ervin’s piece of web

I was still at home, that the trip was looking bad already. Around one hour before leaving I felt sick and had stomach ache… Just perfect, a plane is a so lovely place to feel bad. But well, I wasn’t bad enough to skip this!

As planned, I met up with Anne-Marie, Alexis, Florian and Thibault to take our flight. Check-in went smoothly, we embarked… and waited… and waited… until the pilot told us we had a small problem with one engine. So, we waited even more… until they asked us to disembark. Fine, so we’re back in the airport, it looked like will miss our connection.

After one more hour waiting to know if the flight would be cancelled or not (which would mean we’d still be in Toulouse as I’m writing this), they managed to repair the problem (the right engine was leaking fuel). So we embarked again, and waited for a new window to take off… fine you get used to waiting I guess. And finally we took off, twenty minutes before the time we’re supposed to embark in our connection at Amsterdam. So now, for sure we’re going to miss it.

Eventually we arrive in Amsterdam, which probably prove the leak was really repaired. We rush to the transfer desk… and… wait, of course! When it’s our turn, we get the following deal: three of us (Florian, Thibault and me) are booked on the next flight to Glasgow at 9pm (our was supposed to take off at 3:30pm), two of us (Anne-Marie and Alexis) are booked on the next Edimburg flight at 10pm then the airline will pay for a taxi to Glasgow. Ok, fair enough… at least will be in our beds in Glasgow.

So we waited our new flights… 8:15pm came we’re going to embark for the Glasgow flight at last! We’re even feeling a bit more lucky as we met Thiago, sharing the flight with him looked like good omen. Unfortunately, we still have surprises coming… at the last minute, Florian wasn’t allowed to embark, we got overbooked and he got sacrified on the austel of low prices. He’s told to try his luck with the Edimburg flight.

Thiago, Thibault and me got in the plane. Thibault got executive class, nice. We waited… and waited… until the pilot announced that there’s a problem with the plane. Yes, again! Another plane, another issue. The good thing is that we were able to call Florian to check how it’s going for him. Unfortunately, no Edimburg plane for him, it was full too. So he’s staying in Amsterdam for the night.

And of course he needed his baggage, and I noticed that I lost his baggage number… So we’d no idea if he’d be able to get it back. I was really feeling bad about this… Luckily when we arrived in Glasgow, Thiago had a voicemail on his cellphone from Florian. Apparently they found a solution for his bagage.

So all in all we got to Glasgow, in three separate planes and a taxi, one have travelled for 24h… and the minimum delay was for Thibault and me, we had “only” a 6 hours delay. But, yeah we were all lucky, despite the convoluted trip, no bagage got lost.

Tomorrow is the official opening of the aKademy conference in Glasgow. Once again I’ll be there, and I’m really looking forward to meet the community as usual. I know a few people I appreciate won’t be there this year, I’ll miss them of course.

But this year is a bit special: for the first time I won’t travel alone from Toulouse. Of course, Cyrille left yesterday, but this time I’m travelling with our favorite annma and three of my former students who worked on the KDE projects I organized in my University. It’s a great opportunity for them to meet the community for the first time, and maybe get more involved in the project for a longer period. Some of them already worked on a couple of things apart for the official University projects, and the other ones have already a few ideas they probably want to share.

If you add to that, the great programme, the Edu & School day, the Tutorial day and social events, it’ll be once again a very content rich and friendly conference.

I’m packed, hopefully I forgot nothing. I’ve already a few items on my TODO… And now I’m waiting to get my plane. Looking forward to see you there!

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.

I’m now back home for a few hours already. This week was great, but it always feel good to be at home. Moreover I had a very nice woman waiting for me at the airport, great motivation to come back.

This year aKademy was really great, I really enjoyed being there. I’d like to thanks (in no particular order):

• Marcus Furlong, for being insane enough to organize aKademy;
• Tink Bastian, who put a lot of work to make this event a success;
• The sponsors, for helping to make it happen;
• Peter Simonsson, for being such a nice guy;
• Aaron Seigo, for his craziness;
• Sebastian Klüger, for his ability to kick asses;
• Adriaan de Groot, for the room sharing;
• David Faure, for his wisdom;
• Pradeepto Bhattacharya, for his sympathy and compassion;
• Will Stephenson, because he rocks;
• Kenneth Wimer, for being Kenneth Wimer (it’s always a pleasure to meet you);
• Michaël Larouche, for wearing Iron Maiden T-Shirts (damn, I should have taken mines :-p);
• Jonathan Riddell, for being the best minutes writer in the world;
• The attendance and the speakers, because they’re the ones who make aKademy such a precious event;
• The whole community, I’m really proud to have the privilege to work with so brilliant people.

I’m looking forward to meet all of you again!

Today is officially the last day of aKademy 2006. As usual I’m staying until the last minute, which means that my plane is tomorrow morning at 7am. That also means that I’ll have to get up very early! Maybe I should change my plan and try to avoid sleeping this night.

