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Special guests:
Thomas Dexter (http://thomasdexter.com/)
G Lucas Crane (http://nonhorse.com/Bio.html)
Tristan Shepherd

$7 (proceeds go to the artists)

Purchase at door or pre-order from MAD website at:http://www.madmuseum.org/events/live-control-room-0
Marking the "move-in" for E.S.P. TV at MAD, Live From the Control Room repurposes MAD’s Open Studios into the E.S.P. TV Lab. Hosting a variety of local artists and performers who work with analog systems, as well as broadcast innovators and other voices in the field, Live From the Control Room forms a happening-like environment for discussion, performance, and communal production of experimental broadcast television.

"Live From The Control Room Pt. 2" marks the second in a 2-part series E.S.P TV's recency at the Museum of Art and Design from Feb - May 2013. For more information on this and other events or to pre-order tickets, please consult the calendar on the Museum of Art and Design website at:http://www.madmuseum.org/series/esp-tv

real-time scanned video & algoritmic electronic music - Joris de Laet 1987 - SEMstudio Belgium (S.E.M. Studio voor Experimentele Muziek °1973)
http://jorisdelaet.magix.net/website/

http://www.youtube.com/user/TeffDogg

No Starch Press and I have decided to release a free ebook version of Hacking the Xbox in honor of Aaron Swartz. As you read my book, I hope that you’ll be reminded of how important freedom is to the hacking community and that you’ll be inclined to support the causes that Aaron believed in.

Apologies in advance if there are any hiccups in the distribution of the free copy. The primary host is a server in my flat, which only has a 100Mbps up-link (currently pushing >30Mbps one hour after posting).

Today, March 11, marks the second anniversary of the Tohoku-Oki earthquake that devastated Japan and triggered the meltdown of Fukushima Daiichi. In a desire to help any way I could, I joined Safecast and created an open source Geiger counter reference design, which I released last year around this time.

Since then, Safecast launched a successful Kickstarter campaign, and International Medcom has completed the monumental tasks of tooling, testing, debugging, and developing firmware for this little device.

Above: the limited edition Kickstarter version of the Geiger counter in action.

Above: the steel tools used to injection mold the ventral case of the Geiger counter.

Finally, the clear, limited-edition Kickstarter devices are shipping. You can see some photos of them on the Make Blog as Eric Weinhoffer at Make is helping to put the finishing touch on every unit: a laser-cut, limited edition serial number on the back of each case.

Having shipped many products myself, I know how hard everyone has worked to make this a reality. Congrats guys!

If you donate to Safecast between now and 11:59 PM EDT tomorrow, March 11th, Global Giving will match your donation 200%. As long as funding remains, they’ll even match your donation 100% until March 15th. Click the image below to learn more and contribute to a great project.

The Ware for March 2013 is shown below. Click on the image for a larger version.

Thanks to Patricio Worthalter for contributing this month’s ware! The PCI Matchmaker from AMCC brings me back. I used one of those as part of my Master’s thesis, back in the day when FPGAs accessible by mere mortals couldn’t do PCI directly. Man, it was (and still is) a pain to properly obtain the official PCI bus specs…PCI is a member’s-only club, with a $3k annual fee. Ain’t nobody got dime fo’ that!

The Ware for February 2013 is the Worldsemi WS2812. It’s a digital-to-light converter — add +5V, ground, and shift in a digital code word, and out comes PWM RGB light. The chip also features a digital output for cascading multiple LEDs in a row. It’s an extremely versatile chip that was brought to my attention by Dave Cranor during the Shenzhen geek tour in January — one of those things that you just keep a stock of at all times because it’s a dirt simple way to add a beautiful-looking LED into a tight spot. You can buy ones mounted on a little PCB from Adafruit.

I’ll give Randy the prize this month, since he was the first to correctly identify the entire packaged ware, and also gave a link to a datasheet (which I had also been looking for). Thanks, and email me for your prize!

Thanks to Cabaret Scene for uploading these to youtube featuring the fantastic Halo Halo and Dana Kunze

"Psychedelic Experimental Video by John Mahin. Produced in the Cal Arts Video studio in the 1980's. John used Apple 2 and Amiga computers in the making of his videos. All his videos are performed live with no editing"

http://www.puwame.com/ 

So many good bands, and the organisers are such nice guys

Gonna be doing some work with Victor Timofeev for BYOB 2013

some other great artists look to be taking part too!

