Workshop in Taipei
THE CREW One of the best teams I’ve ever worked in.
After more than a year working on our top-secret project at ITRI time has time to reveal it. Our company has organized a workshop in which many prominent companies such as Canonical, AMD, Dell, and many others participated. So we have created some cool product for ARM server boards.
The workshop was taking place in Daan district in Taipei, which is quite near Taipei 101 building. As it was strating early Monday I decided to come to Taipei Sunday’s evening and stayed in a hostel. The price was pretty cheap, which keeps me surprising but I should finally get used to the cheap prices in Taiwan. It was only 10 USD/night anyway.
I woke at 6AM on Monday and still had couple of hours before start of our workshop. I wished I could go for a morning jog, but I did not have running shoes with me. Instead, I went to McDonalds (oh yes, I am loving it 
and got few pancakes. Then I spent some time looking for a Russian restaurant to which we were going to go after workshop, but I could not find it, so in the evening we ended up in an American restaurant called Diner.
Then at 8 AM people started coming in, and I helped with arranging tables, etc. On the picture above you can see YF Yuan, our deputy-director who was responsible for this workshop. He was irresistable host. People really like him.
Then we heard the rumor that Mark Shuttleworth migth be visiting us! What an exciting piece of news! Mark became world-famous in 2002 when he went to space as tourist. Obviously, his appearance was not planned in this event. We simply could not dare to expect such a mega-star in our humble event. But he did come and gave a short speech about Ubuntu ARM project. Everybody was very excitied by this unexpected visit!
And I did shake hands with him
MARK SHUTTLEWORTH. Space tourist #2 and founder of Ubuntu.com
Things went on smoothly. I presented our stuff. In fact, we shared 1-hour time slot with people from Virtualopensystems.com. They are small start-up focusing on Cortex-A15 hypervisor, whereas we still focus on Cortex-A9. The advantage of our approach is that it already works, while Cortex-A15 people are still playing with simulator.
After the workshop was over we decided to go to a restaurant. Restaurants in Taipei can be notoriously expensive. That’s why our secretary Phoebe told us earlier that we could spend only 400 NTD per person (around 10 USD). Boy, for that amount of money you can get only 1 sandwitch. So, we took a couple of senior managers with us, and went to a notoriously expensive American restaurant. Well, the guys were polite, so each of them spent only around 1500 NTD That amount of money can buy foods for half a month in ITRI’s cafeteria, and we spent it in just a couple of hours.
But everybody enjoyed that evening. We were glad that our month-long preparation for workshop was over, and it was kind of success. I feel happy that our work seems relevant and interesting to many companies in Taiwan and abroad. Few people have already reqeusted our source code, even though we still want to keep our project close-sourced. Still, we are likely to make more releases, and maybe sell our technology to some bigger company. We will see.