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The Google-AU blog reports that Google is going to be holding another one of it’s brain busting adventures soon. The post is ended with the following text/clue:

Arrrrrrrr you ready? Onward to the first puzzle, matey! And good luck!

aHR0cDovL3RyZWFzdXJlaHVudC5hcHBzcG90LmNvbS8=

Soon . 1210550400

Warning: links below contain spoilers.

Shouldn’t take long to figure out. The 10 digits of the final number is a dead giveaway that it’s a unix timestamp, and maps to a particular time. That’s soon.

The seemingly random string is a base64 encoding of a particular website.

I’d just like to wish everyone a hearty and happy star wars day.

May the fourth be with you!

Icon credit: everaldo

I never really got to say much about sightseeing in Taiwan after the conference since everything got so busy. After our wonderful post-conference dinner in Danshui, we crashed back the hostel and woke up to a disappointingly drizzly morning. It was a silly idea considering the cloudy skies, but we headed straight to the Taipei 101 - the tallest tower in the world at 101 floors. It is impressively huge. So huge that the tower poked through the clouds and we wouldn’t have been able to have seen anything from the top so we decided to come back later after visiting the Sun-Yat Sen (who forced the Empress out of power) memorial around the corner.

The Taipei 101 is also really cool because it has the fastest elevator in the world, going from top to bottom in an incredible 36 seconds! That’s 1000m per minute! Charlie and his glass elevator really need to upgrade. We also managed to find some Taiwanese fried chicken with mixed vegies for lunch in some back alley behind the world trade center (which we casually strolled through, thongs, singlets and cameras in hand) before discovering a totally awesome suburb of Taipei which only sold computer and camera gear. Seriously, it was streets and streets worth, probably bigger than my university campus (and that’s big, folks!).

The Confucius temple was lots of fun and very colourful, with red and gold decorations and pagoda rooftops adorned with intricate dragons. Seeing as our hostel was close to one of the most famous landmarks, the Chiang Kai Shek memorial, we visited this enormous plaza at the end of the day so that we had a quick getaway back to the hostel for feet resting time. I could not believe the magnitude of this place. It is probably possible to fit over 100 football fields in the space. My camera couldn’t capture the entire space, so here’s a panorama. If you want to get a feel for JUST HOW FREAKING HUGE it is, click on the photo.

Another grand attraction of Taipei is the Shilin night market where you can experience things such as:

- Stinky tofu (it smells worse than gtk+)

- Asian Elvis impersonators with awesome gold pants

- Never-ending arcades stacked full of Dance-Dance-Revolution machines

- Random old Taiwanese men giving random hints on life

- Buying “pets” as close to being Bonsai as you can get without shoving them into a jar

- Awesome fruits, like durian, dragon fruit and rose apple

And then there is the Grand Palace Museum, which true to it’s name is both very grand, palatial and is host to the finest collection of Chinese art in the world.

That’s a lot of links in one post. Here’s another one for good measure:linkety clinkety (completely factual)

Didn’t get a chance to blog about day 2 of the OTST2008 meeting yesterday since everything has been so hectic. Day 2 was similar in order to Saturday, hearing lots of excellent talks about open hardware and software. I found the talks on Freifunk.net and Open Street Map particularly exciting and look forward to seeing how the future plays out.

Later in the afternoon Pradeepto spoke about the kde-edu project, and Ian and I spoke about Amarok 2. It was a little unfortunate that the number of attendees waned towards the end of the day but I still think the event was more than fantastic. Ellis and the folk from Asus treated us all to a wonderful Taiwanese dinner by the seafront in the waterfront town of Danshui. It was great fun . Here’s most of the team in a group photo:

Summing up, I had a great time. The summit was definitely a great endeavour and hopefully has brought on the right change and the first step to have free software and hardware promoted throughout Taiwan and the Asian world.

Reporting from the luxuries of free Internet at our hostel in Taipei, Ian and I have been going over the talk that we’ll be giving on Amarok tomorrow at the Open Tech Summit here in Taiwan. The entire day today has been spent at the (very nice) Asus corporate headquarters - about 20 minutes on the metro ride outside of Taipei. The metro itself is a nice analogy to the Taiwanese people. Exceptionally efficient, very friendly and hospitable, immaculately clean and well thought out. Kudos to you, Taiwanese government. So friendly have the Taiwanese people been that I’ve been escorted up 10 flights of stairs, around train stations and through chaotic traffic - just to lend a hand. The Asus headquarters are totally awesome, if simply for this rendition of the Mona Lisa created entirely out of motherboard parts.

