The Grote Markt in Mechelen (HDR).

The HDR which I’ve posted here proves that you can indeed create impressive shots only using free software, as long as you have a little perseverance and know how. Maybe Uga’s blogs will get there eventually .

The rest of the images are on flickr.

I’ll start by saying that l think we had very productive week, getting lots of design and development done towards our goals for Amarok 2.0. We focused heavily on critiqueing the user interfaces of the major components in our GUI: the playlist, context view and each of our sidebar browsers. In between hacking hours, Mark, Leo and myself hosted design and release-breaking-issue sessions. These have provided valuable direction and motivation to all of our developers, so you can look forward to some exciting progress as we gear up to an imminent beta (and eventually final) release!

We also brainstormed a number of post 2.0 ideas such as interface adjustments to enhance your application experience, including, but not withstanding, mobile and embedded devices. Yes, that’s right folks, before too long (hopefully) you’ll be able to run Amarok on your favourite (maybe) small form factor device. The main use case would be for remote collections and streaming, but we’re not going to shut out users who like carrying 8GB of music on memory cards.

All this talk of small form factor devices is making me drool over my N810 as I write this. Some observations: all this very slow and awkward typing makes me much more coherent; leeching off random wireless to blog has never been easier; and, the inbuilt GPS has already proven invaluable to the Amarok crew as we used it to find our restaurant when we got lost cycling through the mid-west of Belgium. Note: never cycle 15km immediately after eating a huge meal, and never let Casey on a bicycle.

Finally, a big thanks to all that made Akademy so great: the organisers, the participants, the speakers, the boffers, the paparazzi, and all the people that were responsible for either brewing, frying or coating things in sugar.

– Paris has more museums than you could poke a stick at, all of which are sensational (Louvre, d’Orsay, Rodin etc etc)
– Stayed in the beautiful Hotel de Ville suburb, and went out to the Sacre Cour for two excellent evenings with the rest of Paris for evenings of music and singing
– Bought a museum pass which meant I saw a whole lot more than I would have otherwise seen, such as Saint Chapelle and the Concergerie. Saint Chapelle has all of Genesis, Exodus etc in tiled stained glass windows, which we could even figure out from the pictorials.
– It was easy to fool the French and extend the validity of the museum pass simply by scribbling a new date on the card.
– Have eaten a baguette every day, without fail. Need more fibre.
– Then discovered that croissants were actually invented in Bulgaria when it was under siege by the Turks in the 1600s. The shape of the pastry is meant to represent the cresent on the Turkish flag.
– The high speed train is very high speed.
– Have stayed in “hotels” with neon signs flooding the room, stained carpets and crazies shouting at our window for the price of a stay in a small castle.
– French people don’t understand any English unless you insert a dragged ‘le’ before every other word.
– Every meal seemed better than the one before it, it’s a gastronomical wonderland!
– Spent 5 extremely scorching days in Nice, went diving and visited Cannes and Monte Carlo
– Saw more Ferarris in Monaco than I’ve seen in my entire life

Currently in Belgium at Akademy where I’ve already had my fair share of Belgian fries, waffles and beer. More updates coming soon.

The Taipei 101 is also really cool because it has the fastest elevator in the world, going from top to bottom in an incredible 36 seconds! That’s 1000m per minute! Charlie and his glass elevator really need to upgrade. We also managed to find some Taiwanese fried chicken with mixed vegies for lunch in some back alley behind the world trade center (which we casually strolled through, thongs, singlets and cameras in hand) before discovering a totally awesome suburb of Taipei which only sold computer and camera gear. Seriously, it was streets and streets worth, probably bigger than my university campus (and that’s big, folks!).

The Confucius temple was lots of fun and very colourful, with red and gold decorations and pagoda rooftops adorned with intricate dragons. Seeing as our hostel was close to one of the most famous landmarks, the Chiang Kai Shek memorial, we visited this enormous plaza at the end of the day so that we had a quick getaway back to the hostel for feet resting time. I could not believe the magnitude of this place. It is probably possible to fit over 100 football fields in the space. My camera couldn’t capture the entire space, so here’s a panorama. If you want to get a feel for JUST HOW FREAKING HUGE it is, click on the photo.

Another grand attraction of Taipei is the Shilin night market where you can experience things such as:
– Stinky tofu (it smells worse than gtk+)
– Asian Elvis impersonators with awesome gold pants
– Never-ending arcades stacked full of Dance-Dance-Revolution machines
– Random old Taiwanese men giving random hints on life
– Buying “pets” as close to being Bonsai as you can get without shoving them into a jar
– Awesome fruits, like durian, dragon fruit and rose apple

And then there is the Grand Palace Museum, which true to it’s name is both very grand, palatial and is host to the finest collection of Chinese art in the world.

That’s a lot of links in one post. Here’s another one for good measure:linkety clinkety (completely factual)

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.

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.

