Holiday Party

EU Edge Holiday Party Last friday we threw a holiday party with some friends and our fellow geeks from iMind at the wonderfully decrepit Szimpla Kert.

Oh, it was wild! Watch out for developers who had a few drinks — they are more than eager to start a fist-fight. Oh, well, on a Nintendo Wii, mind you… At least this way Zsombor stood a chance to kick István’s butt. ;)

Thank you all for coming. Till next time… :)

The December Budapest New Technology Meetup

The December Budapest New Technology Meetup went on fine yesterday. We had a nice series of presentations, ranging from an android robot to flash streaming server. Moreover, our very own Gergely Kis also had a presentation on the Google Android project.

Now we only have to wait until January for the next Meetup.

Google Android runs on Sharp Zaurus SL-C760

Android main screen Yesterday we managed to get Google Android running on a Sharp Zaurus SL-C760. This seems to be the first documented success with this device. This article provides instructions on how to get it working, in case you would like to try it at home :)

Google Android is a new software stack for mobile devices, specifically mobile phones. It uses the Linux kernel as the core, but Google developed a new user space stack:

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MD5 seems not safe for code signing

This paper presents a method for creating the same MD5 hash for different executables - thus beating the idea of identifying executables by comparing their MD5 hashes to stored values.

Steve Woz Here

Steve Woz at BudapestSteve Wozniak stopped by in town yesterday afternoon at the Millenáris Park, Budapest. The steadily growing EU Edge Mac contingent went to see him in person and listen to him reminiscing about the fascinating story of life at Apple in the early days. He also gave us some tidbits about the projects he’s presently involved with: teaching technology to kids and helping a number of museums and not-for-profit organizations dedicated to promote technology. It was interesting to see the man in person and learn what his favorite gadgets of all time are: the Gameboy he still occasionally plays with and - obviously - the iPhone these days.

ua: yet another tool for finding duplicates

The problem of finding duplicate files is probably as old as megabyte capacity hard drives. The fact that there are so many on practically any system that has been in operation for some time is surprising. I would say it is even astonishing when you find source duplicates in your development tree. Well, as part of our cleanup and improvement process we decided to get rid of them. This presents the first problem, how do we find them?

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A lecture at the RCEAS

On Satruday I held a small lecture on the Regional Conference on Embedded and Ambient Systems, where I presented my earlier work using MoteIV T-Mote Sky motes utilizing Zigbee wireless mesh networking. I have used these small motes in the Copora installation at the Yamaguchi Center in Yamaguchi, Japan earlier this year.

Quite fun :)

The RCEAS dAEmo event featured other interesting presentations, ranging from cell-phone based text-to-speech systems to head-mounted displays that can be used to control a Sony Aibo robot dog.

EU Edge Open Source site launched

I’m glad to announce that we’ve launched the EU Edge Open Source site. This site will contain the open source projects developed by EU Edge, as well as references to open source projects maintained (or contributed to) by EU Edge members.

The first EU Edge Open Source project released on this site is ua, a command line tool to find identical files.

Enjoy :)

Let the user see the code - GPL for Web applications

The Free Software Foundation has released the Affero General Public License version 3. The license is essentially the GPLv3 with an added clause that requires that source code be distributed to users that interact with the application over a network. The license effectively extends copyright to Web applications. The new AGPL will have important effects for companies that, under the GPL, have no obligation to distribute changes to users on the Web. This release adds the license to the stable of official FSF licenses and is compatible with the GPLv3.

If Google would be really open, they would adopt this license.

The gift

NeXTstation Mono in the museum Today was the day I gave away my beloved NeXTstation Mono computer to the Hungarian Museum for Science and Technology. It was a hard decision to make. I started learning computer languages like C and Objective-C on NeXTSTEP OS as well as using a professional graphical user interface and a true UNIX-like command line environment.

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