"Bring Your Own Beamer (BYOB) is a series of one-night events, so far held in over 80 cities across the world. Join us for a spectacle of moving image featuring artists and their projectors! For one evening only, The White Building in Hackney Wick will be transformed into an interactive object, featuring: MOVs, GIFs, 3D worlds, intercontinental live streams, light box drawings and virtual sculpture.

http://byoblondon.tumblr.com/

Featuring:
Awe IX | Laurie Bender | Rebecca Cooper | Jamie George | James Hicks | Marinette Kaus | Lawrence Lek | Beatrice Lopez | Tobias Revell | Antonio Roberts | Clifford Sage & Joey Holder | Camila Sotomayor | James B Stringer | Daniel Swan | Viktor Timofeev & Chris King | Simon Whybray |

Sunday 10th March | 6-9pm
Residency Studios
The White Building
7 Queen's Yard, London E9 5EN
http://thewhitebuilding.org/

BYOB at White Building is curated by Lawrence Lek, in association with SPACE Studios.

The first BYOB event was initiated and created by Rafaël Rozendaal in 2010 in Berlin."

I’ve been asked by a few people now to outline my plans for improving software installation in GNOME. I’ve started to prototype a new app called ‘GNOME Software’. It exists in gnome git and currently uses PackageKit to manage packages. It’s alpha quality, but basically matches the mockups done by the awesome guys in #gnome-design. It’s designed to be an application management application. GNOME PackageKit lives on for people that know what a package is and want a pointy-clicky GUI, so I’m not interested in showing low level details for power users.

Of course, packages are so 2012. It’s 2013, and people want to play with redistributable things like listaller and glick2 static blobs. People want to play with updating an OS image like ostree and that’s all awesome. Packages are pretty useful in some situations, but we don’t want to limit ourselves to being just another package installer. From a end-user point of view, packages are just an implementation detail.

So, I’ve been designing gnome-software to be pluggable. This means you can write an AppStream plugin to provide things like icons and screenshots for not-yet-installed software. You can write a plugin to ask ostree to update itself, and also a plugin to ask PackageKit to update a specific package. The idea is that we just run all the plugins in parallel when the user opens the dialog, and hide all the gutty details about the application update/install/removal itself. If installing packages falls out of favour we drop the PackageKit plugin, and instead write a plugin for ${distribution_system_of_the_year}.

I’ve done a quick technical outline below:

There are a few sticky issues I’ve not yet solved, like what happens if inksape is installed locally using Glick2 and also installed as a package. I suppose you’d get two entries in the results, and two things to update. Not sure. Ideas welcome.

There’s quite a bit of working code in git, but I didn’t want to write too much until I’d had some feedback from the community. Comments, suggestions and flames very welcome. Thanks.

 

Thomas Petazzoni (front) and Grégory Clement (back) at the Embedded Linux Conference 2013 in San Francisco, discussing ARM Linux kernel issues.

Early last week, version 3.8 of the Linux kernel has been released by Linus Torvalds. The KernelNewbies web site, has, as usual, a great summary of what’s new in this release, together with lots of links to the relevant LWN articles. With 12394 commits, 3.8 has been the busiest ever kernel release cycle, the previous record being held by 2.6.25 with 12243 commits.

Despite this huge activity, Free Electrons has been the 17th most active employer during the 3.8 cycle, with 128 commits merged into the mainline Linux kernel, representing a bit more than 1% of the total number of commits. See the statistics by employer at http://www.remword.com/kps_result/3.8_whole.html and in the traditional LWN article. This puts Free Electrons before Nvidia, Qualcomm, ARM or Oracle in number of commits, and just a few commits behind Freescale. See the Git repository for the list of our contributions.

