World Domination at the CELF Embedded Linux Conference

Spent the day at the CELF (CE Linux Forum) Embedded Linux Conference in the Techmart in Santa Clara. Nice venue -- I don't think I'd been there for an event before, in spite of working just down the street for five years. I only found out about the event yesterday, from an article in Linux Weekly News (which comes out Wednesday night), so I missed the first two days out of three. But $EMPLOYER still got their money's worth, so I'm not complaining.

One of the things I learned from my late father, who was fond of pithy one-liners, was "If you get one good idea out of a conference or trade show, it was worth it." This was worth a good deal more than that -- today turned out to be "Linux on mobile devices" day -- a whole day's worth of good, useful sessions, starting with the Gnome Foundation's announcement of their Mobile and Embedded Initiative.

It is estimated that there will be over 200M cell phones running Linux five years from now. Talk about world domination! Motorola and Nokia had a big presence at the conference.

Also good sessions on X on mobile devices, CELF's mobile phone profile working group, building small root file systems (4MB RAM and 4MB flash), OpenKODE, and a cool hallway demo of FancyPants, a mobile multimedia framework derived from Enlightenment.

Tracks, audacity 1.3.3, and other good stuff

Added reverb to the vocals on "Someplace in the Net" (which improved it considerably); last night I also did some mixing on "Programmer's Alphabet" and "Paper Pings". Ran into some mysterious bugs in Audacity last night working on "Net", so I pulled down the latest updates from the CVS tree and rebuilt it. Several stupid mistakes (you really do need cvs update -d if you want to get all the new subdirectories) and a number of apt-get's to fetch missing libraries later, I had a shiny new Audacity 1.3.3 -- the bugs appear to be gone, and there are some welcome improvements in the UI.

In other news, my left leg isn't hurting, and the infected big toe on my right foot seems to be improving. These are both Good Things.

Happy Bear.

(9:15 reverb on "Paper Pings". 9:35 reverb on "Programmer's Alphabet".)