Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

I will be talking at the Libre Graphics Meeting this week-end in Montreal. See you there!

The number of the day is 0x20.

I'm sure you didn't miss Intel MID, Intel's answer to the wave of UMPC and Internet Tablet. It features Linux, Matchbox and Hildon, all glued together with a distribution based on the Chinese RedFlag. But the more interesting thing is that the core chipset is based on a Pentium M and GMA945, which is much more horse power than, say, the Nokia 800.

Read more about it here, here, here

Now interesting challenge: while I'm sure it will be relatively easy to have AbiWord and Gnumeric running on it, like they already do on Maemo, but how about porting OpenOffice.org? Sure it will be contrived, but we have a 256MB of RAM, 500MB of storage and a 600-800MHz CPU based on a Pentium M (with half the cache on than the one found in laptops) which should be more than enough.

Adobe, to be able to make their proprietary^[1] platform for application developement, using Flash, did use the Open Source WebKit (that same HTML engin that Apple use for Safari, that is based on KHTML). The paradox is that to have WebKit work on Windows, they used Cairo as a backend. The good news is that Cairo is likely to get better and that WebKit using Cairo is likely to help greatly a Gtk based version.

Changes are available for people to use.

Monday I'll fly out to Prague for the week.

If you are there and wish to have some $BEVERAGE, you know the drill.

Pavel, this is a damn good idea.