The serious phase of apartment moving has started last week and I'm right within. Please bear with (even more) latency in answering E-Mails for the next three weeks. I will probably also be completely offline for some days mid-May while the landline and DSL get "moved". In case of emergency, call my mobile.
I just finished a four-week contract that involved development with Qt4. After developing in C with GTK+ for the last couple of months, this was quite a refreshing experience.
This was my first non-trivial project with Qt4 and I'm quite impressed how well it went. Compared to Qt3 (and even Qt2, which I was stuck with on embedded platforms for a long time), Qt4 is a major leap forwards, especially with regards to concurrent programming (Threads) and separating data management and representation (Interview). Note that you want to use at least version 4.2 though, because earlier versions still have a lot of bugs.
In my opinion, Qt is definitely the most-advanced open source GUI toolkit around -- it's probably also even better than most proprietary ones, although I can't say this with certainty, since I don't know anything about Cocoa... yet!
Today I've submitted the obligatory copies of my commercially published dissertation to the Doctorate Office for Mathematics and Natural Sciences at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. In return I got my certificate presented.
This marks the final act of the thesis as I'm now entitled to call myself Dr. Michael Lauer. Sounds good to me ;-)
OpenMoko is a mentoring organization for the Google Sommer of Code 2007. We received 60 student project applications (minus a few duplicates) and since a whole lot of projects were exciting, it was very tough to rank them. Unfortunately we only got assigned three project slots from Google -- if we perform well this year, then we might get more next year.
Anyway, here is the list of accepted projects:
::: {.extern_app}
[by Sören Apel, mentored by Michael Lauer]{.small}
</div> :::
::: {.extern_app}
[by Holger Hans Peter Freyther, mentored by Michael Lauer]{.small}
</div> :::
::: {.extern_app}
[by Deepank Gupta, mentored by Werner Almesberger]{.small}
</div> :::
I'm looking forward to mentor my two students to get a successful project and contribution to the OpenMoko Software Platform done.
To all who didn't make it this year: Thanks for all your proposals and please try again next year -- although if all goes well, we might just contact some of you to realize your ideas in a "private" OpenMoko SoC :-)
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 tell you that we worked on the design of two Neo1973 successors and we came up with something really unique and exciting...
Of course, most of you are probably more interested in the present, i.e. how far away the Phase 1 devices are. About two weeks ago I said something like two weeks -- a prediction that was (of course) too shortsighted. My personal take on that is that I plan to work roughly about one more week on adding some needed features and then enforce a two-weeks feature freeze for the phase 1. There will be a pre-phase-1 snapshot image and p0 developers will be requested to help testing and bugfixing to make the phase 1 experience really stable. By the way, I'll make sure that the phase 1 announcement will include enough information about the phase 1.5 hardware refresh so that you can make up your mind whether you want to wait or just go ahead and buy a freed phone.
Some of the discussions focused on our mid- to long-term plans with OpenMoko -- both as a hardware and a software platform. UI-wise, the applications you see on the Neo1973 are really just the first iteration of our vision. We are somewhat satisfied with the status of the stylus applications, however it already has shown that we can only realize a part of our UI dreams with a toolkit like GTK+, so for some of the applications (finger, main menu, and panels come to mind) we are closely watching how projects like Clutter and EFL evolve.
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:
The only drawback is that I had zero time to visit a bit of the town... I'll be back though!
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 I even had to cancel my annual visit to the Frankfurt Musikmesse which made me very sad.
Anyway, besides the forthcoming move to a new appartment, my commitment for the next months is solely OpenMoko... oh, and that book about software development on Linux-based embedded systems that I'm writing... but that's ok, since writing and developing are different enough to be a good match.
By the way, while I'm writing this, it's Saturday 7:30 in the morning and I'm in the ICE 972 Freiburg--Berlin on my way to Braunschweig for a two-days OpenMoko development meeting with Daniel 'Alphaone' Willmann, Jan Lübbe, and Stefan Schmidt (you probably know these guys from the OpenEZX project).
So, if you contacted me in the last weeks, please don't expect me to be quick in getting back to you -- I'm trying to clean up the mess I call my schedule...
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 ideas) such as Richard Purdie's zaurusd, Florian Boor's microHAL, and the GNOME Power Manager.
I'm closely following the developments around OHM and HAL as well. Eventually, the neod may as well become a plugin for OHM, however as we need a quick plan of action now, the best way seems to go forward and start to implement something based on what's already out there and running.
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 for this kind of work or things really got more complicated. I guess I have to hire some kind of assistant to help me spending more time doing actual development and lowering all this organization overhead.
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, Lorn Potter, Knuth Irvin, Wim Delvaux, Liam Girdwood, Graeme Gregory,... to just name a few.
Unfortunately though I find myself returning with a severe headache and a cold -- which makes me being sick at a frequency of three out of three times (=100%) after returning from a FOSDEM :-( I'm afraid all the project and thesis defence pressure over the last couple of months starts to manifest. The good thing is if I manage to recover until Saturday, then I'm going to Austria for a one week vacation. And although I have some work to do, I'm sure I can relax a bit.
Anyway, back to FOSDEM, I'm looking forward to be there next year, however I really think they need to find a way to allocate more space. OpenEmbedded needs to get a larger booth (or perhaps a developer room), we need to get a larger room for the OpenMoko talk, and considering the Friday beer event, the upper floor at the Roy D'Espagne is no longer a viable option for so many people.