Returning from FIC HQ / Taipei

Just returning from one of the probably busiest weeks in my life. The entire week was spent with meeting lots of FIC staff. Finally I'm able to connect faces to the members of the hardware and production testing team located in Taipei.

Significant time was spent talking to vendors of WiFi chipsets over the last week. The choice seems to have boiled down to designs around Atheros AR6K or Marvell 8686. The AR6K driver code is completely public for quite some time, even though it (and the mvista SDIO code it depends on) might need a bit of cleanup. From Marvell we yet have to find/receive the GPL licensed driver source code - at least from our [high level official] marvel contacts we have received positive confirmation. So actually, for now, only AR6K is a 'known possible' choice, whereas Marvell might become a choice, once we see the source :)

The other big task was sitting down with Werner Almesberger and doing the system level design for the next major hardware revision, and discussing this design with the hardware team. A lot of things are still in flux. But at least the potential of it is _really_ promising. Details are to be revealed at their appropriate time.

I've also had the chance to briefly meet with senior management such as the head of the mobile communications business unit, as well as the CEO and the chairman of the board of FIC. Everybody seems to be really excited and looking forward to the time ahead, now that we have identified many of the problems in the hardware design, production quality and internal processes and are heading to a much brighter future.

Another interesting opportunity was to present at Taiwan NTU University on the 'correct' way of doing Linux development, both technically and from the GPL / policy point of view. Let's hope we now have a couple of more software developers who will know these things before entering the industry :)

In retrospective, I should have done this trip way earlier on. But then, many things have changed over the last nine months, and it might have been an entirely different experience.

Taiwan/Taipei really seems to be an incredibly interesting place. A world of never-ending possibilities in the field of computer hardware. An industry that can produce about any device of your dream - but doesn't since it seems to be locked too much into either the master/slave role of traditional OEM/ODM business - or into producing the same things like all of their competitors, without really trying too much new/exceptional things.

So it seems, after all, my good intentions about travelling less in 2007 seem to be vaporizing sooner than I would have liked. I guess the productivity gain of me being in Taipei at least from time to time is worth it...

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.

Apple can't even properly translate their SPAM

I just received SPAM from apple: "Mit dem Mac ist Codieren immer und überall möglich." and further down "Codieren. Kompilieren. Berechnen."

Seems like a multi-billion multi-national company cannot even afford some native speaker to proof-read their advertisements. Quite embarrassing.

Phase 0 software build

Whenever you think something is bad, it will come worse. We've had another hardware outage of one of our buildhosts during the creation of the images that were to be prepared for the "Phase 0" devices. Luckily, the build system is easy to set up on various machines, and we actually now have the build system on four hosts :)

It was a lot of stress to resolve the most important issues just before flashing those 50 phones. All kinds of last-minute problems showed up, such as a certain kernel module missing in the rootfs, etc.

Anyway, we managed to finalize it early Friday morning, and Friday + Saturday engineers in Taiwan used Werners fabulous devirginator to install u-boot, environment, splash screen, kernel and rootfs.

Unfortunately, due to all the delays we have been suffering, all those initial recipients will receive is a very basic Linux distribution:
We have hardware support for all the components in the boot loader and kernel. The device now has a boot menu that allows you to switch to serial or USB=tty console. It will happily boot into Linux, where it starts the X11 (kdrive) server and starts matchbox and looks like a pretty standard GPE desktop.

Suspend/Resume is now working from the software side, i.e. you can suspend the Linus system into RAM and get back from it, all drivers are coming back into operation nicely. You can access back light brightness, battery charger state, Bluetooth, etc. The easiest way to work on the device is currently by using USB Ethernet emulation and then ssh'ing into dropbear that gets started during bootup.

So you might think ok, I'll get a fully open source Linux PDA with super-bright display. But I wanted a phone!
We still have lots of stability issues with our native OpenMoko applications currently, so there will not be a working/stable "dialer" application yet. Instead, if you really want to try it, you can either manually use GSM, or use to

So yes, we are delayed. Still, we have decided to ship those units to allow more people to hack on it as early as possible. The foundation is there, and it so far appears to be quite stable, too.

Also, software can always be updated, especially now that we have USB DFU support.

And now, finally, after a long time, I am looking forward to touch the GSM code again. Let's hope there are not too many urgent issues interrupting me next week. After all, we want SMS and GPRS support rather sooner than later :)

G5 Quad broken one month after warranty: The big bang

Last night, I was once again annoyed by the slow build time of our dual AMD64 2.4GHz build server, and I wanted to use my Apple G5 quad again as a build/compile system.

So I pressed the power button, and immediately in that instance there was an extremely loud BANG!. No smoke, no smell, just that bang. Standby/trickle power was still there, the LED's kept shining.

I quickly opened the case, too off the covers, etc. There is no visible component that has suffered any damage. No leaked/exploded capacitors, no residue from some electrical spark, nothing.

And then I found out: The machine arrived on February the 2nd, and now it's exactly one month after the 1 year warranty has expired. I wonder how they can time their system failures that well :(

A little bit later I found out about the Apple Power Mac G5 Repair Extension Program for Power Supply Issues. It seems like this is a common bug, especially when you see things like this lengthy list of people who report a similar effect.

Seems like I'll have to call some local Apple dealers the first thing Monday morning....