Ubuntu for MIDs and Netbooks

At OSCON, Canonical presented their interpretation of the MID and Netbook scene. With all the recent news about Intel's Moblin transitioning to Fedora, you'd think Ubuntu was out of it. You'd be wrong! Here is a slide show of the slides to the talk:



Thanks to Peter Goodall, who gave the talk, for giving permission to post these online. I will update this entry when the "real" slides go up.

Update: Pete provided the link in the comments, so I'll promote it here! Download the original slides at: http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/3462

Waldo Photo...

Looking through the OSCON08 photos on flickr, I saw myself. This was taken during the Intel drawing for a MacBook Air (hint... I'm in the red at the right of the image):

Photograph copyright James Duncan Davidson.
http://flickr.com/photos/x180/2704907549/in/set-72157606297321213/

PHP Women?

Thought this might amuse some folks. I took this shot at OSCON08:

OSCON

So, I'm at OSCON this year. This happens to be the 10th aniversary of OSCON. Portland is a pretty nice town, although the tubes get a little slow in the hotel and conference center due to all the geeks! Funny how GPRS can be faster than wifi :)

So last night Legion Of Tech (http://www.legionoftech.org) had Mark Shuttleworth as the speaker. He spoke on his experience of going into space and Ubuntu. It was open to audience participation and Mark did a good job fielding the questions.

Here I am asking Mark about his recent quote regarding the use of QT within Gnome!

N810 and OpenMoko

What does the N810 and OpenMoko have in common?

• They are both small and portable and run linux.
  
• They both use Gtk+ as their native ui toolkit.
  
• They both run mono!

That is right, we are on the eve of some pretty cool happenings in the c# world. We can run our beloved c# apps on these portable Linux devices using the same high-level development environment that we have grown to love so much.

Are you ready for the revolution?

If you have an N800 or N810, check out http://www.mono-project.com/Garmono. If you aren't so inclined to build it yourself...stay tuned for an announcement on the test repository where your device can automatically install all of the mono dependencies you need!

Something to whet your whistle (The mono cairo circles sample running on an actual N810):

Winner!

So I actually did it. Amazing isn't it. This writing endevour has changed me. I have seen into the minds of my characters and they have held my hand and brought me through it. I started writing with zero plot, zero characters, zero reason to even write it -- except for one thing: I wanted to see what would happen in my mind if I let it wonder. There were weird twists and turns I never would have predicted. It could not have been written any other way.

MC and others, thanks for the experience.

Writing on the road

Here I am hurtling down the road at close to 80 mph and I'm typing! This is quite an experience. Of course it is nice to have pervasive inet access through it all. It allows me to do this blog! :) But I should really get back to my novel..I'm a little behind at this point, but I hope to catch up in the next few hours.