Jamie Bennett Speaks

Part 2 of the two part series recorded at the OSiM conference in Berlin is now online. Dave Neary starts by giving a history of Maemo and continues on talking about the community and its way forward. Niels Breet highlights some of the issues the Maemo website is facing and proposes future changes.

This time the video is in 720p (click the full screen button). I’m still experimenting with video hosting sites; this one is on blip.tv. It would of been uploaded to vimeo but it constantly failed on upload for some reason. Maybe next time.

Part 1 of the Maemo developer session that was held as OSiM World can now be found online.

In this talk, Nokia discuss the future of the Maemo platform. Its 57 minutes long but its well worth watching. Part 2 will follow tomorrow.

I will also be releasing the high definition versions of all the talks (once they have been transcoded) via bittorrent so if you want to watch in lovely high-def, you will have to wait a while.

The first of many OSiM and Maemo Summit recordings have been put online. This one is of Dr Ari Jaaksi’s keynote speech at OSiM World 2008 where he discusses the future of the Maemo Platform.

Slide are here:

All recordings were done in lovely high definition but google seems to down covert it pretty badly. I’m still looking for a better host so if there are any suggestions, leave a comment below.

So as I sit by the river in Berlin, sipping a cappuccino, I can’t help but reflect over the last 5 days.

I arrived in Berlin in time for OSiM where I pretty much manned the Nokia booth constantly for the two days. I got to meet lots of new and old faces alike and the traffic to the booth was constant. People as diverse as students from a UK university to key people in multi-national companies were asking questions and showing a genuine interest in what the Maemo platform has to offer, now, and in the future.

On Thursday a well attended Maemo dev session was held. The new technologies that will be used in Fremantle were discussed (the video will be online soon) and it seemed to generate quite a bit excitement, especially when Nokia committed to opening up former closed sourced components.

Then on Friday it was time for the Summit.

I arrived early to set up the video recording equipment. The venue was great; one large room for the main threads and two smaller break-out rooms for other streams. The day started in the main room with Nokia centred content, much of which has already been covered elsewhere so I won’t go into too much detail needless to say the event raised just as many (if not more) questions as it gave answers.

The days were long but enjoyable and the nights were filled with alcohol fuelled conversation but my hat has to go off to the INdT guys who apparently partied until 6am one night/morning! The community council already have lots of idea’s on how to improve next years event so that will be one to look out for.

All in all a very good event. c-base is a really cool venue and I urge anyone looking to host an event in Berlin to check it out along with their very cool Microsoft Surface like table built entirely using open source software.

See you all next year!

The Maemo developer session at OSiM 2008 served to show Nokia’s stance on the future of openness on the internet tablets. They have signalled their intentions by today open sourcing many components that were once closed including the wifi and low level hardware monitoring drivers.

Nokia often quote the 80%/20% line; “In Diablo, 80% of the platform is currently open”. Looking forward to Fremantle, this percentage is set to increase much more. Where closed applications were used, there is an increasing desire to use more open versions. Among the highlights are:

Wow, just got back from recording Ari Jaaksi’s keynote speech at OSiM and he managed to drop a couple of bombs including:

My Dell XPS M1330 get’s hot, and when I say hot I mean that it’s too hot to touch the underneath sometimes. As you may of guessed, it has a defective Nvidia GPU and the recommended course of action is to reflash the bios for a temporary fix.

So, last night I decided that I’d burnt my hands too many times on the laptop casing and that is was time to do what Dell recommended. A quick download later I had the A12 bios ready to install. Once flashed I was given the ‘time to reboot now’ (to paraphrase) message so I did, only the laptop didn’t come back to life.

A lengthy call to Dells technical support line resulted in an engineer visit planned for tomorrow to replace the motherboard. Lets hope its all fixed for the Maemo summit next week or things will be a whole lot more painful to say the least.

EDIT: Dell repair guy fixed it!! Yeah. Took him 30 minutes or so to swap out the motherboard for a new one (with the latest bios) and now I’m back up and running.

So, in little over a week I will be travelling to Berlin to attend the OSiM conference and then the first ever Maemo summit. In true community fashion, I decided that rather than be a bystander to these events, I my as well help out as much as I can.

At OSiM I will be trying to coordinate the community presence on the Nokia booth. We still need volunteers to help answer questions from the public and showcase the many cool apps that we have available to us as tablet users. If your attending OSiM and would like to help, please edit the wiki page with details of when your available. Hopefully we can capitalise on all the excitement building due to Ari Jaaksi talk on the future of the Maemo platform and the Nokia dev session.

This years Mameo summit will be held at c-base in Berlin. I will be charged with video recording as much of the event as possible and distributing it afterwards. The plan is to make available audio recordings of most, if not all talks. In addition to this there will be video recordings of the main talks along with interviews and ‘behind the scenes’ footage.

I will be meeting with the c-base guys on the Tuesday night before the event to view a music concert they’re hosting and have a chat about how the event will best be recorded. Over the two days I will be using a Panasonic HDC-SD5 high definition camcorder to capture as much as possible and Tim Samoff with be snapping away with his trusty Canon 5d.

All in all there should be good coverage of the two days (and nights) so for those people who can’t make the event, you can at least experience it in digital form.