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OpenMoko Coreteam in Frankfurt/Main
During most of the long easter weekend, 3/4 of the OpenMoko coreteam met in Frankfurt/Main at my place. It was a very productive meeting and we discussed a lot of topics. My wife Sabine coddled us with lots of excellent food and had to spend half of the easter vacation alone... sorry for that and thanks for everything :-) We talked about administrative things, schedules, hiring people, supporting OpenEmbedded, and the state of the current hard- and software. Unfortunately most of the really hot topics discussed at the meeting could be classified as confidential, however I think I'm allowed to...
OpenMoko p0-Developer Meeting in Braunschweig
Just returned from a tiny OpenMoko p0-Developer meeting in Braunschweig. It was a packed weekend full of work and though we only managed to process 70% of the Agenda I came up with, we made a lot of progress. In case you're curious, here is the list of things we did: Status Report Neo1973-Hardware Mickey (OpenMoko) [done] Status Report Stefan, Jan, Daniel (OpenEZX, OpenMoko) [done] Full update/quickfix pass through the OpenMoko bugtracker [60% done] Review current OpenMoko software state, fix some obvious bugs [done] OpenMoko ring/alarm/sms tones (Marek) [done] Plan of action for the next 2 months (Daniel and Stefan)...
Projects, Projects, Projects...
I'm on overload. Really. After finishing my thesis I was hoping things would calm down by now and that I had a chance to stand down for a couple of months, thinking about my place in the world and how my life should develop in the next years. Alas, this turned out to be a false hope. I end up having no spare time left at all. Things really went crazy, since last year I commited myself to fulfill a contract this March -- based on the assumption that my involvement in OpenMoko would be reduced by now. Just yesterday...
Things falling into place for P1
Two weeks before the first phase-1 devices are to be shipped, things start to fall into place. The hardware seems reasonably stable lately and we now have a working dialer and basic PIM applications. Just a couple of minutes ago, I got the vibrator to work from userspace. The remaining construction sites before P1 devices are actually usable are the main-menu, task-manager, and the device management daemon. The latter being my primary area of interest -- besides openmoko-libs of course -- for the next weeks. I plan to write a lean-and-mean device manager based on previous work (both code and...
Friction Losses
After quitting university and becoming a freelancer in September last year, my life has changed quite a bit. The most irritating thing is the amount of non-productive time I have to spend to be able to do productive work. While I was in university, almost 90% of the time I was in the office was spent doing actual work (not necessarily for the thesis or the faculty, but you know ;-)) -- nowadays I find myself organizing things, doing phone calls, traveling, processing e-mail and snail-mail, etc. for nearly 50% of the time. It's either me being not well prepared...
Back from FOSDEM'07
FOSDEM was unbelievably exhausting this year. Being in charge of the OpenMoko application framework (which I had to talk about and attend way too many "business" meetings) and one of the founders of OpenEmbedded (which had a booth this year), my schedule just completely broke down: Of the 10 talks I wanted to see, I ended up in seeing just one and a half. Then again, I met a whole lot of interesting people this year: The OpenEZX guys Stefan, Jan, and Daniel, Carl 'Cairo' Worth, David 'OpenWengo' Neary, Pedro, the Maemo team, OpenedHand, the tinymail author, Philippe De Swert,...
Offence is the best defence
::: {.img-shadow} ::: Today at 16:00 I was notified that I successfully defended my thesis. Preceded by a 15 minutes report by me and slightly over an hour questioning me. It's an unbelievable relief to know that the hardest part is over and this chapter can be closed real soon now. The last thing I need to do before they'll confer the doctorate on me is to publish it -- which should be done in a couple of weeks. Thanks for all of your wishes, I was overwhelmed by so many good souls bearing me in mind. Now I can...
Emulating 20 year old hardware on a phone
Due to my preparations for the thesis defence -- soon over, since tomorrow is "judgement day" -- I have almost zero time to work on OpenMoko. Yesterday though I got one of the very few models with a case prototype, that means I can finally work with the vibrator and the speakers (which sit in the case and not on the prototype boards). The first thing I did is to compile sidplayer and mikmod to play .sid / .mod. It's kind of fun using brand new hardware to emulate 20 year old hardware :-) For the interested: .mp3 takes about...
openmoko.org and the light of day
As promised, OpenMoko completely opened access to code, specifications, bugtracker, and mailing lists. This is an absolute novum in the industry, since -- to my knowledge -- no company ever published code and specifications during development state. This is even more open than Nokia -- who released Maemo not before the first version was finished. The OpenMoko team sees this as an open invitation to the community to contribute not only in the form of additions and refinements, but also on the core platform itself. We are gathering your input and are commited to get your wishes into the platform....
Fed up with legacy radio
I can't stand listening to local radio stations anymore. No matter which station or target audience, the playlists are always too small and similar, too commercial-orientated, the moderators are dull, and when I want to know about what happened I rather read a newspaper or go online. Fortunately, there is a very addictive alternative! Since a couple of months, I'm enjoying Soma.fm -- a commercial-free internet radio supported by its listeners. It contains 11 unique channels of underground/alternative radio broadcasting from San Francisco.