One of the rare pleasures of working in consumer electronics is bringing your work home and having your girlfriend coo in delight as a response. Below are some photos of a yet-to-be-released chumby “skin”. It slips over your chumby a bit like a sock. There are actually several in development, and all of them are equally sassy.
Guys, don’t worry; I hear chumby’s got something for you in the works, too.
I recently saw a demo of Android booting up in a CoWare environment, and I couldn’t help but notice this line in the Android boot console:
... Freeing init memory: 96K init: HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN init: reading config file ...
That’s a little scary. If you don’t get the reference, it’s the infamous first words of CATS, followed by the immortal phrase “all your base are belong to us“.
I mean, I love the google search application, but I am a little bit disturbed by the masses of people trusting all their bits to google — their email, their desktops, their photos … soon their phones (no, I don’t use gmail — I must be the last person on earth who doesn’t — but the idea of ads showing up based on what’s in my email is disquieting for a variety of reasons). And I think that surely the Android developers cannot claim ignorance to the context of the phrase: all your base are belong to us // you are on your way to destruction // you have no chance to survive make your time.
Now, Don’t be Evil!
Incidentally, CoWare is a really neat tool; one of their other demos is a hardware simulation of the chumby platform. It’s absolutely amazing that they have a cycle-accurate simulation of the chumby hardware platform that boots our code and runs almost real-time. Since it’s a hardware simulation, you can jump in and inspect the state of signals between components, wiggle lines, and set breakpoints based on hardware state (as well as software state). This is one of those cool things that come out of having an open platform; without access to our source code and documentation, creating this demo without the help of chumby would have been much more difficult. And while some consumer electronics companies would go batty over someone emulating their platform, I say to them hats off for such a clever hack and such a powerful product.
I was recently invited to speak at the XBMC Devcon hosted by Boxee in Amsterdam. It was a privilege to meet the talented and hard-working team behind XBMC and boxee. For those unfamiliar with XBMC, it is a homebrew media center application for hacked Xboxes that rivals anything created by a commercial organization; you haven’t experienced digital media until you have used XBMC. Boxee hopes to do what Firefox did for Mozilla, or what Ubuntu has done for Linux: bring the application to the masses. They currently have a port for the Mac Mini available for limited Alpha testing (unfortunately, it looks like all of their Alpha invites have already been exhausted…for now).
I must give props to Avner and his team for hosting a proper event for hackers — like the last Toorcon Seattle, the entire event had an open bar, all day and all night, with an appropriate mix of caffeine and alcohol available at all times (and who said athletes were the only ones who use performance-enhancing drugs?).
At a conference dinner event at the Supper Club, dessert was presented in a … novel … fashion: on a naked woman. After dinner was served, a man dressed in leather walked in and laid down on the table what looked like a body wrapped in cloth; the cloth was peeled back to reveal a (mostly) naked woman. He then proceeded to paint her entire body with chocolate, and then topped her off with whipped cream and chocolate ganaches, all to a soundtrack spun by a funky house DJ. Of course, you then had to get your dessert — no hands allowed. The chocolate was quite sticky, which made for a number of hilarious photos.
Thanks again to Boxee for the conference and my respect to team XBMC for showing the world what kinds of incredible applications the homebrew scene can create.