One-week trip to Taipeh, visiting FIC.

On rather short notice I am now on my way to Taipeh, Taiwan. As the interested reader of this journal will have noticed, OpenMoko and the Neo1973 are the seemingly endless story of delays and mishaps throughout the last nine months.

So the purpose of this trip is to discuss various options on how to make sure that we all learn the neccessary lessons out of this past experience, and ensure that OpenMoko eventually can at least keep up to some of its schedule promises.

So this will be a week full of meetings and discussions mostly with various managers and particularly the hardware team at FIC, our generous sponsor.

What is at least equally exciting are the planned meetings with various WiFi chipset vendors to discuss our requirements of a mobile-phone compatible low-size, low-power WiFi chipset with a fully GPL licensed Linux kernel driver.

The downside of all this is that I'm once again held back from writing some of the most important infrastructure code that OpenMoko still needs. Anyway, this compromise has to be made - after all, of what use is software without a high-quality, reliable, performant and available handset hardware :)

Since Werner doesn't have a blog, old-fashioned as he is, let me mention that he'll be there for the whole week, too. I think it's a 34-hour trip for him to get from Buenos Aires to Taipeh. I wonder how well he'll survive that...

Dor

On my China Airways flight from Frankfurt to Taipeh, I have continued my tradition of watching the [usually] only Bollywood movie that the in-flight entertainment system offers. In this particular case, it was Dor

I had not yet heared/read anything about that movie, and not even the name sounded familiar. So I was a bit skeptically if this was one of those cheap superficial "B-class" movies that I try to avoid.

To the contrary. What seems like a low-budget production without any major actors [that I would recognize], is actually a masterpiece. Very unlike the cliche Bollyowood, it is not "overdone". Nothing is exaggerrated into self-irony. Everything feels real, down-to-earth. No princess-like costumes, no palaces and no super-rich Indians in their mega-cities. This impression is further substantiated by the somewhat simplistic editing. Scenes end abruptly, and the audio track does not spawn such 'hard cuts' smoothly either.

Dor is a sincere and honest movie about two women who have nothing in common, and come from completely different cultural backgrounds of Indias diversity. However, both of their husbands go abroad to work in Saudi Arabia very soon after marriage. A terrible accident involving those two Indian workers sets the stage for the remainder of the plot.

The whole movie is shot at various locations on the country side. The only remnescent of modern india is a cell phone with SIM card, and the mainstream bollywood songs that are sometimes playing on some squeaky radio.

It seems like this is the next DVD on my 'to-buy' list. Let's see if I manage to pick it up during my trip to Bangalore in early April.