ervin’s piece of web

It was another great day here! I love this city, and this event. I took a real breakfast for a change, actually the free breakfast in the hostel is not really interesting, but there’s a restaurant next to it.

David’s talk was interesting because it provided plenty of nice tricks that make your life easier on day to day hacking. I heard you David, I’ll probably switch to zsh really soon now.

Anne Østergaard’s talk was also interesting, it put in light quite some interesting information about the men/women relationship in free software communities. She had a few not so easy questions in my opinion, and answered in a very clear way. I’m glad that she made this talk. Thank you Anne!

After the coffee break I attended Adriaan de Groot’s talk about the English Breakfast Network. Very interesting and useful stuff if you ask me. I also attended Julien Seward’s talk about Valgrind. This is really an awesome tool, and using it for a full KDE session is a kind of crazy idea. But that gave me another idea, this approach could be used in EBN. Since EBN is already doing some GUI automated testing, during this testing it could also be collecting valgrind data at the same time.

After lunch I attended Pau Garcia i Quiles’ talk. Interesting stuff, that’s surely the biggest Qt/Ruby application around.

Holger Freyther talk about KDE and Consumer Electronics was interesting. We can still improve in this department. I tend to disagree about his very technical view about the problem though, most improvements required are more cultural than technical in my opinion. Granted it’s not really something easy to fix, but we can work on it.

I also attended Richard Dale’s and Richard Moore’s talks. Also very interesting topics that will bring quite some interesting features for KDE4 if we embrace them. And we clearly have to embrace them.

I attended Coolo’s talk about Kickoff which showed quite some interesting usability studies result and a great prototype.

Finally I attended Will Stephenson’s talk about Network Management. Very nice talk, introduced some of the network related parts of Solid.

We ended the day with the aKademy awards. Congrats to all the winners you really deserve it! The awards were followed by a nice dinner concluding those two days of conference. I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all the people who made this event possible. In particular Marcus Furlong who drived the effort so nicely. I also have a special thought for Tink who put an awesome amount of work into it, even if she knew she wouldn’t be able to come. THANK YOU!

Now onto the day long e.V. membership meeting and the upcoming coding marathon! Conference is over, but not the whole event, more very good stuff is coming…

Today was the first official day of aKademy 2006. It started with Aaron’s keynote which was just awesome. I must say “as usual”, he is such a great speaker, very inspiring. His photos slideshow was just a great idea, it really showed how much common background the community shares.

I then attended the talks about QtDBus and Plasma which led us to the coffee break. It was time for the joint Phonon and Solid. I think that our duo with Matthias definitely worked, and it seems that our talk and approache was received quite well.

We formed small groups to hunt for lunch. We stopped in a small restaurant with David, Coolo, Thiago and a few other people. The food wasn’t bad and strangely both waiters were french.

Despite the bad weather here, we managed to get back for the second keynote in time and dry. After this keynote I was pleased to attend J5’s talk, the content was really interesting. And in particular his motto should be remembered: “Competition and Cooperation are NOT Mutually Exclusive”. Thanks a lot John for coming and participating in the conference part with this talk!

I missed a few talks, I was talking with Sebastian Trüg about future plans for KDE 4. It’ll probably lead to interesting reuse of some K3B code. Too bad I didn’t see the Asian Track, I was particularly looking forward Pradeepto’s talk.

I finally attended all the remaining talks of the KDE4 track. George’s talk about KHTML state was particularly interesting in my opinion.

I’m now writing this from the “pav” where we had a perfect geek dinner thanks to Nokia who sponsored a ton of pizzas and drinks for us. Thanks a lot for this support! The “pav” is an interesting place, cosy and warm… really nice, I’m so glad to be here!

I was ready on time to travel to Dublin… but not my plane. Departure got delayed around 40 minutes. Not a nice way to start the day. I was supposed to meet Volker Krause on arrival, and luckily he was kind enough to wait for me. In the airport we met a few other KDE hackers: Antonio, Inge and Lubos.

Reaching the hostel from the airport was really easy, we were just a bus and 5 minutes walk away. We had to wait a bit to be able to reach our rooms so we used this opportunity to have lunch together with John Tapsell and his wife.

Went to the PC huts to finish polishing the talk we have with Matthias. I’m looking forward to giving this presentation with him.

In the evening I met Cormac Lawler of WikiMedia fame and his girlfriend. We chatted in the Kennedy’s Bar for almost three hours! He’s really a great guy and it was a real pleasure to meet him in person. We discussed some interesting collaborations and I truely hope we’ll see the discussion we had opening to a broader audience and give birth to nice cross-projects.

