Planet SoC

I’ve been sadly neglecting this blog, and even worse given the current timing, my GSoC project - next week is the ‘pencil’s down’ date, and I’ve decided to re-write everything in C. However, I’ve got a good excuse: last week I gave a presentation at the North American Congress On Biomechanics (NACOB) in Ann Arbor. It was pretty nerve-wracking, my second conference presentation (and much more intimidating than the little Ontario-grad-students-only OBC), but I think it went well. I also got to see some other interesting presentations and meet some fun people, so all in all it was a great trip. Oh yeah, and I also saw Rod Stewart at the DTE Energy Music Theatre. It was pretty funny to be amongst 15 000 drunken screaming middle-aged soccer moms.
My other reason for taking a break from the project was a trip back home for the August long weekend. It was pretty nice to be on Saltspring in the summertime (rather than my usual Christmas trips) - here’s a little picture from Saturday night’s dinner on my parent’s boat:

Not a bad place to be at all. I also got a little surprise when I got home: an early birthday/graduation gift in the form of an EEE 900! This little thing is half the size of my already-tiny 12” tablet, and I took it to the conference last week and it was awesome. I got used to the keyboard surprisingly fast (although I did increase the keyboard responsiveness by adding tinfoil as described in this post). I also loaded Ubuntu 8.04 (actually, ubuntu-eee because I was too lazy to do the webcam/sound/wireless config myself), as well as the custom kernel from array.org. The result boots almost as quickly as the default Xandros (30 seconds or so), but seems to run a little hotter (around 60 degrees, 65 when under heavy load). All in all, it’s a great toy.