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.

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

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.