Tuesday, May 17, 2005

MEDC 2005 Wrap-up

Well, MEDC is over – sorry I didn’t post more last week.  For some reason, when I got back to Seattle Friday afternoon I was very tired – might have been the fact that I averaged 4 hours of sleep per night while in Vegas (go figure).

The last day was pretty cool – I volunteered to referee the SumoBot competition, which was won by the lone RC entry from ASU.  We had some cool prizes, including more bots from Parallax, and the final event was very exciting and even attended by Elvis.  Mike Hall has some cool pod cast videos on his site – I’m looking forward to him posting the one of me and Elvis at the SumoBot competition.

This year’s Devcon was probably my last – if you were there, or have read the blog, you know that I’m no longer on the Embedded team, so my chances of going to future Devcon’s will be low.  Sean Liming will be presenting my material on securing XPE devices at the MEDC roadshow in Europe and Asia – the info will be the same, so if you have a chance to go, I urge you to.

One very cool thing we did was during the keynote, which I reported on earlier – a working HORM demo during Bill’s speech.  I have to give thanks to Brad Combs’ XPEFiles – during the development of that device, we discovered that the video driver was not part of XPE as shipped.  We searched XPEFiles and found the driver componentized there – 10 minutes later, we were rebuilding the runtime with the updated driver and within 30 minutes were seeing an 800x600 32–bit color rather than 640x480 in 16 color mode.  Very cool, and my thanks to Brad for running his site.

In other news, there was a recent report on eWeek about a faulty security update, namely MS05–019 (thanks to Andy Allred for bringing this to my attention).  I haven’t heard anything about XPE customers being affected by any aspect of the faults, but we will be handling the re-release in our next regularly scheduled security update package for XPE.

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