totalueberwachung

It didn't look too good for a while, but the replacement Freerunners are in the mail now. They should arrive in time unless the customs officer is having a really bad week (let's hope not :-). The tracking information currently says "Verzögerung bei der Verzollung" which means "Delayed at customs" so the coming week might prove interesting. :-)

I'm optimistic though, especially since I've already reworked 15 devices without problems.

In related news I'm thinking about getting myself a Weller WD 1000M soldering station. I've seen (and tried) this station in action at a friend's and I was pretty impressed. From standby to operational temperature in 3 seconds, auto standby when the pencil is inserted back into the rest and a short finger to tip distance make this station really pleasant to work with.

It's been in the works for some time now, time to announce it here as well. :-)

From May 1st until May 3rd there will be a buzz fix party in Braunschweig. So if you have a Freerunner that is suffering from GSM buzz during calls (and more or less all devices sold until now are susceptible to buzz) then come visit us on May 1st, 2nd or 3rd.

More information here: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/BuzzFixParty#Braunschweig

Please add yourself to the list if you are attending.

From November 20th - 21st Roh, Gismo, Stefan, Mickey and I got together in Berlin for a small meeting. Harald generously provided a room for the meeting in his apartment and lots of food for breakfast. Thanks again very much for the hospitality.

We talked about quite a few things, mostly getting everyone up to date on what is happening inside OpenMoko. Among other things we also talked about the status of the OpenMoko distro to release a new snapshot. The apps have matured quite a bit during the past months and all that is needed is a little more integration work and we should have a new snapshot real soon. (TM)
Another issue is that many people are forced to use OpenEmbedded, a build system, even if they just want to develop applications. These people don't care about all the flexibility (and overhead) that oe provides, they just want to compile their applications. So we talked a bit about how this SDK/cross-toolchain should look like, what features it should have. Basically it should pick up autofoo projects automatically and package them into an ipkg to test on the Neo.

Overall it was a real nice meeting and it was great to see Harald so relaxed. Have fun with your regained freedom! :-)

From left to right: Harald, Stefan, Roh, Daniel, Mickey and Gismo

I've been in Taipei, Taiwan from Oct 11th through Oct 28th to visit the OpenMoko office there and get to know the team working in Taipei. This being my first visit to Asia I also wanted to experience the culture.

I can say I managed doing both and want to thank everyone at the office who made me feel very much welcome and at home. I really enjoyed working with the people there and I hope I can repeat that visit sometime in the future.

I wont go into detail about the restructuring partly because Mickey has already mentioned most of the changes and partly because I want to wait how things turn out when the dust settles before I start bitching around. ;-)

I'll try to have some more time for OpenEZX in the future. Until recently I didn't own any EZX device, but fortunately this has changed now. I bought a Motorola A1200 in Taipei and I also have a Motorazr2 V8 now. :-)

Granted, the last one is based on the MotoMAGX platform and will take some more effort until we're able to flash our own stuff onto it, but porting the drivers to a recent kernel should be much easier because it's version 2.6 to begin with.

I've already started hacking on the A1200, basically just getting my build system up and running and verifying that I am able to build and boot my own kernel via boot_usb. Next I'll try to integrate the patches that are floating around to fix the framebuffer.

It is quite slow (at least with the osm data) and I haven't tried integrating gllin yet, but I think it's cool nonetheless.

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.