Sun has announced that the Sun Spots are now fully open source. This means that the API as well as the Squawk VM are now fully open. The Squak VM itself is an interesting project. I will be curious to see how it compares against google’s Dalvik VM on small devices (that is whenever google releases or tells us more about Dalvik).

The press release seems to imply that the Sun Spot hardware will also be open source:

The open source release of the versatile Java technology-based Sun SPOT platform will include hardware, software and the Squawk Virtual Machine.

but this is the only mention I see of hardware in the press release and on the several sites dedicated to Sun Spot. I really hope they expand on this and show the world everything that is included in the OSS releases.

If the hardware is Open Source that could make way for some third parties to make their own implementations, similar to the different implementaitons of Arduino. This would be especially welcome given the crazy high cost of a Sun Spot device ($250 or so per device compared with $20-150 depending on configuration for Arduino). Yea, Yea, I know Sun Spot is way awesomer than Arduino, but if I am going to make a little device to attach to the top of a rocket or the under carriage of my skateboard, you better believe I am going to be looking for the cheapest hardware I can find.

looking for something in my office yesterday yielded 11 cards on my desk that were not in any computers. this is probably not good.

My order from Ultimarc came in. I am starting work on a DIY version of one of these, for about 1/10th of the price they charge. It probably won’t look as sweet, or be as powerful, or run windows. but it will run ms pacman and that is all that really matters to me.

My big project for yesterday…

after much pain and frustration…

OSX on a Dell 4700!

I had a lot of issues with the video card and NIC but was able to swap them out with different ones from the pile in the first photo. It runs very fast since it has fast hard drives and a ton of ram. yay!

Also, in apple news. They announced today that they will have an SDK for the iPhone in Feb. This may be enough to get me to buy one. I am tempted to start bringing some of my cocoa libs up to speed with 10.5 now so I can write apps when it comes out. I really want to get off of Windows CE for my phone and this could be awesome. But then again the Nokia N810 looks like it may be even way awesomer. I was kind of hoping Sun would have revived the SavaJe phone by now, but it looks like they are going to be slow and under deliver so I am not going to hold my breath.

In the nice to dream DIY category, there is a company in Australia that sells DIY laser tag kits. Basically they sell all of the electronics, you make the guns. It means that you can make a custom gun for about $300-$500 rather than pay the $3k-$4k for the other pro systems out there. The only problem is that even though I’m willing to pay that much for a gun, I don’t know if enough other people would be willing to in order to get a proper game going. I would maybe even make two, but I think it takes six people at least to have a good game. I’ll keep it in the back of my mind for next summer.