ervin’s piece of web

This week I’ve been participating to the FISL conference in Porto Alegre. I held a 3 hours long tutorial here to introduce students to Qt and KDE development frameworks. The feedbak I got was pretty good, the questions were interesting and I even managed to cover what I was planning during this session. It’s been really enjoyable.

Apart from that, I’ve been mostly hanging at the Trolltech/KDE booth, or the speaker’s room. Lot of interesting people here. I’ve been very impressed by the INDT people, they’re a very nice and smart bunch of people.

Today is my last day in Brazil, since it’s sunday I’m going to relax a bit with Andreas and Thiago. It’s been great being here. I’m really looking forward to being back home, that said spending 14 hours in plain will probably be a pain. That’s all for now, I’ll probably blog again about Akademy 2008 CFP when I get back home.

I’m back from Milano. The first Plasma sprint has been a pretty good event. My only regret is the low productivity on the first day since we spent quite some time hunting for food. But once we found the right balance, the productivity just got through the roof and we got an humongous amount of things done (as the current activity in the repository proves).

I’d like to thank everyone involved in this sprint, we really formed a great bunch, that’s nice to be able to get things done and make new friends at the same time. A special thanks for Richard Moore, without him I’m not sure we would have seen the end of the API review. Also I’m really looking forward to collaborating with the JOLIE developers, it’ll probably cover all our current Web Services needs.

Also congratulations to Alexis who led the effort to make WoC finally happen in Plasma, and to Sebas who did a humongous job in this area too. Yet another important piece of the Plasma project finally done.

And now preparing for departure again, I’m going to FISL 9.0 where I’ll give a tutorial about developing applications with Qt and KDE. I probably still have to rework a bit my slides to fit the target audience and the time slot. I still have to pack too…

Last week-end we had the release event in Toulouse, it has been the only french event and that’s why I decided not to go to Mountain View. On friday evening we had a long user oriented talk with some bits of Aaron’s keynote, followed by a cocktail and a merchandising booth. It’s been a real success, I expected not more than 20 or 30 people… but it turned out that the room was full, some people had to stay outside. Also I was the one giving the talk, and I think I didn’t screw up from the questions I had after the talk and people reactions. Of course, I played our first KDE Commercial, especially since it’s been secretly done by a couple of people in Toulouse. They really did a great job in my opinion.

On saturday, we had technical conferences for the whole day. We had a really nice bunch of speakers. Aurélien Gâteau, David Faure and Lauren Montel travelled in Toulouse just for this event and give talks. We also had our local gems: Anne-Marie Mahfouf and Alexis Ménard. I also gave a couple of talks. The atmosphere was quite nice, people had interesting questions and David even implemented a feature request almost in realtime (after screwing up his desktop).

We (the speakers) ended up the saturday evening in a restaurant, Aux Fils de l’Aligot, were we had an excellent regional food. Laurent and David didn’t knnow what aligot is so we had to help them discover it. Too bad Aurélien had to leave in the afternoon… next time Aurélien you’ll have your share of food too.

Finally, I’d like to thanks all the people who made this two days event possible:

• our sponsors, C&S and KDAB;
• all the speakers who made this event possible;
• all the people from Toulibre who were really supportive;
• Michel Saliba who spent hours coordinating the necessary work to subtitle Aaron’s keynote;
• and a special thanks to Alexis who really did a great job organizing this, he was so active I didn’t have much left to do.

It’s really nice to see how the Toulouse community pulled such an event almost from nothing… I think it was a good test run for us, maybe next time we can try something bigger. Akademy 2009 or 2010 anyone? :-p

My last evening in Bangalore has been spent at Atul’s place
with all the other speakers around and the organization team
for the “Speaker Party”. Once again great food, and great people
to discuss with.

I left a bit early with Till, Volker, Christian, Kartik and
Sheela. I got back to the hotel with Kartik while Till, Volker
and Christian left to the airport to take their plane.

