ervin's piece of web

Of course, we had parties during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Quite a few of them… And obviously we had some casualities. Most notably Alexis couldn’t handle it all:

So Alexis, is that what you’re doing while you pretend working?

One of my good memories from this year Akademy will be about Glyn Moody’s keynote. I admit I was a bit skeptical at first with the title:

It could sound like a somehow arrogant way of seeing the hacker community… Except that Glyn has an outsider point of view primarily beeing a journalist. And as a good journalist he gave us facts, simply about what already happened (the genome sequencing example was particularly inspiring as free software saved the day there), and how the free software movement influenced other movements. It looks like a snow ball effect leading us toward more sharing and less egoism. I think that most of us started contributing to free software out of some sort of optimism and because we’re aiming at some utopia. Along the way we might loose hope, and not have the idealism in mind anymore simply trying to see free software have more market shares, etc.

Thanks a lot Glyn for reminding us why we started contributing at all, and for all the hope you gave us by simply showing that free software is already making a difference in this world.

Those who know me also know that because of both my research career and my free software involvement I attended a lot of conferences and talks. And I really mean a lot. Still, I had to wait for the very first keynote of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit to attend the finest, and brightest talk I ever attended.

It was very rich, didn’t simply stick to the technical side of things but got deep into various fields, most notably philosophy. Of course the speaker deserves credit. So if you see this man giving a talk near you:

Simply run and attend his talk. He’s also a very nice person, and since he uses free software, he probably matches perfectly his own quote from his keynote (which is getting famous):

Liberal software is software which a gentleman would use.

Bad, bad ervin! I didn’t blog during this year Akademy while I usually do it. So this year I’ll try to post a few “after the facts” blogs, and I’ll call this short serie “Memories of Akademy 2009″.

OK, I didn’t blog, but this year I took pictures, and I uploaded them to my almost brand new SmugMug gallery. Go get them!

As usual, long time without blogging from me. A lot happened since the last time, but I’m too tired (and probably lazy) to write about it now. Some of it will be covered in my talks for Akademy 2009.

Of course, Air being almost out of the door we deserve a new updated LaTeX beamer template. Since I wrote the Oxygen template, I decided to produce a new one based on the great work from Nuno. As usual I’m providing a tarball with the template, and you can take a look at an example presentation

And tomorrow morning, very early, I’ll meet some more gearheads from Toulouse, and we’ll take the plane for Gran Canaria. Looking forward to it! See you all in Las Palmas.

OK, that was really short, I’ll try to blog more during the conference. I swear!

This year Akademy was a real blast. For the first time I didn’t feel like blogging during the event though, we had a pretty good coverage on PlanetKDE and the Dot anyway. I really wanted to enjoy the people while there.

That’s why, I’m just blogging a list of my thoughts about Akademy 2008 (in no particular order):

• It was the best Akademy so far, no less. The program was pretty good, the organization team did an amazing job… Congrats everyone!
• The network was unfortunately sloppy at times, more than last year I think.
• I got the best conference swag ever: a tea cup. It’s been made by our Korean team, it’s gorgeous, it’s hand made. Definitely the best present for a conference. You guys rock!
• I didn’t get much done hacking wise (my last hardcore geek Akademy was in Dublin), but I socialized a lot more and attended quite a lot of BoF.
• I’m really looking forward to see some of the discussions which happened during the conference to come to fruition. In particular regarding the release management, good stuff to come.
• Once again we had a few students from Toulouse. One from last year even came back by himself. I think the efforts in my University are slowly creating a nest of KDE hackers.
• The team humongous has been humongous (as expected). I hope I’ll get the same room mates next year, it was really great.
• Ade is a very good story teller… Now I really miss my bedtime stories involving dinosaurs, minority operating systems and flying warfare.

Of course, as a proud member of the team humongous I have to use this banner:

Now I’m experiencing the post-Akademy blues as usual. I miss you all already! See you next year!

PS: I have lots of pictures… The problem being that with a higher resolution camera I’m now stuck on how to host them online. Maybe I should upgrade to a FlickR Pro account. I’m not sure if it’s worth the money…

As you might remember, I offered a drink to some of the people submitting talks for Akademy 2008.

I know the schedule is not online yet, but to help you wait a bit I’m going to announce the
Winners of the Akademy 2008 Drink Awards!

So the following people met the criteria of submission order and quality for their proposals, which give them the privilege to be on my final list. Please applaude this year winners:

• Paul Adams
• Harald Fernengel
• Celeste Lyn Paul
• Patrick Spendrin
• Thomas Baumgart
• Sebastian Kügler and Dirk Mueller (they submitted a joint talk, but I’ll be nice and let them have a full drink each… could have been fun seeing them with only one glass to share though)

Feel free to poke me during Akademy for your offered drink. It’ll be my pleasure to get something nice and refreshing for you.

Of course, the mandatory banner:

PS: Now, I’m sure I would make a crappy host for the Oscars…

In case you forgot, the deadline for Akademy 2008 CfP is in two days… yes, May 1st is coming quickly now! If you haven’t submitted your abstract yet please don’t wait for the last minute. Moreover, every year, after the CfP is over, I find people who should have submitted but didn’t because they think what they do is boring. It’s just plain wrong.

That’s why, I’d like to remind everyone: Yes, what you’re doing is interesting. No kidding.

Since people need incentives to submit their interesting abstracts, here is the deal: The first two talks to be accepted this year will get a drink from me. After that, each of the 2^n-th talks which get accepted (so no need to rush crappy proposals) will also get a drink from me (that is the 4th, 8th, 16th and 32th since we generally accept no more than 50 talks).

Submit now, you might get a free drink.

We (Alexis, David, Florian, Thibault and me) left the hostel early to avoid troubles at the airport. Since we’ve been told the security was raised there it looked wise to be on the safe side. It turned out that we arrived there too early and couldn’t even check in. So we had to wait…

After the check in, everything went well: short time at the security check point, plane (almost) on time, run for the connection in Amsterdam, wait 20 minutes… We reached Toulouse airport in time: 10:15pm. Good, it was much more pleasant than our previous experience. No baggage was lost or hurt in the operation.

Finally at home! Great!

And this morning, back in the lab at 7:20am as usual…

Today was the last official day of the conference. But apparently, the security guards decided differently. We had a hard time getting into the building for hacking. We had to wait until 9:30am. The almighty Kenny Duffus helped solve the issue and that’s how we got access.

We basically spent the day hacking as more people left. And soon the labs were looking more and more empty. After lunch, I got outside with David for some shopping. And then got back to the labs as soon as possible for more hacking.

Since we were supposed to leave the labs early today, we left at 5:30pm and went to the hostel for more hacking there. Finally, we went in an italian restaurant for dinner. The food was fine, maybe a bit too salty for my taste.

And we’re again in the hostel enjoying the unreliable wifi connection as I’m typing this. Tomorrow will basically be devoted to going to the airport and waiting for our flight. We’ll probably cross our fingers hoping everything will be ok this time.