0xlab Launch

0xlab is a innovative movement. Taiwan, our home country, has been doing IT hardware manufacture for quite a long time and is fairly successful. The thing about hardware manufacture is that it’s all about cost-down. Once your competitors know how to make the same product, it all goes down to the scale and production management.

On the other hand, the software industry in Taiwan has always been poor, as long as I can remember. The only two big local (maybe not so local) software companies here are TrendMicro and Cyberlink. Considering the fact that Taiwanese students always do great in the global programming competitions, the performance of software industry is relatively not that significant.

The involvement of FOSS here used to be in a really really bad condition. Giants like Asus has been using FOSS to create consumer products for years, but they didn’t really understand how to play nice with other kids, until suited by people like Harald Welte. It’s not like “I’ll only open up if I absolutely have to”, the involvement of FOSS is actully becoming a good business strategy now. Just think about why giants like Intel, Novell, Apple and Google are getting more and more involved in open source. There are reasons behind all these.

We should really use our advantage in hardware to join this trend. 0xlab is the first step, and I hope there are many to follow.

Google Calendar: offline mode broken?

If I access Google Calendar with Google Chrome now it will ask me to enter password again. After that it will do a brief redirect then drop me right back to the password screen. The redirect looks like below, so I would guess the “locallogin” view doesn’t work for me.

From Randomness

So I switched to firefox, without Google Gears the calendar showed up just fine, but once I tried to enable the offline mode it showed this.

From Randomness

Since Google Gears is always enabled in Chrome, it means I cannot use it to access my calendar now.

Slashdotted.

So now the news is in the open. After Harald mentioned the recent status of Openmoko, Sean talked at openexpo to explain the whole thing.

In my opinion, Sean was more honest then I expected, and I admire that. It’s hard to admit so many mistakes as the CEO of a company.

Anyway, leave the past in the past. Life still needs to move on. I still got my gta02 (freerunner), and it’s still an interesting device that has all kinds of possibilities. What’s missing is just the right software. I still haven’t decided where to put my energy into, whether it should be freesmartphone based or Android. As a FOSS developer, it seems I should really support freesmartphone, but since my next job will most likely be related to Android and my time/energy is limited, maybe I will start with android.

I didn’t put this into Openmoko category by purpose so it won’t show up on planet.openmoko.org.