Monthly Archives: December 2009

Open Source

My open source TV

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For Christmas this year I decided to surprise my wife with a new TV. To sum it up: hiding a 42″ TV in the closet was hard.LCD TV

Oh well, the model I got for her is a Philips 42PFL7404H. It’s really nothing magical about it, it’s a rather standard LCD TV.

What did make me smile however, was the little paper I found next to the manual (which is done in 30 languages!) and the quick-start guide, a two-sided legal-sized paper that lists all the open source products they’ve used in the TV as well as the GPL and LGPL licenses spelled out in their entirety. Anyway, the products this TV claims to use are:

Linux kernel, Flash Eraseall, Nandwrite, Helper Application, Libc, Librt, Libm, Libpthread, libgcc, libstd++, Diet libc, libgphoto2, vsnprintf, GIF reading routines, base64.

I find it noticeable that there’s no shell or busybox in that list, which in my book is a rather unusual embedded Linux setup.

Open Source

Going Fosdem 2010

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Oh what the heck, we plan to bring every single employee of Haxx over to Fosdem 2010. Yes, that means all two of us!

I hope we’ll manage to join up with fellow Rockbox hackers then and it would be great fun to meet other friends from other projects and open source activities too.

I’ve not been to Fosdem before, and I’ve offered to do a talk there but so far I’ve not gotten a response from the responsible guy in the “embedded dev room”. We’ll see how that ends.

Open Source

FOSS-sthlm

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Me and Claes Jakobsson had a talk in #curl the other day about how we rarely meet Open Source people in the Stockholm Sweden area outside of our own little circles and friends.

In that moment we decided we’d try to arrange a meeting. Free Sofware and Open Source people in the area. In one place. Possibly involving beer. And why not some talks by some clueful people? We’re aiming for it to happen already during early spring 2010, but no date has been set yet.

We’ve already sent out a few mails to people, and we’ve posted about this idea at a few places and now I’ve setup a dedicated mailing list for this purpose. The foss-sthlm mailing list.

Do you want to participate at a meeting like this?

Do you want to help arranging the meeting and get the word spread in all the communities that we would like to get the word spread to?

Do you have any experience in arranging a meeting of this sort? We currently have no idea if people are interested enough, or if we get people interested how many we might be able to attract!

Do you by any chance have connections or friends at companies that would be interested in helping out with sponsorships or similar? My company (Haxx) will certainly make a contribution.

Don’t be shy. Join in and help us get some fun going.

Update: we now have web site monitoring our progress.

Development

Haxx <<= 1;

Oh yes, I’ve been dreaming of the day when I could use a blog post title with a left shift operator! 😉

HaxxOur growth rate is indeed phenomenal as my brother Björn joins Haxx as employee number two, and we’ve now doubled our size! Well, at least we double the number of full-time Haxxers.

Haxx continues to focus on being highly skilled and experienced consultants within embedded, Linux , networking and open source.

If you need help in your project, or know of anyone else who could use skilled embedded consultants. Give us a beep!

If you, dear readers, are interested in working with or for us, and you think you are a skilled person within one or more of our areas then by all means get in touch! If you’re living and working in Sweden and most preferably in the Stockholm area, it’ll be really cool.

Open Source

How to get involved in Open Source

I had a fun chat with Anthony Bryan a while ago on the topic of how to get involved with Open Source. What projects generally need, what you can do, how you can help and things like that.

The recording/podcast was originally posted over at knowledgecaps.com, but the 22MB file is also available from my site. I’m not sure why, but when I play this in my audacious I get the chipmunk version (ie far too fast playback). So I haven’t yet listened to it myself!

A related article I wrote ages ago: What Can I do for Rockbox when not Programming?