Just Another Tech Blog

Many moons ago I posted about a fledgling project seeking to provide fully open graphics cards and drivers to the open source community, and consequently the world. After some separation from the tech world, I have come back and note that this wonderful project has made some brilliant strides! In fact, it has come so far as to now offer pre-orders for their first card, the OGD1. The road hasn't been an easy one:

The OGD1 design has actually been finished for a couple of months now. In that time, we've been chasing a chick-and-egg problem. We can take all the orders we want, but there's as much as an 8-week lead time between when we place our order for 100 boards and when we get them so that we can test and then ship them. It would be inappropriate to charge our own customers until we ship to them. That leaves us with a $60000 bill to pay before we have any revenue, and that's too much for Andy, Howard, and I to float on our own. We didn't want to make a formal announcement for re-orders until we solved this problem.

The card will initially be offered at $1500, with discounts of $100 for the first 100 pre-orders. But who is this card aimed at? Obviously the $1500 price tag is a bit high for the performance offered, so those seeking cutting edge graphics acceleration will have to look elsewhere (Matrox?). Rather, the card is meant for hackers and for those wanting to accelerate the pace of open graphics.

We often get inquiries about the use of OGD1 as a graphics card. It can easily-enough function as a graphics card, but for most such uses, it is badly over-priced. On the other hand, OGD1 is very competitively priced as an FPGA development kit. We need to make it clear what OGD1 is and why buying one is an important step for Free Software.

Check out the full announcement on the project's mailing list or read a bit @ Kernel Trap. Also, be sure to visit the project's wiki.

Everyone loves a good April Fools joke, and this year the BBC came up with one which was quite appealing to the Linux crowd. Since I am particularly partial to penguins, I simply must share this video, be it a week or so old now (live with it, you can never see too many penguins). I'll let the video speak for itself:


However, the true geek will want to know how this was made possible. Of course, "CG" can blurt out of anyones mouth, but I'm sure there was more put into this than just computer graphics. So, I went off to stroll the Internet in search of some behind the scenes footage. Well, leave it to BBC to make my search easy, apparently I wasn't the only one asking questions after having seen this vid. Here's some great "making-of" footage:


But now, what would a great joke be without a parody on it? Leave it to digg to share the most random stuff on the Internets... I recently found this rather nice Linux-themed "improvement" on the original video:


I particularly enjoyed the music on this one. It is well made, almost as though it were always meant to be a Linux commercial.

Well, I hope that these penguins have brightened your day as they have mine today (and for that matter the other 5 days I have watched this vid).

Recently, my trusty 2GB Corsair Flash Voyager died on me when it's head suddenly popped off as I was attempting to use it. It was one of those moments where your whole life just flashes before your eyes... Ok, so maybe it wasn't that bad, and, like all bad things, this rather tragic incident had a quite enjoyable bright side! Namely, I got to buy a new flash drive! Yes, the nerd inside of me is still alive and kicking. I decided to go with the same brand/ model because it had been so good to me for the years of its service, with one "small" upgrade... 4x times the storage :-) Yup, that is 8GB of flash memory goodness in my pocket. Great stuff really, I got it off the 'egg for just $40! That's how much the 2GB model cost a few years ago! It is really crazy how much flash memory prices have gone down.

As one usually is when receiving new hardware/ gadgets, I was rather excited when the drive shipped just 2 days later (I love you newegg). I popped it in my computer and received an interesting surprise. Instead of nautilus opening up, I was greeted by gtkpod. Apparently, the drive was being recognized as a "Digital Audio Player." Annoyed, I set off to find a solution to my problem. Sadly, forums were not much help, but finally I found a post far back in the Ubuntu support forums that quelled my need for an answer.

According to Bug #90286 on launch pad, I was not the only one experiencing these issues. Check out the solution @ the Ubuntu forums.

That worked for me! Now my drive is recognized as a normal USB disk.

I'll include these keywords to aid searchers:

Corsair Flash Voyager Recognized as Digital Audio Player

IMPORTANT UPDATE: I forgot to mention in my original posting that one of my best friends kindly saved my data for me as my flash drive was dying. Using a complex system of holding the drive in place and quickly maneuvering through "My Computer", she managed to save the most essential of my data. Here's to you! :: CHEERS ::