Hoards of hackers in similar-looking t-shirts with funny logos having the b in front of the K (see below for some sort of explanation) were seen on the streets of London on Friday June 3rd 2011.

Thanks a lot to  Google UK who hosted our Rockbox developers conference this time in central London.

We had some short-time visitors but we were 16-18 reverse engineering happy persons in a single room most of the weekend, where we hacked away on code, whined on the amount of outstanding patches and bugs and generally made a large amount of bad jokes and Monthy Python references.

The happy core team was caught on a picture:

On the Saturday we plowed through a lengthy list of discussion points to really make the most of all of us gathering physically. Among the outcomes from that is that we decided we want to change to git, we think a lot of future of Rockbox lies in the app for Android, we keep the Archos support and more. The Android builds are going to get into the build system ASAP and we’re gonna setup a system where (only) trusted build clients will participate in the building of Android builds that will be distributed to users – this since applications on phones will have a much greater risk of causing harm if some “bad guy” would try to infect our system with stupid things.

Dominik “bluebrother” Riebling brought up the very interesting point that none of us had noticed: we have two different logos being used in the project: one with the K being in front of the b (like the one on the web page) and one with the K being behind the b – which is used in SVG logos and on just about all Rockbox t-shirts made so far! If you zoom in on the tshirts on the group picture you’ll see!

We will also start allowing GPLv3 code into Rockbox in order to be able to use espeak, but all our code will remain GPLv2 or later. I could only find a single USB header file left that comes from the Linux source tree and has a GPLv2 only license.

Even more than this was discussed but I figure the rest of the details will be posted properly on rockbox.org for those seriously interested.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable weekend with a lot of fun and great friends. We stayed at a hotel just a few blocks from the devcon office which was really convenient. even though its wakeup routine was a bit non-standard. Peter “petur” D’Hoye took a lot of pictures as usual.

We also managed to break the Tower of Rockbox record.

The group picture was taken by a Google person I don’t know the name of who helped us out, and the one of me was taken by Peter D’Hoye.

]]> http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2011/06/05/rockbox-devcon-2011/feed/ 0 http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2011/06/05/rockbox-bridge-and-tower/ http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2011/06/05/rockbox-bridge-and-tower/#comments Sun, 05 Jun 2011 21:41:29 +0000 daniel http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/?p=2905 Keeping to the tradition and subtle arts of Rockbox Towers, but doing it with a twist to celebrate the place we have Rockbox devcon 2011, we decided to make a Rockbox bridge.

We started out by gathering all devices we had in the room that can run Rockbox and distributed them on the construction floor area. As the Android app runs fine on tablets now there’s actually a rather good way to get some solid base into the construction…

Once all material was known, the construction started with a large amount of eager engineers contributing with good and bad ideas and at times very shaky hands:

(wods, scorche, gevaerts and paumary)

The result, involving an iRiver beneath the bridge catching the digital flow, became what might be the longest Rockbox construction done so far:

After the bridge, the work started on the real stuff. Building the tallest Rockbox tower ever made. After a couple of accidents and crashes, the tireless team managed to break the previous 104 cm record and the new Rockbox tower record is now officially 117cm:

(Pictures in this post were all taken by Peter D’Hoye.)

We had the great pleasure of waking up this morning just before 8am to this sound.

The weather was nice and the wait was very brief so we could very soon return inside and attack the breakfast buffet.

Here’s the team that was present at Devcon, picture from petur’s comment:

The Rockbox team that gathered in Ghent for this weekend of talk, hacking and socializing (drinking beer) is caught on this group picture. Click the image for a slightly larger version. Photo by Petur.

The people on the photo

The top line from the left: amiconn, markun, bertrik, gevaerts, GodEater, AlexP, Zagor, domonoky, Bagder (me!)

The lower line from the left: kugel, pixelma, scorche, petur

We did have a 2-hour discussion session on the saturday, and I expect to post an mp3 of it later on. The short and compressed outcome in plain text is found here. Petur was a great host. The facilities were nice, the hotel was great, the food arrangements worked out perfectly. A swell weekend!

As our tradition demands, we did bring out all our targets (portable music devices that can run Rockbox or at least have some code in the Rockbox repo) to be used as building bricks to create a Tower of Rockbox.

This first picture shows that we have a pretty wide selection of players in this room:

With all those “bricks” put in an imaginative order on top of each other, the result could look something like this:

you may enjoy comparing this building with last year’s creation.

More pictures from this year can be found in Petur’s collection and gevaerts’ collection.

This year we’re entertaining the inhabitants of #rockbox and #rockbox-community with two webcam streams from ustream.tv. View both cams at once using rasher’s page.

The beers happen to show some the liquids we’ve been enjoying here!

See all Petur’s Devcon 2008 pictures here.

You just have to go there to watch the biggest Tower of Rockbox yet. I’m sure it’ll pop up in the tower of rockbox wiki page on the rockbox site soonish.

Topics: release 3.0 about 55 minutes

Some little about gsoc2008

GPLv2 discussions about 1h:00 in

Rockbox steering board

Menu and button discussions

Pluginlib action and buttons in plugins in general

Plugin patches in the tracker

Update: Petur’s recording of the same meeting as 146MB MP3.

Update: I replaced the actual stream with a capture screen capture after the event.