Review at amazon: Software Product Lines in Action: The Best Industrial Practice in Product Line Engineering

This weekend i read the following book:

Software Product Lines in Action tries to explain, why a company should move from contract-based development to its own product strategy. But this change does not only involve software engineering -  you have to do organizational changes, business process changes, technology changes, ....
One nice excerpt is "Bringing comprehensive change to a software development organization isn't easy, and false starts are expensive."

The book has three divisions: "Aspects of Software product line engineering", "Experience Reports" and "Conclusions"
Part one covers the theoretical statements and is quite readable.
Part two presents 9 experience reports, which are not really helpful. Different companies are presented with their problems and their lessons learned. The best example is Nokia Mobile Phones - it is clear that their change to software product line has not worked very well. Nokias software for mobile phones was not a magic bullet...
Part three ("Conclusions") is much to short, to learn something.
Reading the 300 pages is at the beginning quite interesting, but after page 80 i did not get anything new or helpful...

If you are interested, take a look at my review at amazon.de. (like all my reviews: written in german ;-)

Review at amazon: Fallbuch BIP

Sometime ago i read the following book:

For all who do not know what BIP stands for: Bochumer Inventar zur berufsbezogenen Persönlichkeitsbeschreibung

And as you can see: This is something, what is only used in Germany - wikipedia has no translation in english or any other language.

If you are interested, take a look at my review at amazon.de. (like all my reviews: written in german ;-).

Ubuntu: Hibernate/Suspend to disk: Resume problem with ATI Radeon R7

On a new Lenovo laptop i had some issues with supsend/resume.
I installed tux on ice and the suspend process worked, but the resume just freezed after some seconds.

First step to solve this problem was to stop the graphics (/etc/init.d/lightdm stop) and try it again.

This attempt worked without a problem, so it was clear: the resume problem is a issue with the graphic card:

laptop:~$ lspci
[...]
01:00.0 Display controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Topaz XT [Radeon R7 M260/M265] (rev ff9)
[...]

So i tried to disable the modesettings with grub. I changed in /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="resume=/dev/sda9 quiet splash"

to

 GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="resume=/dev/sda9 quiet splash  nomodeset"

and then the command

update-grub

And after that everything worked...



Here an explanation from https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132:
nomodeset
The newest kernels have moved the video mode setting into the kernel. So all the programming of the hardware specific clock rates and registers on the video card happen in the kernel rather than in the X driver when the X server starts.. This makes it possible to have high resolution nice looking splash (boot) screens and flicker free transitions from boot splash to login screen. Unfortunately, on some cards this doesnt work properly and you end up with a black screen. Adding the nomodeset parameter instructs the kernel to not load video drivers and use BIOS modes instead until X is loaded.

Note that this option is sometimes needed for nVidia cards when using the default "nouveau" drivers. Installing proprietary nvidia drivers usually makes this option no longer necessary, so it may not be needed to make this option permanent, just for one boot until you installed the nvidia drivers.

Ubuntu: WLAN module for bcm43-chipset gone after reboot...

Today i ran with a laptop into the following problem:
After a reboot the system lost its WLAN:

 # uname -a Linux Notebook 3.13.0-86-generic #131-Ubuntu SMP Thu May 12 23:33:13 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

and

# lspci | grep 802.11
02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43142 802.11b/g/n (rev 01)

Trying a modprobe wl failed...
There were some posts, which suggested to install kernel-drivers, dkms and so on, but this was not the problem, but it led me to the solution:
I tried to install this packages an i got the following:

root@Notebook:~# apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -a) build-essentials dmks E: Der dpkg-Prozess wurde unterbrochen; Sie müssen manuell »sudo dpkg --configure -a« ausführen, um das Problem zu beheben.

And here we go:

root@Notebook:~# dpkg --configure -a
mysql-client-core-5.5 (5.5.53-0ubuntu0.14.04.1) wird eingerichtet ...
libgpgme++2 (4:4.13.3-0ubuntu0.3) wird eingerichtet ...
sudo (1.8.9p5-1ubuntu1.3) wird eingerichtet ...
Konfigurationsdatei »/etc/sudoers«
 ==> Geändert (von Ihnen oder von einem Skript) seit der Installation.
 ==> Paketverteiler hat eine aktualisierte Version herausgegeben.
   Wie möchten Sie vorgehen? Ihre Wahlmöglichkeiten sind:
    Y oder I : Die Version des Paket-Betreuers installieren
    N oder O : Die momentan installierte Version beibehalten
       D     : Die Unterschiede zwischen den Versionen anzeigen
       Z     : Eine Shell starten, um die Situation zu begutachten
 Der Standardweg ist das Beibehalten der momentanen Version.
*** sudoers (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [Vorgabe=N] ?
xscreensaver-data (5.15-3+deb7u1ubuntu0.1) wird eingerichtet ...
...
...
initramfs-tools (0. 103ubuntu4.4) wird eingerichtet ...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
bcmwl-kernel-source (6.30.223.248+bdcom-0ubuntu0.2) wird eingerichtet ...
Loading new bcmwl-6.30.223.248+bdcom DKMS files...
Building only for 3.13.0-86-generic
Building for architecture x86_64
Building initial module for 3.13.0-86-generic
Done.
wl:
Running module version sanity check.
 - Original module
   - No original module exists within this kernel
 - Installation
   - Installing to /lib/modules/3.13.0-86-generic/updates/dkms/
depmod........
DKMS: install completed.
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
unity (7.2.6+14.04.20160408-0ubuntu1) wird eingerichtet ...
...
...

Now the WLAN was up again...

Apparently the last system update was waiting for an enter, but i forgot this windows and did the reboot...