In detail, Free Electrons contributions for 3.8 have been:

• A large number of contributions related to the support of the Marvell Armada 370 and Armada XP SoCs, done by Grégory Clement and Thomas Petazzoni. Contributions included: a new network driver for the Armada 370 and Armada XP, support for the Armada XP-based OpenBlocks AX3 platform, support for the Armada 370-based Globalscale Mirabox platform, a big number of improvements and Device Tree support for the Marvell XOR engine driver, beginning of Device Tree support for the older Marvell Orion5x SoC family, support for the L2 cache found in Armada 370/XP, clock drivers for Armada 370/XP, SMP support for Armada XP, enabling of SATA on Armada 370/XP platforms.
• The contribution of the initial support for a new SoC family in the mainline Linux kernel: the Allwinner A10 and Allwinner A13 ARM SoCs. This support has been contributed by Maxime Ripard, who has become the maintainer for this new ARM sub-architecture.
• A driver for the I2C-based SSD1304 OLED display, a nice 128×32 pixels monochrome OLED display, contributed by Maxime Ripard.
• A number of improvements in the support for the Crystalfontz i.MX28-based platforms, the CFA10036 and its expansion board the CFA10049. These contributions have also been made by Maxime Ripard.

Through these contributions, Free Electrons have gained a good expertise in support for ARM SoCs and boards inside the Linux kernel. If you are interested in having us help you bring the support of your ARM board or ARM SoC into the mainline Linux kernel, do not hesitate to contact us, you will be directly answered by our engineers doing Linux kernel development!

Do you have a bunch of these errors in your Airbrake, Honeybadger, Ratch… er, Rollbar or whatever’s the trending error reporting app?

1 2 3 4 #123430: ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid in releases # show in production ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: PG::Error: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xd1 0xf0 : INSERT INTO "raw_stats" ("collected_at", "kind", "resource_id", "resource_type", "site_id", "user_agent", "utm_source_id") VALUES ($1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7) RETURNING "id"

I do. And one day, I’ve finally had enough of these bogus reports.

Meet Rack::UTF8Sanitizer! Install it, enable it, and forget about encoding bugs for the rest of your life.

This article was published on our quarterly newsletter.

The Free Electrons team wishes you a Happy New Year for 2013, with success in your professional and personal projects, and in contributing to other people’s lives. We are taking this opportunity to give some news about Free Electrons.

In 2012, Free Electrons continued to work on multiple development projects. The main difference with 2011 is that the projects were much longer. Here are the most important ones:

• Linux kernel code development, adding and maintaining support for Marvell Armada 370 and Armada XP ARM SoCs in the mainline Linux kernel. Months of engineering work! Our commits appear on git.kernel.org.
• Linux kernel code development and toolchain work on a new i.MX28 computer-on-module from Crystalfontz, adding support for this system to the mainline Linux kernel. See the project page on Kickstarter!
• Build system integration, bootloader and kernel driver development, system update mechanism improvements, and general embedded Linux development work.
• Kernel driver development and upstreaming for AT91 analog to digital converters.
• Boot time optimization and power management audit on a MIPS based point of sales terminal
• Boot time reduction project on a ARM based point-of-sales development kit.
• Embedded Linux system integration, development and support.

Through contract work or through direct contributions, 2012 gave us multiple opportunities to contribute to open-source projects, in particular:

• 195 patches to the Linux kernel, plus the ones which have been accepted by maintainers but haven’t been included by Linus Torvalds yet. See git.kernel.org for details.
• 448 patches to the Buildroot build system. See git.buildroot.net for details.
• 9 patches to the U-boot bootloader.
• 7 patches to the Barebox bootloader. See git.penguntronix.de for details.

By the way, here’s the git command that you can run in the corresponding repositories to count the commits by yourself:

git shortlog --no-merges -sn --author "free-electrons.com" --since="01/01/2012" --until="12/31/2012"

We gave multiple sessions of our Embedded Linux system development and Linux kernel and driver development courses. We have also completed migrating our training materials from the Open Document Format to LaTeX, and their sources are now available on our public git server, making it much easier to follow changes and contribute to them.

We also created a new Android system development course and delivered multiple sessions of it. It is a four days training course to understand the Android system architecture, how to build and customize an Android system for a given hardware platform, and how to extend the Android platform to take new hardware devices into account.

