As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ll be moving back to Berlin at the end of May. Making the move has become even more exciting after learning that I’ve been chosen as one of the new trainees for Openismus. Since Murray has made the announcement, I thought I’d introduce myself to the community.

First of all, I should state that I’m American despite what the umlaut in my last name would suggest. My last name was Wilson before taking my wife’s last name just before our daughter, Vada, was born a couple years ago. I met my wife in Berlin and am very familiar with the city, having lived there from October ’99 until late 2005. I love Berlin and am excited to be moving back.

In a few weeks I’ll be graduating with a BS in Computer Engineering from San Diego State University. While in school I interned at a small company programming mostly in C++. I learned a lot from my work there but feel like I’ve got lots more to learn.

I’ve been a long time GNOME user after being converted from KDE at about the 2.4 release. Before starting school I’d occasionally submit bugs for Ubuntu and GNOME. I even attended GUADEC in Stuttgart where I met lots of interesting folks and got really inspired. But, alas, school started and free time vanished. We then sprouted a family which is a timesink, but such a wonderful one. Having a chance to learn and contribute on the job is a chance I couldn’t pass up.

I’m very much looking forward to the opportunity that I’m getting at Openismus to learn about and contribute to the projects I’ve been following so closely for so long.

Thanks Murray and Openismus.

Annika and I just got back from Conan O’Brien‘s stop in San Diego at the San Diego Civic Theatre. It was heaps of fun. Would have been even more fun if we hadn’t been in the nosebleed seats – last row of the Balcony. I’ve never been in a theater that was so vertically oriented. It felt like being in a basketball arena – extremely steep. Nevertheless, we could still make out what the small characters on stage were doing.

Conan was always my favorite late night talk show host when I used to actually watch TV. I think his show will be better on cable where he can go even further with his brand of humor.

• Earliest flight from #LA to #Paris on #airfrance was 30/4 as of 20/4. Told to try standby daily. 5hr round trip from SD not going to happen. #
• At LAX yesterday to help father-in-law rebook cancelled flight. #airfrance refused hotel being it's an act of god. Is this right? I say no. #

• Engadget has some screenshots of the #MeeGo UI. Looks attractive. http://bit.ly/awOmvH #
• Got my graduation tickets yesterday and black gown and orange tassel today. 5 weeks and I'm finished. In about 6 weeks I'm in Berlin. #
• When adding Q_OBJECT to a class in QT4, one may get a undefined vtable error. Cleaning and rerunning qmake may fix this. uhg. #
• Great! Qt4 and templates don't play well together. That was a good amount of time wasted to find out. #

In order to graduate from the Engineering program at San Diego State University, each student needs to complete a senior design project with a team of between 6 to 10 students. The group that I’m apart of is working on building a system to localize nodes in a wireless sensor network (WSN). We do this by using signal strength and, when nodes are in line of sight of each other, ultrasonic transducers to measure the time difference of the received ultrasonic signal and the radio signal. This is a problem that has been tackled many times and I’m pretty sure we won’t be able to come up with anything novel in the short time we have, but the task of building the working system is what is important.

Partially populated prototype board

I’m in charge of building the GUI and integrating the software side of the system. For the GUI I’m using Qt. I’ve used this before and found it pleasant enough although I still run into issues that cause me to waste more time than I’d like. The most important thing for me was that Qt is cross-platform and has great documentation. Having some high-profile applications such as Google Earth and Skype using it makes it easier to “sell” to the other team members as well.

For the WSN we chose Atmel Zigbit modules. These have a ZigBee wireless chip and an ATMEGA128 microcontroller embedded within. This module was chosen because much of the difficult circuitry was taken care of, previous good experiences with AVRs, and the low-cost of the hardware and development tools. Thus far we’ve created custom PCB’s to hold the Zigbit modules, a pair of ultrasonic transducers, and the accompanying circuitry. We are currently testing those so that we can get about 20 boards professionally made.

We’ve got less than a month to finish up and are working feverishly to get everything brought together and integrated. With luck we’ll have a working system in a couple of weeks.

• In the name of procrastination I just installed Gnome Shell. First impressions are positive. Let's see how it plays out with some usage. #
• My Nexus One's screen is kaput. There seems to be fine cracks under the top layer. It is dark purple and unreadable. No idea what happened. #
• Earthquake caused quite a bit of shaking at our apartment. First one I've ever felt. After the recent earthquakes it's kind of scary. #

• After months of my daughter, Vada, calling both my wife and myself "Mama", she finally started calling me "Papa." That feels good. #