We cruised up through the West coast of Lombok, through the cheap resort town of Sengigi (a great town with a beautiful reef surf break and excellent food), until we arrived in the Gili Islands. Spent nearly a week diving, surfing and relaxing on the beach. Life couldn’t have gotten much better. Lots of fun people and plenty of things to do (I spent my days surfing between dives, and Jared spent them lying on the beach reading books). We enjoyed our stay so much that we even conveniently missed our boat back to the mainland and stayed another day. When my time in the Gilis was up, I headed down south to Kuta Lombok to check out the awesome surf breaks. Kuta Lombok was my favourite part of the island. Being totally remote, there are no ATMs and the internet connections aren’t even worth touching. The only way to get around is on a motorcycle and an attached surf rack. There weren’t many travellers and everyone was there to do one thing – surf! The beaches are some of the most beautiful, transparent blue and white sands with headlands of massive proportions and cliffs punctuating the horizon.

I’m also back in Bali for the Balinese New Year, Nyepi. Strange thing about this festival, is that there is no mention of it in any guidebook. I would also rate it as one of the most important, since the entire island is sent into a state of house arrest for 24 hours. There’s a big party the evening prior to purge all of the evil spirits from houses and souls, and then everyone stays inside because they are lurking around through the streets. So here’s a tip: if you ever get stuck in Bali on Nyepi, find a nice hotel with a pool and food for the entire day.

We broke the trip in two by stopping at the Hindu Prambanan temples, which are impressive, but nothing compared to the Buddhist monuments of Borobudur (which we visited the next morning). Enormous stone temples dedicated to the path to nirvana and illustrated with carvings of the stories of the buddhist ways of life. Back in Jogjakarta, life is brimming with busy streets typical of a city deemed the cultural capital of Indonesia – tacky shirts and terrible handicrafts (except for the impressive works of the Batik artists). Hostels are smacked in the middle of lanes which are impossible to navigate around, especially in the middle of torrential downpours. The Kraton, or the Sultan’s palace (Jogja has a sultan), is a huge mini city with over 25,000 inhabitants. They get free tea, coffee, accommodation and work within the premises so they have a pretty good life. I expected the palace to be a little bit more over the top, but it was quite sparse. The villages inside were also very nice, and we found a little shop making Wayang puppets for the Sultan’s performances. The Wayang puppets are two dimensional items made out of buffalo leather, stenciled and elaborately painted to make representations of important Hindu people such as Krishna.

We left Jogja on a two day tour to Gunung Bromo and then onto Bali, which seemed to be cheaper than actually going it alone. Gunung Bromo is a large national park around the volcano of Bromo, where we woke up at 3am for a trip to a viewpoint to see sunrise. Being wet season, we saw absolutely nothing but fog, and I froze because I had not many clothes. Our hostel had this magnificent view of the volcano which we hadn’t even realised until about 10 in the morning, by which time we were leaving for Denpasar. Indonesians in Java can be filthy liars. I don’t know why, maybe it’s a bad habit, but they seem to make stuff up or lie even when it has no direct impact on their lives. For example, we were told that our bus would arrive in Bali at 7:30pm, only to be frustrated, impatient and annoyed when we pulled into the bus station past 11pm.

Spent the last few days in Bali with Dani, Nikki and Jared, relaxing at the beach, lots of surfing and eating disproportionately large quantities of excellent food!

I didn’t intend to write about Danau Toba after my spiel on Sumatra. I didn’t think there would be much to say. Then again, there aren’t many things that could beat an unexpected marvel. Having rented a motorbike, Jared and I cruised around 100km of the island, taking in the sights and culture of the local Batak people. They have recently been converted to Christianity, but still hold their traditions and heritage in high regard. The architecture of the houses are unique, hard to describe – wooden with a roof pointy at the ends. All the columns, door frames, beams and furniture is decorated with stylish patterns carved into the wood. Batak cemeteries litter the island, intermittent with the ongoing tessellations of the rice paddies and their different shades of green and yellow.

It’s a shame we can’t spend more time soaking up the lifestyle of relaxing in beautiful cabins alongside deep blue lake. Instead I’ll be hopping on another local bus that is a cattle car to ship me back to Medan for the flight to Java.

Leaving the port we found no less shocking. A thousand people trying to harass us and we found a minivan with Lara and Dave to the remote jungles of Bukit Lawang. We obviously got ripped off a bit (at least it cost us more than the public bus), but it paid off because we arrived in the small village in the middle of a torrential down pour. Quite possibly the biggest storm I have ever had to walk for 5 eternal minutes for, across a bridge over a thundering river then through some alleyways of mud and septic sauces. It took 3 days to dry off, as we trekked through the jungles playing with the Urang utans, Thomas Leaf monkeys and watching the Gibbons trapeze through the tree canopies at an incredible speed. We slept in the jungle, had excellent food and spent hours solving riddles that the guides gave us. Swimming in the fresh water streams and waterfalls were a nice way to cool down, just like the tubing trip we took back down to the village. Bukit Lawang is a beautiful little town which has still not recovered from a crippling flood a few years ago. Quiet and serene, until a big Indonesian company weekend trip invaded and played some Mosque mix-tape karaoke style for long periods in the night.

Local buses in Indonesia are quite the experience. Cramming 20% more people than a bus can comfortably fit, playing extremely loud Indo-pop music, cruising (bumping) along the Trans-Sumatran highway for 200km (6 hours), weaving in and out of traffic (a few near head on collisions) can give new meaning to the term adrenaline and squished at the same time. By the end of the trip I think I knew what it felt like to be paraplegic, with no feeling from the waist down.

By now we’re recovering by the shores of Danau Toba, the biggest lake in South East Asia. It’s calm, cool and has an anaesthetising atmosphere.