This way I had some sleep, and early in the morning I got a
car sent by the organizers to get to the airport. Had my flight
for Mumbai with no problem, and arrived in time. I have to
admit that Mumbai airport is much bigger and cleaner than the
Bangalore one. There, Pradeepto was waiting for me and picked
me up to go to a hotel in Panvel (a small town near Mumbai).
I’m staying there for the next few days because I’m attending
Pradeepto’s wedding.

This post is officially the last one about FOSS.in 2007. But
likely not my last one from India this year, I’ll probably blog
about Mumbai and the wedding. As for FOSS.in, I have a short list
of things which I’ll definitely remember (in no particular
order):

• Most of the talks are all done by high profile speakers…
  I even wonder how I got talks there. You definitely have the
  best people in their field coming here. The “who’s who” of the
  Indian Free Software contributors is there, but you also have
  quite a lot of famous international Free Software contributors.
  If you don’t believe me, look at this year speakers list but
  also past years… I hardly know any other conference with such
  speaker lists (except maybe FOSDEM).
• The organization team is just awesome and I’ll really miss
  them all. Lovely and interesting people… I admit I was a bit
  heart broken when I had to leave the speaker party. I’m looking
  forward to meet them all again.
• The party at Opus, nice karaoke club, terrific atmosphere…
  and Shlipa learning how to count people when drunk (I’ll never let
  you forget this moment). @Shreyas: No need to smile while reading
  this, you were half drunk too, remember?
• The high quality of the organization (the organizers again, but
  also the volunteers and the logistics around the conference), it
  was just perfect. I’ve been speaker in quite a few conferences, and
  I’ve never seen something like this. As a speaker, you’re never let
  on your own, you always get help for anything, and you can feel it’s
  all done with a great pleasure. In short: it’s the best organized
  conference I’ve ever been to. And I don’t see another one beating this
  team anytime soon.

Last day of FOSS.in I had some network problems, and I’ve been
left with almost no access since then. Hence why I’m blogging this
only now and the entry will be slightly short.

The last two days were marked by a few talks I attended.
Particularly, Danese Cooper talk was brilliant, she’s one of the best
speakers I know. This talk was very interesting, and relevant to most
people employed to work on Free Software. How to keep your ethics. How
to make your employer move forward in the right direction. Are important
part of the equation now that we see more and more companies involved
in Free Software development.

Of course other outstanding talks were the ones by Till and Volker
about Akonadi. Very well done guys! It gave me a very good overview of
what Akonadi is, and how to develop with it. I already claimed in the past
that I would never ever work on the kdepim codebase… Honestly they
gave me the will to work on Akonadi based PIM stuff which is a small
miracle. Akonadi really looks like the way to go for PIM: shareable accross
desktops, lightweight yet powerful, a nice and clean API taking care of years
of experience from our PIMsters. Congrats to everybody involved.

Last but not least, the talk from Andrew Cowie about how to become
a contributor was quite nice too. The idea to do it along with Shreyas was
terrific, it gave a very entertaining talk. Too bad there was too much content
for the allocated slot and they had technical issue at the beginning of the talk.
They had to rush in the end, which is unfortunate for such an important topic.

Finally, we had the official closing of the conference, it started with a
talk by Rusty Russell. Basically he was asked to give a talk which would give
everybody the will to become a contributor. Then, he came up with the very nice
idea to explain is own story, and to invite other kernel hackers to do the same.
After that he invited Sheela on stage and she made her first patch to the kernel
in live. That patch was sent on the relevant lists, we learnt later that it
got applied and will be shipped in the next kernel… Yes, that was that easy!
In the end of his talk he invited almost all the attendance on the stage: contributors,
users, people knowing developers, etc.

Atul then got on stage to the closing talk, he invited a few people to talk about
other indian conferences and events around Free Software. There’s so much potential
here that it’s really nice to see some dynamics around this topic in India.

It was the opening day for the conference part of the event. Very nice introduction by Atul in my opinion. The keynote was nice too, getting some insights about Anjuta development, where it came from etc.

Then, I attended Holger’s talk about Open Embedded, interesting stuff too. It really shows the difficulties of having to deal with small devices and how it impacts the community.