As in the previous years, we also gave presentations at international conferences:

• IIO, a new subsystem (FOSDEM, Brussels, February 2012)
• Qt for non graphical apps (FOSDEM, Brussels, February 2012)
• Buildroot: a nice, simple and efficient embedded Linux build system (Embedded Linux Conference, San Francisco, February 2012)
• Buildroot: a nice, simple and efficient embedded Linux build system (Libre Software Meeting, Geneva, July 2012)
• Buildroot workshop (Libre Software Meeting, Geneva, July 2012)
• Linux kernel: consolidation in the ARM architecture support (Libre Software Meeting, Geneva, July 2012)
• A look through the Android stack (Libre Software Meeting, Geneva, July 2012)
• Your new ARM SoC Linux support check-list (Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Barcelona, November 2012)

Also attending these conferences, the Free Electrons team also recorded and published videos of the talks:

• FOSDEM 2012
• Embedded Linux Conference 2012
• Android Builders Summit 2012
• Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2012

Thanks to their contributions to the mainline Linux kernel on the ARM platform, Gregory Clement and Thomas Petazzoni have also been invited to the ARM minisummit at the Linux kernel summit in San Jose in August. They were involved in decision making for the next evolutions of the Linux kernel on the ARM architecture.

We also organized and participated to two “Buildroot developer days” events, one in Brussels in February after Fosdem, and one in Barcelona in November after ELC Europe.

We also continued to participate to the development of the community of Linaro, an engineering organization working on improving Linux on the ARM platform. Note that this involvement is now over, allowing Michael Opdenacker to get back to more technical projects.

Now, let’s talk about our plans for 2013.

We plan to continue to hire more engineers to meet growing demand for our development and training services. In particular, a new engineer is joining us in March.

We are also organizing several public training sessions in France, which dates are now available:

• Android system development, Toulouse, Apr. 2-5 (French)
• Embedded Linux kernel and driver development, Toulouse, Apr. 8-12 (French)
• Embedded Linux system development, Toulouse, Jun. 10-14 (French)
• Embedded Linux kernel and driver development, Avignon, Jun. 10-14
• Android system development, Toulouse, Jun. 18-21
• Embedded Linux system development, Avignon, Oct. 7-11

We also plan to announce several new training sessions. Being very busy with projects in 2012, we haven’t had time to make progress in the plans we announced one year ago:

• Git training. A two day training session to clearly understand how to use the Git distributed version control system, both for internal projects and for contribution to open-source projects.
• Linux kernel debugging, tracing and performance analysis course. A one to two day session to trace kernel execution, investigate bugs and performance issues.
• Boot time reduction training. A one to two day workshop to learn and master the methodology and techniques to make your embedded Linux systems boot faster.

As we are only in the very early stages of planning and preparing these courses, don’t hesitate to take the opportunity to contact us to let us know your expectations and influence their contents, in case you are interested in such courses.

We will also continue to participate to the key technical conferences. In particular, Free Electrons engineers will be present at the Android Builders Summit and the Embedded Linux Conference in San Francisco, and at Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Edinburgh in October. This participation to conferences allows Free Electrons engineers to remain up-to-date with the latest developments in the embedded Linux area and to create useful contacts in the community. Do not hesitate to go to such conferences, develop your technical knowledge and to take the opportunity to meet us there!

Last but not least, we will try harder to really write this newsletter every quarter. In 2012, we were so busy with projects that we didn’t manage to release newsletters for Q3 and Q4.

You can follow Free Electrons news by reading our blog (31 articles in 2012) and by following our quick news on Twitter.

Again, Happy New Year!

The Free Electrons team.

I’ve just purchased a ColorMunki Smile so I can write a native colord driver for the i1 display class of hardware. I’ll base this on the Argyll CMS driver which is also GPLv2+ and this will mean we can get faster and more reliable readings by not spawning /usr/bin/spotread and trying to screen scrape the output. It also means we can support the newer LED backlights in the client UIs, which the smile supports.

Deep Fryer Diaries 1
What is a VCO?

Eric Barry Drasin http://ericbarrydrasin.com has been doing an image processing workshop at Blackhammer Studio. Blackhammer is an Analog Audiovisual Production studio located north of NYC, created and run by Matthew Schlanger.http://www.lumpybanger.com

Eric has been documenting what he has been learning and will be releasing a series of podcasts about Analog Image Processing techniques called the "Deep Fryer Diaries."

Today Matthew Schlanger talks about VCOs, or Voltage Control Oscillators.

http://fastfoodmusicvideo.tumblr.com