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As I'm sure you all know by now, BeGeistert 15 will take place in Duisburg on the October 8th/9th weekend, less than a month away (I'm good with Math). If you're planning to attend, and if you've never been there I can assure you it's TONS of fun, don't forget you have to register in advance, which makes the organizer's lifes much, much easier, in terms of booking rooms etc.

So head over there, register and help make the 15th one the best BeGeistert evah! Even if I'm not there this time... :)

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PalmSource has just announced that ACCESS Co., Ltd. has acquired them for approximately USD $324,3 million.

ACCESS is not new on the Palm operating system, as it has been delivering the NetFront browser to the platform. With the acquisition, ACCESS gains operating system platform expertise and Linux development resources for mobile devices in the U.S., France and China.

You can read the full press release here.

Update: It seems like Access was looking for a way to expand the market for their cellphone browser (which is currently used by many of DoCoMo?s FOMA 3G phones), and since both Symbian and Windows Mobile both are more or less closed off to them they?ve decided that they needed to have their own operating system.

NetFront is a full featured browser that also supports Java, javascript 1.5, SSL/TSL, cookies, CSS, XHTML/HTML, as well as other advanced Web features. The browser allows you to open multiple windows, and it can handle web pages encoded in Japanese as well as English.

For those of you that have one of the latest Sharp Zaurus models, you will be familiar with the NetFront browser already. Earlier models were equipted with the Opera browser. I'm the owner of a Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000, and the NetFront browser included offers a near-desktop browsing experience. NetFront also came bundled with all Sony Clies running Palm OS Garnet. The browser is also available for Series 60 and PocketPC. The PocketPC version also supports Macromedia Flash. Hold on, cause the supported platform list doesn't stop here. Well, it's back to Sony again. Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. chose NetFront as their browser for their Playstation Portable, which is one of the most popular gadgets at the moment.

One thing is sure, the upcoming Linux-based PalmOS will have an greatly improved user experience when it comes to accessing information on the Internet.

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This comment was posted by zenja over at BeBits:

How to make BeOS port of QEMU the best in the world - you need 3(4) bored developers and 1 weekend. (Assumption - guest OS is Windows, but can easily be MacOSX when it comes out).

Developer 1
Makes BeOS GUI frontend for QEMU. Simple things like select image file, cdrom mountpoints, boot disk, enable CD, memory limit etc. Store settings in config/settings.

Developer 2
Develop BeOS server which polls once a second and checks for clipboard updates. Listens for connections on network port (ie. 40010). Develop Windows client which connects to BeOS server (through guest OS network port of 10.0.2.2). Client receives messages from Server, updates Windows clipboard whenever BeOS clipboard changes. Also, client polls windows clipboard every second and sends message to BeOS server when clipboard changes. BeOS server copies network copy of clipboard into BeOS clipboard. Taa-daa, you now have sharing clipboards between Windows guest OS and BeOS Host(this is how Virtual PC on MacOS shares clipboards with Windows). Developer 3
Ports TinyFTP (or any other really small FTP program) to BeOS. Windows guest OS connects via 10.0.2.2 to TinyFTP running under BeOS. Easy file sharing between guest OS and BeOS. This is probably the easist way share files, since the image file is probably NTFS.

(Optional developer 4)
Modify source code of QEMU for BeOS so that instead of accepting QEMU console input (ctrl-alt-2), it interfaces with the BeOS GUI frontend. This way saving a live session is one click away, and loading into a saved session is also one click away. Makes booting into Windows a 1 second afair.

If we (as a community) can do this, then I'm positive that the BeOS port of QEMU will be the best available, even going as far as suggesting that Fabrice Bellard (the creator of QEMU) might consider porting KQEMU extensions to BeOS himself, since the BeOS version is the most feature filled.

I'm volunteering to spend this weekend on doing Task number 2. Any other takers?

Can we do it?

Is there anyone out there to meet the challange? And just as important, would Michael Lotz be willing to spend more time on the QEMU port to bring it up to this level?

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The last Wesnoth released on BeBits so far is 0.8.5, and that was back in October last year. Development on Wesnoth on the other hand never stopped (including the BeOS package, which while not published on BeBits has been available from the game's page, with every new version), and the development team is getting close to releasing Wesnoth 1.0. August 28 they released version 0.9.6, a release that mainly contains bugfixes, but also new portraits for lots of units and, of course, translation updates.

The great news is that the latest release is also available for BeOS/ZETA users from the project's download section.

As stated on the game's download page over at BeBits, you will need the latest libpak to play the game. That's not entirely true. Of course the whole package is not required. ZETA users will for instance only need to install the libintl file from the package. Enjoy the game!

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I guess that I am one of the few that actually have had the chance to test both the old and the new video editing systems from Edirol. They are state of the art, and really shows us what a great MediaOS BeOS actually was and still is.

VideoSystems reviewed the Edirol PR-80 for their July edition, and has made the whole review available online.

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yellowTAB has just announced that they will be one of the sponsors of this year's Open Source Conference 2005 Tokyo/Fall. The conference will be held at the Japan Electronics College on September 17th.

yellowTAB will be giving two presentations: "The 90 minutes ZETA technical seminar for developers is scheduled to be held from 10:30AM (track 7A-1), and will be given by Senior Development Engineer Bruno G. Albuquerque, also known as the team leader of the open source OpenBFS file system. Jorge G. Mare from will be in charge of the ZETA 1.0 primer, which will be held from 1:00PM (track 7A-2). All attendees will receive a ZETA Demo CD."

Attendance is free to everyone wishing to be there, but registration is required, and you can do so at the Conference's site. For the full press release, read yT's announcement.

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I today finished the QEMU port for BeOS I started some time ago. After having giving up on it numerous times before, I now managed to finally get it running. It is using SDL and runs Haiku, as you can see on this screenshot. A BeBits release will follow in the next few days.

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yellowTAB has announced last night the immediate availability of the (growing) ZETA API documentation. They are using Doxygen to work on the documentation, which will allow them to make it available in several formats, including html and pdf, among others.

yT's CTO Alan Westbrook had this to say: "We are currently busy working on new documentation based on the wonderful Doxygen system. In the meantime, we are putting this resource up on our website, so that developers can make suggestions and use some of the more useful features of being able to browse the class heirarchy and object relations."

Click the first link for the full press release.

[Ed. note: Thanks to those who submitted this news piece to ICO. It's great to see the readers participating.]

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Coder Teknomancer (also the guy behind Beezer) is working on an app called Zenverter (name will change), which is, as I'm sure you've guessed by the name, an unit converting application. Zenverter is a rewrite of BeConverter and according to him, work is moving along at a nice pace. While BeConverter could work with around 300 units, Zenverter will have over 1200, quite the leap.

As I know you (and I) all love screenshots, you voyeurs you, here's one for your pleasure.

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yellowTAB announced last night their presence at last week's Game Convention, held at Leipzig, four years in a row. Here's part of their announcement:
Many companies expressed considerable interest either to develop for ZETA or port their games to it. ZETA's compact and powerful architecture is the ideal platform for computer games. In addition discussions were held with many well-known distributors and resellers regarding co-operation in marketing ZETA.

The trade fair finished on 21st August with a record number of visitors. Along with the majority of visitors and exhibitors, yellowTAB was very happy with the trade fair and is already looking forward to the next Games Convention in 2006.
It's always good for a company to increase their visibility and in yT's case, that stays true. Let's see what this can bring our platform, as gaming (and gamers) is one of the computer's industrie's main "drivers".