Holi is an annual and popular Indian spring festival. Although the playful throwing of the coloured powders won’t be allowed in the college, ISAL is inviting you to its annual Holi celebration party. As usual, it will take place in Leuven and everyone is welcome. More details here.
This Sunday, I attended only two talks. These talks were in the embedded track since I was with my brother who is interested in this. The first talk, “SH-2A Linux kernel” by Yoshinori Sato, was very difficult to follow since Yoshinori did not tell us what is the SH-2A microprocessor (it is apparently used in cars, a.o.) and his English was very bad. In the second talk, Vitaly Wool introduced XIP, a way to directly run portions of software from where it’s stored in a type of Flash memory (instead of being copied to RAM first). With XIP, you can reduce boot time (or at least the “time to splashscreen”, especially interesting in handheld devices where you want to quickly be “productive”). But you can have other occasions where speed of execution is more important than price (because the type of Flash memory used is more expensive than standard RAM). Yesterday, Jim Gettys said the OLPC laptop can boot very quickly but it was thanks to the use of LinuxBIOS (and maybe XIP?). I also liked when he took a pen to show us something on a slide and said that it’s “because my wife is here and she said it’s bad manners when I point at things with my finger”. ;-) ...
I spent this Saturday at FOSDEM, listening to some interesting talks. Pieter Hintjens spoke about the Status of Software Patents in Europe. As the FFII president, he should clearly be against software patents. But, although his speech went in this direction, the 3 new FFII initiatives are diluting his/its position as well as the threat (the 3 initiatives are European patent conferences, the creation of the European Software Market Association to lobby the EU and a Campaign for Ethical Patents). Let’s talk seriously: software patents are not a solution and shouldn’t be allowed ; no trade-off. ...
It’s a bit late to wish you a merry Christmas (if you celebrate this event). But it’s still time to wish you a happy new year 2007. :-) And now, a little video-clip/remake from Boymongoose (some background about India needed). youtube owK5tHjL0aE You like Indian self-satire? Here is Welcome to the Laddu shop (after 50 Cent “Candy shop”) and Curry n Spice girl (after Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl”) (a lot of background about India needed). OK now, back to real work …