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Taiwan Day 0

Getting There
Yesterday I arrived in Taipei after about 22 hours of airplanes and airports. At least for a Missouri guy like me, it seems sparling and huge. Fellow Amarok dev and Sydney resident Seb Ruiz isn't so impressed. I didn't get lost on my way to the hostel until the very last block. I walked into a bakery probably looking quite lost (I had been walking around a single block for about 10 minutes) and one of the workers asked me "do you need help?" in English. I showed her the address and phone number of the hostel, she whipped out her mobile and called it, got directions and walked me to the entrance (about 20 meters away actually). So the Taiwanese are very friendly, Seb had a similar experience of someone actually taking him up the elevator directly to the hostel.

The hostel itself (the "Camel's Oasis"), is very homey. I found Seb chatting with a Québécoise about her 6-month world tour (you always find such lucky people at cheap hostels). I did follow Seb's advice and avoided sleeping much on the flight over here (only about 3 hours), but my biological clock still objected to the 11 hour timeshift; I had some pretty spotty sleep last night.

OpenTech Conference
Now we're at Asus for the OpenTech Summit. This morning is being devoted to Asus. Ellis, the product manager for the Asus EeePC (IIRC), presented on how Asus intends to work with the community. A Xandros developer, Brian, went over SDK for the Asus EeePC, which is basically Xandros distributed with Eclipse and Vmplayer. The main development environment they are supporting is Qt 4.2; he did a "Hello World" using Eclipse's Qt Designer integration. Both Ellis and Brian talked about the method for ISVs to release software for the Eee PC; this interests me since it would be really nice to have a way to release the newest Amarok's directly to the EeePC Add/Remove Programs system. The next version of the EeePC OS is apparently going to make it easy to install .deb's or an EeePC-specific tarball which contains a bunch of .deb files.