ervin’s piece of web

As promised, a short blog post today since I spent most of my day in the KDE e.V. general assembly. It consumed the whole day until 6pm.

It started with the Lord Provost reception in the town hall building. The building itself is very cosy and beautiful… but I couldn’t care less, there was plenty of free food available. FREE FOOOOOOD! Thanks goes to Trolltech for sponsoring this.

Then I teamed up with Aaron and Zack wandering around in the city. We ended up in a bar playing lot of good music (read: industrial, hard rock, etc.). We of course had drinks there, chatted for a long time, watching at japanese and chinese movies on their TVs. And, since there was a pinball there, we played with it something like one hour and a half. Was a nice way to celebrate Zack’s birthday!

Then, we crossed the street to another bar and listened to the last song of a blues man there. Very cool music again, and plenty of drunk people… Some of them just got interested in us and that was the beginning of a new journey. No idea where they wanted to go, but the girls just wanted us to follow, of course the boyfriends were really not impressed. As we walked with them we got relabeled “canadian”, “polish” and “frenchie” in no particular order.

At one point we got ride of them, and tried to find another place to stay… Problem being that at midnight all the bars are closed here. So, asking some people in the street we tried to find a place called “the Garage”, with a truck in front that we couldn’t miss. Looked like a good plan since it was supposed to be the busiest place in town. Then we walked, and walked… and walked through a no man’s land. Found a few uninteresting clubs, but no Garage or truck. Aaron and Zack were feeling hungry at 1am and almost ran into a noodle bar, when I noticed a trunk next to it… We finally found the Garage. After their very late dinner, or very early breakfast, we were all feeling tired, so we walked back home without even stepping up in the Garage.

We reached the hostel around 2:30am if I recall correctly. That was a very nice night with the right mix of drinks, music, drunk people and noodles.

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.

This morning I woke up early, even if I get back to the hotel a bit late yesterday. We had dinner in the Cambridge Brewing Company yesterday night… It’s really an interesting concept, this bar/restaurant does its own beer! It’s really a nice restaurant… and of course a loooot of beer has been drunk at my table. Since most of the people I had dinner with arrived a bit late today, I suppose it was a bit hard for them to wake up.

Finally, this morning we basically waited for people to arrive. Once again I was the first one in the Stata Center, changing timezone has some advantages after all, so I used some of my time putting together slides about my views on the current status of FreeDesktop.org and how we could improve some things. Of course, I know some of my positions might not be shared, but I consider that it’s a nice way to try to present the “fd.o perception from the random KDE guy” now that I met some Gnome hackers.

I attended the DBUS BoF, it was interesting. It was the last BoF before lunch, so I jumped out of the room and fought again for pizza, another round of free food!

After lunch, we took some time with David Zeuthen and John Palmieri to discuss about HAL, NetworkManager, DBUS, etc. It opened some interesting opportunities for collaborating. I’m confident it’ll give some interesting results, some things are already in the pipe. I gave to David my slides about FreeDesktop, it could be the start of a broader thinking about FreeDesktop to go toward improvements.

It looks like we’ll sooner or later prove that we can get really good relationships between Gnome and KDE and share when it makes sense.

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.

I woke up early today… very tired… I admit that I didn’t sleep well last night. The Kaesespaetzle was quite good, but managed to make me feel sick during the night.

That’s why I was very very slow… I met Aaron Seigo upstairs and I bet that he wondered who was this guy not even able to understand a simple english sentence (I finally understood on the second or third try). The breakfast was quite nice and in the same fashion : slow and lazy.

Then it was time to walk to aKademy for the first talk by Eirik Chambe-Eng one of the two Trolltech founders. It was really nice and informative. Last but not least there was a lot of humour in his talk which is always a very good thing.

The second talk I attended was about the areas of KDE which would need the use of meta-data and research centric UI. The talker was Scott Wheeler who unfortunately experienced a lot of technical issues while presenting. But, he was good enough to keep the talk very informative…

Then I attended to a talk by Gustavo Boiko and Helio Chissini de Castro. They propose a way to share some code snippets inside the project to avoid duplication even more. It sounds like a good idea indeed… but it quite difficult to do it right in my opinion. This idea surely needs to be a little more refined but can turn into something really nice.

I unfortunately missed the Harri Porten’s talk I planned to attend… I was a bit late lunching and chasing for a lent laptop to be able to work since I don’t have one.

I’ve then made a hard choice and attended to Matthias Ettrich’s talk… but I’d like to attend Kurt Pfeifle’s talk about NX.

Matthias Ettrich’s talk about APIs designing was really good! This guy is really clever and master his subject… There was so many things to say that he was not able to present everything. He’s planning to write an article on the subject, and I’m really impatient to be able to read this!

Then I missed Tom Chance’s talk about the Quality Teams because I was gently discussing with Eva Bruscheifer, Peter Rockai, and two person working on the Skolelinux project : Bart Cornelis and Kurt Gramlich. We’ll see them again during the coding marathon for the KDE Debian Integration meeting.

The last talk for today was about freedesktop.org, Daniel Stone inherited this task… which resulted in some harsh considerations. I have to admit that I’m sometimes worried when I see how the things evolves, but the goal they support is quite valuable and more KDE participation would a good way to improve things. It’s just like any other project after all… its global behavior is determined by the people working on it.

And good surprise (almost since it was mentionned on the schedule), we had a “social event” with free food and free drinks (free as in free beer, not free as in freedom :p). It was really good food, and I discussed with some people.

Finally, I managed to make the laptop work correctly for my use… it still needs some tweaking but I guess it’ll be okay. The only problem is that I have to fight with this weird qwertz keyboard! It’s really unusual for me.