Blogs

The latest Yocto Project release hits the streets today: Yocto Project 1.2. This is the project's standard biannual release, and it includes many bug fixes and features. The new features are described in the release notes, but there are a few important ones to note:

If you're a geek like me, you might find yourself watching some science fiction movie or show and wondering "why is it that we have no problem talking to extraterrestrials?" Sure, a wookie on Star Wars may speak some strange tongue, but the humans all seem to understand wookie and Chewbaca can understand human really well. How can this be possible?

After a dose of warmer weather, those of us on the west coast of the US are experiencing a return to winter for a little while. Strange how I can have a talk with folks like Tom Zanussi who are suffering from 80 degree (F) heat in Chicago or BIll Mills in Maryland while my poor toes are turning blue from the cold. Boo hoo, I know. Portland is pretty close to paradise for me as a place to live, but there are moments when it gets just a bit rainy.

I sat down this morning to jot down a few words about the latest Yocto Project development milestone, which has the very homely name of "M2". We pause at this time to branch our code, run a full pass of our QA suite and make sure we are on track with major features. (This is all good by the way).

As the calendar year winds down, I find myself tapping away at the keyboard at my sister's house in Denver, Colorado in a snowstorm. I just spent the morning digging out our rental car and shoveling my sister's driveway and her next-door neighbors. It is a time like this to reflect and, yes, to remember that one of the reasons I moved to Portland, Oregon was to escape the snow!

This has been a busy month in the Yocto Project, with all kinds of activity jumping along:

These videos were shown at the Embedded Linux Conference / LinuxCon in Prague, CZ in October. Enjoy!

I've noticed a disturbing trend amongst a few of the high quality wineries in my state. They have abandoned the cork to close their high-end wine bottles and turned to screw caps.

This is good news to people who struggle with how to get a cork out of a wine bottle. And wine snobs will point to the countless studies which show that metal tops eliminates the possibility that the cork has gone bad and spoiled the wine.

Much has been written about how the Internet has revolutionized collaboration and made it possible for your brilliant ideas to make a difference no matter where you live on the planet. Bill Gates is famously quoted in Nick Kristoff's "The World is Flat" that "... so many people can plug and play from anywhere, natural talent has started to trump geography." This is of course true, but even with the Internet, there is no replacement for face-to-face interaction.

For the last 18 months or so I've been working full-time on the Yocto Project, where I've touched various parts of the system. I'm really proud of what our team has achieved - we have an amazing tool that people want to use! Despite that, there are still some common tasks that users can't achieve as easily as we'd like...