That’s all for this friday, I’m finishing typing this as I’m attending Aaron’s keynote.

See you later!

This post will keep the current trend on Planet KDE going: Dublin, I’m coming!!!

I finished packing. Now I just need to have some sleep, and wait for my friend E. who will drive me to the airport. Thanks in advance for this!

Quick checklist:

• Stuff packed: done.
• Maps, and info to find my way, printed: done.
• Ogg Vorbis player filled with good music: done.
• Books to read in the plane: done.
• Slides for the Phonons in Solids talk: done.

I even found some time to work on Solid so hopefully it’ll be merged in kdelibs this week-end.

Booked my flight today, and added myself to the arrival page. Now my travel is fully planned. I’ll be there for the full conference, I don’t want to miss a day.

Now I’ll have to work on the “Phonons in Solids” talk submitted with Vir since it got accepted.

I’m looking forward to meet the community again!

This time it’s really finished. I’m back home. This year aKademy was great.

Today, I’ve not done much apart from travelling. I didn’t loose my luggage. Everything went well until I arrived Paris. My flight has been delayed for more than a hour, and the weather was so bad in Toulouse that the plane couldn’t land at the first try! But well, the pilot managed to keep us safe. =)

A lovely woman was waiting for me at the arrival (almost two hours late), that’s really nice to be back.

Yesterday night we had a beach party with a kind of barbecue (something typical in the area). The only problem from me is that they cooked only sardines this way, but there was more food so it wasn’t a real issue.

During the event, people quickly started to walk around. The place was really nice. We’ve seen KDE hackers swimming in the sea by night while a few others were playing freesbee on the beach (by night!?). Around midnight a show made by a school of Flamenco started. It was really a great moment, this dance is really a beautiful one in my opinion. I really enjoyed this show.

And finally, we waited for the bus to arrive and bring us back home. We were near a small restaurant, and of course, a few KDE hackers (no I won’t disclose the names :-p) were trying to hit on two or three women that were there. They obviously faced a conflict of resources, because well… women attract geeks, and they were quickly surrounded by ten, or twelve persons. =)

Today, I plan to keep hacking a bit… I don’t know how much time I’ll be able to access the net, we’ll see. Anyway I’ll surely do only small things, I’ll still be able to commit from home if needed.

I’m becoming really impatient to come back home. I feel the need to see my girlfriend. This feeling was present when I left home, and grew quickly during the conference. I’ll see her tomorrow in Toulouse airport when I arrive. I need to speak with her, take her hand, etc. I’m addicted to her.

Enough for today, next time I’ll blog from my home.

Yesterday night I discussed with David a lot, the scope was large and we even ended up discussing about time travelling. Was interesting, but we decided that 1:30am wasn’t the right time to discuss such thing and we should better go to sleep.

I woke up a bit late because of this, but I managed to be in time for the KOffice meeting. It was insightful about the current state of the project. There’s not many contributors, so if you’re searching for a project where you could contribute : WE NEED YOU FOR KOFFICE!

Some people left today, there’s obviously less people in the computer labs already. But, it doesn’t stop us to work on KDE! Today was very productive (attending no meeting helps).

I finished a thin layer around HAL which will be the backend for a new hardware discovery layer in KDE. It’s works nicely already. Using this small wrapper you can already list hardware with a very few lines of code. I’ll now build a full featured API on top of this to be able to do more complex manipulations in applications.

Since I needed a break on this kind of work I started to work again on my (almost) secret project… It’s something GUI based for a change, and I plan to make it as reusable as possible, I don’t know if I’ll be able to have something interesting before the end of aKademy. But I’ll continue to work on it after aKademy, I’ll blog again as soon as I have something demoable.

I’ll soon go back to the residence to have some food, and maybe some sleep (except if I continue hacking from there).

This morning was really nice, we had a touristic visit of the old city center. First, we visited the Cathedral of Malaga which is really huuuge, and has nice pictures and organs. Then, we have a look at the “Teatro romano”. And finally, we visited the Alcazaba which is a very old fortress, it was really a nice and beautiful place. The guide was interesting, giving a lot of insightful details and speaking a fluent english.

For this afternoon the plan is basically to hack as much as possible, no meeting. And this evening I’ll surely team up with some people to by food in a supermarket nearby the residence, I just have to not forget to prepare everything I need to hack from the residence, since we have no Internet access from there.

Not much more today, see you tomorrow!