Seen at Assembly 2011

The stand for Ubuntu Linux also had some Meego people showing that Meego is still going wrong. I got my hands on the Nokia N9 prototype version (I did not get permission to take picture of it). There was also Intel Meego tablet reference platform shown on the stand. The MeeGo people from Nokia were not allowed to tell any interesting details of their MeeGo plans…

I visited the Assembly TV premises to catch up what they are doing this year and meeting the friends there. This year the broadcasting system was almost completely in HDTV format, including the cameras for main broadcast (seminars still used standard definition video). HDTV video editing and playback was done mainly using Apple computers (proven to work in this application better than PC based systems). Technology to transfer video between devices was mainly HD-SDI, DVI (over fiber optics) and Ethernet. Audio connections used RockNet technology. RockNet real-time, low latency audio distribution network using CAT5 cable. RockNet can link up to 99 devices into a single network comprising 160 audio channels. The network is self-healing for single connection failures.

Helsinki Hacklab had an interesting stand with all kinds of robots and electronics hacks. At the same stand there were also Tampere hackerspace 5w and Hacklab Turku. It is good to see that there are forming groups of people who hack things together. This is one robot on the stand. It is based on RC servos connected with servo card and Python program running on PC.

hacklab_robot

metku.net stand had also this year some interesting hardware hacks shows. This is one interesting case for a PC.

mobira_dataman

I met Kristoffer Lawson at Assembly. He told about his new on-line banking project Holvi. Holvi in essence is a new way to do online banking. With Holvi, small groups are able to tag each payment in certain ways so that a clear overall picture is formed and thus it helps these groups to better understand how their money is spent and received. This should pretty much makes bookkeeping redundant for smaller organizations and groups. Holvi is a great example of a team sticking to their guns and building upon their core expertise. There is much of Scred in there, but the shift in approach.

The main demo competition and 4kilobytes intro competitions were again high quality. You can find the entries at Assembly Archive. Some coders are really making wonders with their code.

3 Comments

  1. Tomi Engdahl says:

    If my report on Assembly was interesting the you might be interested on this as well. Here is a link to a report on the largest LAN party in the world:

    Inside the World’s Largest LAN Party
    http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/11/30/2343229/inside-the-worlds-largest-lan-party

    Inside DreamHack, the 12,000-computer LAN party
    http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/107245-inside-the-worlds-largest-lan-party

    Over 12,000 LAN party goers turned up at DreamHack Winter 2011 in Jonkoping
    Three massive halls — the largest holding 5,000 computers — for four days
    Wiring up more than 12,000 devices to a single network is difficult.
    Telia and Cisco provided no less than 120 gigabits of internet bandwidth.

    http://www.dreamhack.se/dhw11/2011/11/22/120-gigabit-at-dhw11/
    At DreamHack on November 24th to 27th Cisco and Telia are building the world’s fastest Internet connection with speeds of breathtaking 120 gigabits per second.

    All participants will be invited to take advantage of as much as possible of the network’s capacity. The previous DreamHack-record is 20 gigabits.

    The internet connection will have a speed of 120 gigabits per second. This is almost certainly the first time such a fast connection has been set up over a distance of over 300 km (between Jönköping and Stockholm).

    The fast connection is made possible by several new technologies from Cisco and Telia. Telia is behind the fiber network while Cisco contributes to the hardware, including two CRS-3 routers that are the most powerful router with a transmission capacity of 322 out of bits per second.

    Reply
  2. Gorgeous Router says:

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    Reply

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