ervin's piece of web

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!