The aim of OTST is to promote open software and hardware to the Taiwanese, who are quite backward in their thinking of FOSS culture. We’re here on a religious missionary crusade to try and convince them to pick up free software! There were a number of interesting talks today, such as an introductions to OHI and OpenPattern, ultra cool speech recognition software for the EeePC and a general EeePC hacking howto. There were a few talks in Chinese, but I still found it easy to understand how cool it was to see compositing support on the EeePC.

In the early evening we had a light dinner party (which was quite heavy as we’d been fed all day), with two performances by local creative-commons artists. It’s heart-warming to see that Asus is putting a lot of effort into hosting this event and really trying to push the FOSS movement in Taiwan.

I’ve just been interviewed at a Spanish website which promotes open source software, zatune.es. The interview follows one of my pet projects, squash, and really stretched out my spanish skills .

interview link (spanish)

It’s that never ending story once again. Upgrade the video card, suffer extreme performance loss in the desktop:

1. swap nvidia 7900 card for 8600 (a meager upgrade, but still)


2. notice the desktop has dramatically slowed down (expected)


3. recompile the newest nvidia kernel drivers


4. reboot, and to no avail, no performance increase


5. repeat steps 3 and 4, each time tweaking something else. xorg.conf, ubuntu restricted drivers etc

DRI is enabled:

seb@hammerhead:~$ glxinfo | grep "direct"

direct rendering: Yes

I know glxgears is no good benchmark, but at least it provides a slight indication to the performance of the card. 5000 fps is a rubbish result. Also, I’d expect to be able to run the desktop with compositing without an problems - which I can’t.

Can anybody provide a fool proof method of fixing this? I’m reaching out for the sake of my sanity!

Hi all,

Just a quick message that I’m sure many of you have discovered already. Cover art retrieval from Amazon is now broken due to a change in API that Amazon has introduced in it’s web service.

We will release Amarok version 1.4.9 very soon which will re-enable cover art downloads.

Thanks for your patience.

For those of you wondering where I’ve been, it’s Malaysia and Indonesia for the past two months (stories and photos). Not that anyone wants to hear about that, though!

Has anybody noticed a remarkable spike in wordpress comment spam in the last week? I’ve had to defer all comments for moderation due to the massive amounts of crap that’s coming through. More importantly, does anybody have any suggestion of a way to get around it?

Update: Just noticed that all my permanent pages and comment captcha is missing. This disturbs me greatly.

Development work on Amarok 2 has been gathering some momentum. It’s nice to see, but there is still so much work to do.

Cross platform support is also being improved drastically. Martin has done some work on OSX development, with Benjamin Reed doing lots of hard work on amarok builds (screenshot proof).

We even have an awesome open source windows developer, Shane King, who has been hard at work ensuring that Amarok will eventually run for those running Microsoft Windows. Looks like my wishes about finding an open source win dev actually came true. How wonderful and happy that makes me, perhaps the world is coming to it’s senses about software libre.

For build instructions and a few larger screenshots on Windows builds, visit the Amarok wiki

Facebook now allows businesses/organisations/groups etc to create base station pages on the site. Become a fan of these pages and spread the KDE love - do your part in the wild world that is viral marketing!

KDE and Amarok are now on facebook - tell your friends, tell the world!

Exciting news! I’ve spotted a Google streetview car in Sydney! Hopefully this means that Google Maps Sydney will soon get a street view so that we can play fun privacy invasion games.

It’s a little hard to tell thanks to the crappy camera on my mobile phone, but with some squinting you can see the camera mounted on a 1.5-ish metre support bracket on the hood of the car. You can also see the Google decal on the side, providing awesome aerodynamic characteristics to the car.

Exciting news! I’ve spotted a Google streetview car in Sydney! Hopefully this means that Google Maps Sydney will soon get a street view so that we can play fun privacy invasion games.

It’s a little hard to tell thanks to the crappy camera on my mobile phone, but with some squinting you can see the camera mounted on a 1.5-ish metre support bracket on the hood of the car. You can also see the Google decal on the side, providing awesome aerodynamic characteristics to the car.

Exciting news! I’ve spotted a Google streetview car in Sydney! Hopefully this means that Google Maps Sydney will soon get a street view so that we can play fun privacy invasion games.

It’s a little hard to tell thanks to the crappy camera on my mobile phone, but with some squinting you can see the camera mounted on a 1.5-ish metre support bracket on the hood of the car. You can also see the Google decal on the side, providing awesome aerodynamic characteristics to the car.

Some of you may already be familiar with the find-a-thing puzzles which I have posted on music and movie subjects. Here comes another in the sequence: a historical famous people search quiz.

Best of luck for this one.