After lunch (ah! great food again!), I hanged into the Hacking Room for most of the afternoon showing bits of KDE, discussing the design, trying to give information on how to get started with some of our frameworks. Nice and interesting people were here to discuss. Because of that I missed the QtWebKit talk by Simon, but it was worth it.

And finally, I had my last presentation, about the student projects we did last year in my University (and we have a sequel running this year), it had some exclusive data in it on how it’s going this year. I got really nice feedback to this talk, truely nice to see so many students and a few professors in the room. There’s definitely some will to replicate this and I’d love to help such efforts. We’ll see where it goes…

Since the first day of the conference was over, we moved to a restaurant… Followed by some of the organizers, we ended up being 20 people in there. Was a traditional “on the banana leaf” restaurant. Great people (again), awesome food (again)… I ended the day full and happy!

Daily report from FOSS.in (at least I try). It was the day were we had the KDE project day, so I was of course hanging in the KDE room all day. Unfortunately it was a quite remote room, which didn’t make it easy to find us, but we had our share of people, and at least we were sure they were motivated to find us.

Overall we had nice talks, and of course nice questions. I’m not that happy with my talks too, I think I somehow missed the target audience, but I learnt from this and will do better next time.

In the evening we had a nice party in a karaoke bar. The food was great, the people too. At the end of the party one of the organizer was drunk, she had to count us ten times to know how many taxis to get. In the end we had our taxi and went back to the hotel.

For those wondering: no, I won’t give the name of the drunk organizer for her own sake… I’ve been told it’d be disclosed by other bloggers anyway.

I got my flight to Bangalore yesterday after a night in a cheap hotel near CDG airport. In case you’d wonder: yes CDG airport is still as bad as usual… For instance I met Till and Volker there and we didn’t manage to buy wifi time there. Their portal was sooo confusing…

Anyway, we just sit in the plane and after a few hours (with a headache for me) we arrived safely in Bangalore airport. No bagage got lost so after a bit of waiting we got out of the airport. There, Atul and a couple of other people from FOSS.in organization.

We crashed out at the hotel and woke up ready for the first day of the conference. After breakfast we got to the venue which is a nice building in my opinion. I used my day to keep up with mail, prepare myself for tomorrow talks, add the final touch to my main conference talk and discuss with people. It’s really nice to meet them, lot of nice folks!

The lunch break was great too (I could I come here without talking about food?). I really enjoyed it, veggie and spicy! We also got joined by Danese Cooper and a few other people, the discussions were very interesting. Last but not least that’s the time when the famous Pradeepto joined us. Always a pleasure to see him!

Now leaving for dinner… Later people!

Tuesday and wednesday were basically spent doing API review and refactoring the public API to address the issues found. It’s great to get input from people experts in the field… After all their work on Qt proves they have a lot of expertise in making APIs which rock.

That’s why Solid is getting get a big facelift during this week. I’m cleaning it up at a lot of places, and had to refactor the internal API a bit. Hopefully now the most intrusive changes for the hardware discovery part are done. It’s kind of frustrating because I’d basically like to see this week last for a month. I opened the eyes in quite some shortcomings, and we probably won’t have the time to make a second round of API reviews.

So… Let’s get the most of this week! Back on furious hacking!

As usual started with a very early flight. I had to woke up at 4:30 this morning to get it… No need to say I’m pretty tired while writing this. Of course I’m also pretty excited, which explains that despite being exhausted I’m hacking at… the Trolltech offices in Oslo. Today being the first day of a 5 days long sprint about Phonon and Solid.

It’s always nice to meet old friends and new faces. The Trolltech guys form a very friendly group.

Today, we basically travelled, setup our small network for the sprint and had discussions about investigations and work for this week. It already looks like it can become a highly productive week. After this nice kick-off we gathered in a very nice restaurant in Oslo with a few trolls. The food was just wonderful, and it was very cheap (in particular compared to Oslo standards).

This night we finished the work on factoring XMLGUI out of KMainWindow with Simon. It’s now in trunk, so now we can concentrate on the main purpose of this sprint…

Thanks a lot to the Trolltech people to allow this sprint to take place.