Back from Switzerland

Just came back from Berne where the bi-annual OpenExpo was held. The OpenExpo is one of my favourite conferences, since it's very professionally organized, has a rich mix of interesting topics and talks while retaining the very friendly characteristic spirit of switzerland -- which I like a lot. Sean Moss-Pultz from Openmoko Inc gave a talk in the "business" track, while I gave a talk in the "technology" track. Videos of both tracks are available here [actually, the business track is still missing, the technology track is already there though] -- please watch them before continuing reading. Sean "shocked" the...

Back from Aalborg

Just returned from FOSS.Aalborg '09 where I held a talk about OpenEmbedded. It's been my second time in Aalborg (first time was Mobile Developer Days '07) and it's been a nice and informative experience. Met some folks doing amazing things with embedded. Everything was organized very professional and the presentations were interesting -- particularly the talk about security which was held by two guys from the OpenBSD project. OpenBSD has never really been on my radar, although according to what I've seen in the presentations it seems to be of really high quality. I guess I'll give it a look...

BumpMapping hell

Catching up and plans for 2009

I felt it's time to recap the stuff that kept me busy the last months and give you an overview over the achievements planned for this year -- always focusing the free software movement, of course. freesmartphone.org Let's start with the major project I've been working on, the freesmartphone.org project, funded by Openmoko, Inc. FSO grows, and it grows in the right directions. We get more API customers -- notably the SHR project and the Paroli project -- and refine our API and the reference implementation. The 5th milestone has just been released and apart from a major foobar with...

Sid Player Update

Our Sid Player application has been on sale in the AppStore for three weeks now. We received quite a nice amount of feedback considering that this is a niche application -- thanks to all of you who downloaded and reviewed or mailed us! Behind the curtains, we have been analysing the feedback and have just started to work on the first update which we expect to be available within the next 4 weeks. This next release is mostly a database update, since we will add the missing songs from the HVSC directories 'GAMES' and 'DEMOS'. This adds about 2000 more...

Visiting 25c3 for one day

Although traditionally the Chaos Computer Congress' schedule is slightly suboptimal for me (12/26th is my birthday), I'm going to be in Berlin from 12/28th to 12/30th and will visit CCC on the 3th day (12/29th). I'm going to attend Harald's talk about GSM base stations, so if you want to talk to me, just pick me up afterwards.

Sid Player on iPhone

You all know how much I adore the C64 sound aesthetics. This is the #1 program I was missing in my iPhone. Out now in the App Store!

ogsmd and its modems

Recently, I have been working on adding more support for various types of modems to ogsmd. "Why's that?", I hear you say, "isn't that already done since long?". Yes and no. There are two dimensions where modems might differ: The way how the AT interface is exposed, The implemented AT command set. Both dimensions come with their own set of problems: Exposing an AT interface As you might know, there are basically three different means for exporting an AT interface: A single line without mulitplexing support, Multiple premultiplexed lines, A single line with multiplexing mode. Before we go into the...

Pornophonique

Thanks to my framework team buddy Daniel 'Alphaone' Willmann, I just fell in love with the german band Pornophonique. Everyone appreciating the 8-bit chipsounds we had in the old days of computing will absolutely enjoy their work. My favourite song is 'Sad Robot' from the album 8-bit-Lagerfeuer -- it sounds a bit Everlast-inspired, but hey, that's a very common 4-chord-loop. Did I mention that their music is creative commons licensed? Hats off, guys -- you rock!

CI61 06:50 FRA

::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: 好久不見! Three weeks passed within a blink. Last sunday, we smoothly landed in Frankfurt/Main after 14 hours of a calm flight. 4/5 of the Openmoko Framework Team (while Stefan was on vacation in .au and missed all the fun) met in Taipei to tackle some outstanding issues and synchronize with the plans for the next major Openmoko release. For a start, please refer to the blog postings of Charlie and Daniel, who mentioned some of the things we did in detail. Let me cover the current status and what we are going to work on in...