While I was in Taipei, I revamped the EFL recipes in OpenEmbedded. They suffered from a lot of hackish workarounds that were necessary while EFL didn't use pkgconfig and had some bogus autotools usage. This is now history and so we have a more or less clean set of EFL recipes in OpenEmbedded!
Related to that, I have recently been contacted by Andreas 'audifahrer' Volz who's going to work with me on refreshing my C++ bindings to the EFL that have unfortunately been stalled since many months. As a first step towards more visibility, we agreed to autoconfigize them (they were using my beloved qmake :-)) and put them into the Enlightenment CVS. Over the next months, we plan to catch up with recent changes in the EFL and enhance them. Lots of cool things forthcoming for ya C++ lovers.
This -- of course -- also has some relevance to OpenMoko.
By the way, Aaron Bockover joins me with a rant about Gtk+ theming.
We finally switched off the dryer on saturday and almost all of my stuff has been placed into the office again. I'm now fully operational again and can (finally) continue to work as usual *phew*
Much like the first week, the 2nd week in Taipei really rushed by and I'm finding myself being back in Frankfurt for until the 15th of July, when I'm leaving to Birmingham to attend GUADEC. I will have a talk about OpenMoko there and I'm looking forward to meet a lot of GNOME guys and gals.
My last day in Taipei was spiced by a whole day meeting with Carsten 'The Rasterman' Haitzler, whom we invited to visit us -- talking about graphics for next-generation user interfaces, the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, and more. Raster is a really nice and competent guy and I enjoyed that meeting a lot -- thanks for your patience with all my questions :)
Unfortunately, I also have some bad news. While I was in Taipei, Frankfurt struggled under massive amounts of rain and water poured into my new office room in our apartment :-( Fortunately, nothing important has been damaged, however the whole carpet is drenched and there is now a (really loud) dryer operating in the room for a couple of weeks. *sigh*
The first week in Taipei has passend and it's really good to be here. FIC is a great place to work in a comfortable and focused way. All people are very kind and helpful. The climate is pretty warm and the humidity is a bit higher than what I'm used to, but then again, I'm spending the lions share of every day in the FIC building anyway :D
I didn't have much of a chance to see some sites in Taipei yet -- and I'm afraid that won't change next week, so I have to come back soon.
Of course all you Neo-lusty folks are probably not interested in how I feel here, but more in what I am doing here... alas, I can't tell much at this point of time. What we are focusing on right now is not even directly hardware or software related, but more structure related. It's a bunch of good things happening though. I expect OpenMoko to post an announcement pretty soon that will explain what happened in the past weeks, what we are heading towards, and what we can expect from the next months.
Yesterday night I arrived back in Frankfurt/Main. I'm going to stay until Friday and then head over to Taipei for a while to work on OpenMoko.
As usual, the LinuxTag was very exhausting, but fun and productive at the same time. My talk was very well received and a lot of people are looking forward to (finally) get this phone into their hands. If you want to get an idea about what I presented, feel free to read the slides and hear the speech (sorry, german language this time).
Once again, I took the opportunity to get some Berlin spirit and Holger 'Zecke' Freyther lead me into a bar. This time the walk was much shorter (very appreciated after two days on an exhibition) and the bar was also pretty cool -- thanks! :-)
Writing this on my way to the LinuxTag 2007 that takes place in Berlin this year. In roughly 9 hours, I'm going to give a talk about OpenMoko -- the backgrounds, vision, and status. Due to all the stress with moving, I couldn't prepare like usual, however I'm sure it'll be good enough to spread the word :-)
After Alice and T-Com seemingly wanted to play ping-pong with me -- repeatedly sending me to each other -- I took the matter into my own hands and solved the problem. All DSL and Telephony problems are sorted out now. Don't ask how :D
The cable-TV issue has also vanished. I'm now using a satellite dish and the best free (as in free speech) sat receiver money can buy -- a Dreambox 7025 -- thanks to the nice folks @ Dream Multimedia TV, especially one of their core developers Felix 'tmbinc' Domke. Did I already tell you it runs a Linux Distribution built by OpenEmbedded? I'll report about my first sat experiences soon -- stay tuned.
I'm writing this post from within the new office room in our new appartement. Obviously the move is now over, although the new appartment is a mess and a lot of stuff is still missing and/or waiting for construction, i.e. the kitchen is scheduled to arrive mid-june :-(
The last couple of days were a bit of a horror story. Telephony and DSL were scheduled to arrive @ 18th, which they did -- however not on the proper socket... the plug in the souterrain / office is scheduled to be attached to all the network hardware. It took me about 6 hours to find that out... now all the equipment is (temporarily! my wife is very unhapy with all this) sitting in the hall and I had to establish a wireless bridge to get my computers in the office to the network (luckily I had an unused Linksys WRT54GS sitting in one of my boxes).
Next thing that happened was that my Linux workstation refused to boot. It auto-powered off one second after pushing power. I had to deassemble and reassemble it completely -- removing about 2 kilograms of dust from the fans and then it ran again.
However, the integrated network adapter no longer appeared on the PCI bus *sigh*. Again -- luckily -- I had an unused USB-Ethernet adapter laying around and so after 3 days messing around I can start being productive again.
And of course all of this while the OpenMoko project is in an important phase... once all these temporary problems are sorted out, I promise I won't move for at least another decade... ;-)
Since last friday we're sleeping in the new apartment. The only missing bits to move are some dishes and the office -- which will be moved on 20th and 21th. After that, the periods without connectivity will be over.
Recently, goxboxlive from the Xanadux project sent me screenshots that show OpenMoko running on the HTC Universal. The fun part is that it doesn't run native, but on Opie with the Xqt2 X-Server on top.
So... OpenMoko boldly goes where no free software platform has ever gone before ;-)