totalueberwachung

After driving to Beriln on August 1st to pick up my brother we finally got to Finowfurt today. The camp location is really nice. We already have power, network will hopefully follow in a few days. In the mean time I'm online through GPRS which is pretty usable for irc and web browsing if you have patience (I don't), but sucks for almost anything else (especially remote shells).

GUADEC has been over a while now, but I still wanted to say how much I enjoyed being there. The atmosphere was really friendly and I enjoyed the lectures and the talks afterwards at dinner. If I have time I definitely want to come again next year. So thanks to all who crossed my way in the UK and made this. You know who you are.

In a couple hours my plane is going to leave from Hanover to Birmingham and I will be attending GUADEC during July 15th through 19th.

I hope to talk with many interesting people (known and unknown), finally meet some of the o-hand guys face to face and have a great time. :-)

My flight back is at July 22nd so I'll have a little time to visit the UK with my girlfriend and finally watch a [musical][1] I've been wanting to watch for some time now. [1]: http://www.avenueqthemusical.co.uk/

Last weekend Michael 'Mickey' Lauer came to Braunschweig for a small meeting (5 people). Mickey has already outlined the topics covered so I'll just add to some points.

The first day was spent with some status reports from OpenMoko and OpenEZX and updating the bugs in the bug tracker - closing ones that have been fixed in the past and asking about bugs where progress seemed halted.

The second day we continued cleaning up bugzilla, but didn't have enough time to go through all the bugs. Stefan, Jan and I will finish that soon.
The most important issue for me was discussing what needs to be done with regard to openmoko-libs. I now have a fairly good understanding (I hope!) what the current issues are. I will first file bugs / add descriptions to existing bugs so the APIs are accurately reflected in bugzilla and then start working on them. This should keep me busy for the next months.

Marek was responsible for the nice ambiance by improvising on the guitar to some of Mickey's mods. He also made good progress on the sound theme. I hope he'll finish the startup sound soon. :-)

The meeting was really great. I'm really looking forward to the next one (when-/whereever it will be).
Jan also pointed out that we should think about running a sprint like python did in the past. I think this is a great possibility to channel the development potential that we have after phase 1 into the appropriate directions.

Today someone on the openezx channel reminded me of a linux phone I had almost forgotten about. I first saw the ImCoSys smartphone at the CeBit and after talking to the representative I had the impression that they were not very open source friendly. After I asked him about their modifications to GPL'd software he replied that they were keeping GPL contributions at a minimum and developing most of the software on their own.

Since the phone is on the market now I decided to send them a mail and request the source code that is under the GPL. The first pleasant surprise was that they answered my question and they did it fast. I sent my mail at 1:15 (am) and I had an answer at 1:28.

According to that mail the source code will be distributed with the phone on a CD/DVD.

I will have to get one of these phones and see for myself. With things like bluetooth, wifi and GPS it does have a pretty high hack value.

So I finally decided to join the blogging community. I have been pondering this decision for some time now but my recent activity in the OpenEZX project and the prospect of hacking OpenMoko on my own Neo1973 in two weeks (Yes, I'm one of the lucky phase 0 devs :-) really made that decision easy.

If you don't know what the Neo1973 and OpenMoko are you should check out http://www.openmoko.com/ now. In short OpenMoko is a framework for cell phones and the Neo1973 is the first device that is supported by OpenMoko. The thing that sets them apart is that their platform is open and they are actually encouraging people to improve their product which is just fantastic.

I'm sick of companies and their closed Linux devices that try to restrict you to some predefinied set of use cases and I am really looking forward to the things emerging from this great project.

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This entry was supposed to be submitted using flog and vim but flog instead decided to crash taking the blog with it. So this post is powered by browsing through strings /dev/mapper/vgelara-lvslash |grep -50 fantastic |less instead. You wont believe how many fortunes have the word fantastic in them.