Day: November 13, 2006

This is one of those, “I gotta get one” things! A T-Shirt that you can wear that actually allows your “air guitar” playing to generate sound. Whoa!

Australian air guitar T-shirt actually rocks

Australian scientists have invented a T-shirt that allows air guitarists to play actual music as they strum the air. The T-shirt, created by scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), is called a ‘wearable instrument shirt.’ The shirt has censors in each elbow and sleeves to detect and interpret the air guitarist’s arm movements — one arm chooses chords and the other strums imaginary strings. The gestures are then connected wirelessly to guitar audio samples to generate the music. ‘It’s an easy to use, virtual instrument that allows real time music making, even by players without significant musical or computing skills,’ said CSIRO engineer Richard Helmer. ‘It allows you to jump around and the sound generated is just like an original mp3,’ Helmer said in a statement on Monday.”

Well, it has happened! Sun Microsystems announced that it is releasing all of Java under the GPL! Wow!

Sun Pours Out Java Cup

“Sun on Nov. 13 released at www.sun.com/java all versions of Java—Standard, Enterprise and Micro Edition—under GNU GPL (General Public License) Version 2.0. Sun will maintain its commercial license and its CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) in a multiple-license menu for certain customers that have already built systems based on previous contracts. ‘This undoubtedly is the largest single open-source contribution in the history of IT,’ Rich Green, executive vice president of software for Sun, said in an interview here. ‘It’s the mental final step for Sun and Java.'”

The next release of Ubuntu is already under development. And, this time they are concentrating on user experience more than “back end” development.

Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Release Dates

Mark Shuttleworth says of “Feisty”: “The main themes for development in this release will be improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end server market, and an aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies. Ubuntu’s Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release for both users and developers. Edgy has been a wild ride, with some remarkable achievements (nothing like re-inventing and substantially improving on init!) Feisty will be a little more focused on features that are very visible to end-users.”