Archive for the ‘tech’ Category
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
Didn’t get a chance to blog about day 2 of the OTST2008 meeting yesterday since everything has been so hectic. Day 2 was similar in order to Saturday, hearing lots of excellent talks about open hardware and software. I found the talks on Freifunk.net and Open Street Map particularly exciting and look forward to seeing how the future plays out.
Later in the afternoon Pradeepto spoke about the kde-edu project, and Ian and I spoke about Amarok 2. It was a little unfortunate that the number of attendees waned towards the end of the day but I still think the event was more than fantastic. Ellis and the folk from Asus treated us all to a wonderful Taiwanese dinner by the seafront in the waterfront town of Danshui. It was great fun :). Here’s most of the team in a group photo:
Summing up, I had a great time. The summit was definitely a great endeavour and hopefully has brought on the right change and the first step to have free software and hardware promoted throughout Taiwan and the Asian world.
Posted in photos, tech, travels | No Comments »
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
Reporting from the luxuries of free Internet at our hostel in Taipei, Ian and I have been going over the talk that we’ll be giving on Amarok tomorrow at the Open Tech Summit here in Taiwan. The entire day today has been spent at the (very nice) Asus corporate headquarters - about 20 minutes on the metro ride outside of Taipei. The metro itself is a nice analogy to the Taiwanese people. Exceptionally efficient, very friendly and hospitable, immaculately clean and well thought out. Kudos to you, Taiwanese government. So friendly have the Taiwanese people been that I’ve been escorted up 10 flights of stairs, around train stations and through chaotic traffic - just to lend a hand. The Asus headquarters are totally awesome, if simply for this rendition of the Mona Lisa created entirely out of motherboard parts.
The aim of OTST is to promote open software and hardware to the Taiwanese, who are quite backward in their thinking of FOSS culture. We’re here on a religious missionary crusade to try and convince them to pick up free software! There were a number of interesting talks today, such as an introductions to OHI and OpenPattern, ultra cool speech recognition software for the EeePC and a general EeePC hacking howto. There were a few talks in Chinese, but I still found it easy to understand how cool it was to see compositing support on the EeePC.
In the early evening we had a light dinner party (which was quite heavy as we’d been fed all day), with two performances by local creative-commons artists. It’s heart-warming to see that Asus is putting a lot of effort into hosting this event and really trying to push the FOSS movement in Taiwan.
Posted in photos, tech, travels | No Comments »
Friday, April 18th, 2008
I’ve just been interviewed at a Spanish website which promotes open source software, zatune.es. The interview follows one of my pet projects, squash, and really stretched out my spanish skills :).
interview link (spanish)
Posted in tech | 2 Comments »
Monday, April 14th, 2008
It’s that never ending story once again. Upgrade the video card, suffer extreme performance loss in the desktop:
- swap nvidia 7900 card for 8600 (a meager upgrade, but still)
- notice the desktop has dramatically slowed down (expected)
- recompile the newest nvidia kernel drivers
- reboot, and to no avail, no performance increase
- repeat steps 3 and 4, each time tweaking something else. xorg.conf, ubuntu restricted drivers etc
DRI is enabled:
seb@hammerhead:~$ glxinfo | grep "direct"
direct rendering: Yes
I know glxgears is no good benchmark, but at least it provides a slight indication to the performance of the card. 5000 fps is a rubbish result. Also, I’d expect to be able to run the desktop with compositing without an problems - which I can’t.
Can anybody provide a fool proof method of fixing this? I’m reaching out for the sake of my sanity!
Posted in tech | 15 Comments »
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Hi all,
Just a quick message that I’m sure many of you have discovered already. Cover art retrieval from Amazon is now broken due to a change in API that Amazon has introduced in it’s web service.
We will release Amarok version 1.4.9 very soon which will re-enable cover art downloads.
Thanks for your patience.
Posted in tech | 3 Comments »
