Today, I am excited to be playing with a new Nexus one thanks to Qualcomm Innovation Center and Rikki Kite.  This is going to be my second attempt at replacing my constantly crashing Blackberry with a Android based phone.   Last year at OSCON, I came home with a G1 Dev Kit, and while it made a fun phone to hack around on and use while on vacation, I encountered two issues that made it difficult to use day to day.

• Battery Life -  The latest cyanogen mods made this MUCH better, but still not a full day of use on a single charge)
• Little to no exchange support.  No I’m not a freedom hater.  Its just that my employer uses exchange heavily for calendaring and e-mail.  Cyanogen eventually added ActiveSync support with “Work Email”, but it left a bit to be desired.  Touchdown for whatever reason never worked either.

Other than those I loved the phone. The keyboard was great, it made a great phone for Internet use and apps, but my primary use of a phone at this point is email and calendaring for work.  So for anything other than hacking projects, or trips where I wanted to use the data / GPS features I mostly left it sitting on my desk.

So far I’ve been using the Nexus One for about 24 hours.  Having come with FroYo (Android 2.2) I was pleasantly surprised to find it included built in support for both Email and Calendar sync via Exchange’s ActiveSync.  So far most, if not all, of the issues I had with the G1 have been resolved.  The only thing I miss from my Blackberry / Android G1 experience is a real keyboard.  I’m mostly fumbling about on the touch screen still.

Things to try out next / Pending Questions:

• Is the $20 Touchdown app still needed? So far I haven’t used the native ActiveSync support long enough to know if its sufficient. I’m going to stick with it and see what features I’m missing.  It would be nice if someone had a table comparing the two feature sets.
• How to filter what e-mail shows up on my phone. Theres a lot of crap I mean low priority e-mail that I’d prefer to ignore until I get back to my desk.
• Music Sync – Looks like Rhythm Box supports the NexusOne pretty well.  Going to give that a shot later.
• Tethering – I know it can be done. there seems to be a button for it. I just haven’t tried it out with Ubuntu yet. I’m sure it will work.
• Find a decent jabber client for non-gtalk use.

Hoping I’ll be able to stick with this one!

My own team, Production Engineering, has a few spots open at the moment as well.  If you are interested in systems engineering roles focusing on J2EE applications on Linux, systems/application design, and automation they might be worth a closer look.

Also, if you are at OSCON, please drop by the Linux Fund booth on Wednesday for a t-shirt invitation to our 10th Anniversary party, sponsored by Stonehenge, Mindtouch and Kaltura.

Hacking the Open Government
There is currently a renaissance in available data and content from the federal government as well as some state governments. Everyday it seems that some new web site or service makes publicly available over the internet what previously was only accessible on paper or other non-digital format. What does this mean for the hacker, the agitator, the political scientist, and the average internet user?

Additionally, Linux Fund‘s 10 year anniversary will coincide with OSCON. We have therefore decided to celebrate by holding a benefit, with all funds going towards our projects. The party will be held on Wednesday night, just down the street from the convention center. Details to be provided soon.

If you are considering attending, the OSCON team has provided us with the 20% off code “os09fos”.

If you are interested in helping out please drop us a note. We will be on site and in need of assistance on 2/19 – 2/22.

SCALE  will be open 2/20-2/22 in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles Airport Westin Hotel.

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Found this via  Doc Searls, and it gave me a good laugh.

If you submitted a proposal for SCaLE this year, keep an eye on your e-mail inbox!

Last night the SCaLE 7x team met on IRC and went over the final selections for the Call For Papers.  I think everyone will be impressed by this year’s line up.   Sometimes it amazes me how much the quality of the submissions has improved over the years.   Despite all of this we still managed to wrap up at a reasonable hour.

After several rounds of review and discussion on IRC, we managed to narrow down the list of over 150 presentations proposals down to about 50 we will accept.  As usual there was a lot of debate over many of the presentations, and despite having added an additional track this year we still could not fit all the presentations we wanted into the schedule.

Before you ask me for the list of final speakers or if you have been acceptedl I’ll give you fair warning, that there are still a few final details and administrativa to sort out before we announce the selections.  We are however significantly closer now, and if you submitted a proposal this year you should at least be hearing from the CFP team this week with a status update.

One thing I hope we can work on for next year’s event is automate the call for papers submission process with submition forms on the website, rather than using e-mail and our internal wiki.  We did an amazing job with re-writing and improving our registration system last year.  This year we focused on converting the website to drupal, so that maitenance could be more easily spread across the team via workflows.  Next year, I’d really like to see us work on an automated system for proposals similar to what LFNW, OSCON, and ApacheCon have done in recent years.  I’m going to try and blog some notes on features I’d want to see for that webapp in the coming weeks while the ideas are still fresh in my mind.

Anyways, so far SCaLE is looking like it will be extremely exciting this year.  I hope to see you all there.

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Please note that the follow areas are still open for submissions and close on December 31, 2008:

• Women In Open Source (WIOS)
• Open Source in Education (OSSIE)

We also still have a sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities avaialble.  If your organization would like to exhibit at or support this year’s event please drop me a line (sponsorship [at] socallinuxexpo.org).

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