It’s always a bit sad to see people leaving… But that’s to be able to meet and have fun again next year.

The biggest event for me today is that I switched to zsh after being a bash user for years. I doubt I’ll go back to bash one day. Zsh is really awesome, I’ll probably find a few more things to tune but it’s already quite interesting. Thanks a lot to Sebas for providing me an initial set of configuration files, it helped the transition.

I also shamelessly rebuilt my whole KDE trunk installation (and abused the icecream cluster) to have an organization similar to the one proposed by David in his talk about KDE 4 Development Setup. It makes a lot of thing more convenient and less time consuming. A lot of great tips in there, I strongly advise everyone to take a look at his how-to as soon as it’ll be made available.

That’s all for today, I’ll probably go back to the hostel soon now in order to enjoy the presence of the remaining people.

Today we finally made the Solid libraries enter kdelibs! That means that a most of the milestones of the roadmap are done. Now it’s mostly about polishing, writing more backends, and making use of it in applications. It couldn’t have been achieved without the help of Will Stephenson who mastered most of the network management classes all by himself. I’d like also to thank Laurent Montel who gaves a few advices related to the build system during the merge, and Dirk Mueller who already made a few pedantic cleanups on the code base.

After this achievement, I finally took some time to walk downtown with Peter. Dublin is really a nice city, I really enjoyed what I saw. We passed by the Saint Andrew’s Church which has an interesting architecture. This church somehow summarize this town quite well. It’s very old, and that’s what you notice first, but if you come closer you’ll see that on the inside it’s been renovated in a really modern way. Dublin is like this, it looks both old and modern.

We stopped by the Saint Stephen’s Green Park, walked a bit and sat on a bench. It’s a really nice a peaceful place. That’s actually interesting to look at people in this kind of place. Parents and children playing together, couples walking, people simply chatting… that’s really refreshing. We’re really lucky to have the opportunity to appreciate moments like this. Interestingly, a couple of elder people stopped by a bench next to the one we were sitting and started to sing together. It sounded like a very old and melancholic song. Precious moments…

After the successive refactorings of the next few days, it’s time to get ready for merging in kdelibs. So today I spent almost all my time finishing the refactorings, documenting and reviewing the API. In the meantime Will was working on the fake backend for network management. I also gave a hand at it.

I took a break since API documenting can quickly become boring. And I attended Sebas’ BoF on marketing. Quite a few interesting ideas…

Tomorrow we’ll concentrate on unit tests. Once they are ready, we’ll finally be able to move Solid in kdelibs!

Mental note: I should really try to find some time to visit the city center. I’ll surely go with Ken and Peter tomorrow afternoon.

Already the second day of the coding marathon. I didn’t attend many BoF and talks this time. I concentrated much more on preparing Solid to enter kdelibs. Not yet done, but we’re coming closer.

Apart from this code work I took some time to attend the Qt tutorial done by Mirko Böhm to Trinity students. Since I’m doing something similar in my university I was trying to see if I could find a few ideas to improve my own course material.

I also attended Mirko’s BoF on multithreading and performances. It raises a few interesting questions. Done right it could give a boost to our application startup time and responsiveness. We probably can find patterns to make implementing those concepts more easily, it’ll probably require some time to get it but that’s for the better.

A new day is now starting, see you later. Greetings from Dublin!

Today was the OpenDocument Day at aKademy. Very nice idea, it allowed a quite some people to get in contact about this important topic.

I attended the lighting talks and breakout sessions. Lot of interesting topics, but I won’t enter in more details here, there would be too much to write, and I’m a bit tired.

I made a break to attend the Strigi BoF. The design looks sane, its main developer cares about resources. It seems that we have a winner here. There’s only a few things that I dislike about the daemon part, in particular how the D-Bus support is implemented, it seems to be too much effort for the tools we currently have. But well that’s nothing critical, really.

This break was in fact during lunch time… So I get back directly to the lighting talks session of the OpenDocument Day. Luckily Peter kept me some food, so I was able to have a lunch after all. =)

During the breakout sessions I found some time to work on Solid to prepare its merge in kdelibs, that led me to some cleanup and refactoring. I’m waiting for the network related parts to be ready and then the merge will occur.

The OpenDocument Day ended with a sponsored dinner for all the attending people. Fine food and lot of talks… Once again a nice way to end the day.

As expected, the KDE e.V. General Assembly took the whole day. The minutes are supposed to be available on the KDE e.V. website at one point so I won’t cover it’s content here, it would be too long anyway.

Surprisingly we finished in time to be at the Google party for 6pm as expected. Quite nice, lot of free food a few people from Google to talk with (both from engineering and marketing departments) and of course a lot of KDE hackers.. They even made a small lottery with cool prizes… They definitely know how to receive and make you comfortable. Thanks a lot to Google for this nice evening.

After the party a few of us got to a bar nearby the university. Luckily I can reach our wifi network from here, so I’m blogging this from a cosy armchair with friends drinking beers around me. Nice way to end the day.