ervin's piece of web

I attended FOSDEM 2007 this week-end. It was my first time there, it’s really a great event. It looks a bit like a system at the edge of chaos… but it self-organizes correctly. There’s always something happening because of an insane amount of talks. It’s even a bit frustrating at times because you definitely can attend only a few talks. Which means you have to choose very carefully… I admit I was disappointed by two really bad talks but no big deal.

Particularly interesting was the OpenMoko talk. I’d say it’s nothing ground breaking on the technical side, but it looks great from a business model perspective… Definitely looks like a tempting cell phone for hackers.

Also amazing was the attendance during the KDE 4 talk. The room was just full, it was difficult to find a seat. Jos Poortvliet did a very good job at summarizing the current state of the matter. Keep up the good work Jos!

Apart from the talks, FOSDEM has proven to be just great for socializing. It’s great to meet known friends again, to put faces on people you only know from IRC or mail, and new people. That’s probably the best advantage of FOSDEM, a lot of different projects are present there, so it’s really easy to discuss with them. The cross-desktop and education sessions just showed it.

Since a few months, we try to setup a hacking session per month with my friends from the IPSquad. Of course, we have no problem having “outsiders” (I don’t really like the term since we’re not a closed group) participating, and that’s how Philippe joined us a couple of times.

For this month I had an idea: What about proposing the students working on KPlato and Umbrello to join us? It’s definitely better to work in groups like this. You can do more in less time and feel part of the family. Monthly hacking sessions like this are a perfect way to share the fun. So we did it yesterday. Not all of the students involved in the projects joined, but a few of them showed a real interest and were able to attend. Since it was a bigger group than usual I had to find a place. Luckily, we’ve been able to use a room of the University which was just the perfect location (most of the students living nearby). We had also the nice surprise to have annma join us. To all the people involved: Thank you a lot for your presence!

February group (from left to right): Florian Longueteau, Philippe David, Anne-Marie Mahfouf, Caroline Bourdeu d’Aguerre, Hassan Kouch, Florence Mattler, Frédéric Lambert, Florian Piquemal, Thibault Normand.

Of course, no hacking session is perfect without food and a compile cluster. We had plenty of food, but for the cluster we had to install icecream on most of the computers (it was already setup only on three of them). But once everybody got it running we obtained a really nice ten nodes cluster:

Fellow hackers, food, and a compile cluster… It was just a perfect saturday!

aKademy 2007 is slowly coming. stop.

It will be in the nice city of Glasgow. stop.

A Call for Participation has been published more than a month ago. stop.

You can Submit Talks until 14th February 2007. stop.

You surely have something interesting to say so Just Do It Now! stop.

Of course you have something interesting to say! stop.

Konqui wants you for aKademy 2007. stop.