I safely returned from Taipei and was almost in time. As I don’t have a hitchhiker guide to transatlantic traveling I had to learn it the hard way. Don’t take the arrival time for granted and plan the evening. If anyone knows how to legally get a rental copy of I’m a Cyborg but that’s ok. please tell me.

Taipei is great and I hope this was my first visit in many to come. It was a pleasure to see the Openmoko offices, catch up with the local engineers (too many to name them and I would forget one and would feel really bad about it). My short-term goal for tick and jeremy is to make them start a blog, take videos of their apps (assassin, diversity) and expose themselves to the public. It was a pleasure to meet the other foreign engineers and I’m specially honored to have met Werner Almesberger, received a talk on kboot, and rasterman and enjoyed the training on the graphic pipeline, state of XRender and general musings on object orientated programming.

I have finally a result of the automatic build of Qtopia/X11 that is not segfaulting (yeah!) and the experience feels like wasting time. I think I have spent almost of the last week on this thing as the turnaround times are so heavy. E.g. I managed to compile Qt for the target without fontconfig and the apps were only able to display numbers but not any glyphs. So I had to pass -fontconfig and the includepath for fontconfig to the configure script. This results in a five hour penalty as Qt for the desktop (totally unrelated), Qt for the target (not only the two classes knowing of fontconfig) and then the full Qtopia stack (I assume the Qt with and without fontconfig is binary compatible… so another waste of time). Anyway I have a GTA02/Freerunner (with GPS, WiFi, GSM, without a working bluetooth) that is powered by enlightenment, which is of importance for buddhists, and Qtopia/X11. We need to polish the packages and configuration, make sure that qpe is launched as part of the Xsession start and then let our “black team”, allan, do the testing and secure my job by finding bugs. The modem gets powered on, Qtopia finds it, I see the PIN Dialog and once raster is finishing his keyboard we can enter stuff. Pal hurry up!

What is so cool about Openmoko? In contrast to many other companies, specially in the hardware industry, is that the relevant stuff is public, our failures with hardware, our stupidity, our brilliancy, our success, our progress, our vision. This allows you to track it and be part of it and contribute. We are open, and mean it, and this commitment to openness is important. This is showing with our platform strategy. We are not only a Gtk+ company, we are not only an EFL company, we are not only a Qt/Qtopia company. We have enough flash to make it possible for you to carry your favorite toolkit and language in your pocket, show it to your friends. So our platform strategy is different, it is toolkit and language neutral, in the current age this implies DBus and yes we are interested in reusing and creating DBus Interfaces around GSM/SIM, Networking, PIM, Journal, Location, Communication,… This effort is lead by former Opie colleague and close friend Dr. Michael ‘mickeyl’ Lauer who currently enjoys the sun in Recife and is attending the Bosa Conference with a bunch of other Openmoko people (raster, stefan, daniel).

So consider contributing, your open phone is waiting for you. And remember warranty is void when NOT opened.