Only a few days left before the [Desktop Summit 2011][ds-url], I'm really looking
forward to wander around in Berlin again. I'm excited and almost counting hours
before my flight out on friday morning! Yes, I'll be there:
![I'm going to Desktop Summit 2011][ds-banner]
And I'm not just attending, I'm also giving a talk on monday during the afternoon
(3:20pm to 3:50pm). It's titled ["We're a family"][talk-url] and it's a look
back at the efforts I put into a Community/University collaboration in Toulouse
for the past few years. I had talks around that topic already for an Akademy, but
this one is going to be special for two reasons.
First, it'll be much less about the organizational challenges such a collaboration
carries than the human impacts it can generate. Here it'll really be about showing
the bonds it created among the people participating in this collaboration, and the
opportunities it created for the students in the community projects. It will also
cover the local and global influences those students had on the community.
Second, the course of study where this collaboration was taking place is closing...
Right now it's not yet clear if the students projects we had in the past will
still be possible. So this talk is really a wrap up about what happened in Toulouse
for the past few years, and probably a "goodbye". Even if we manage to create a
new collaboration somehow, this talk marks the end of an era. That's why we tried
and managed to line up several generation of students related to this adventure.
We'll have a lot to share, but maybe not enough time for all the most juicy secrets. ;-)
So, if you're looking for some laugh, tears, and insights on such a Community/University
collaboration, hopefully it'll be the right talk to attend. Don't miss it!
On my side I'm putting the finishing touch to the talk, and of course it'll be ready
on time.
[ds-url]: https://www.desktopsummit.org
[ds-banner]: https://www.desktopsummit.org/sites/www.desktopsummit.org/files/DS2011banner.png "I'm going to Desktop Summit 2011"
[talk-url]: https://www.desktopsummit.org/program/sessions/were-family-how-five-years-university-collaboration-changed-our-town-landscape
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: [smugmug
url="http://ervin.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=8915543\_6uRJn&format=rss200"
start="74"] 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. [smugmug
url="http://ervin.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=8915543\_6uRJn&format=rss200"
start="79"]
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:
[smugmug
url="http://ervin.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=8915543\_6uRJn&format=rss200"
start="51"] 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](http://ervin.smugmug.com "ervin's photos").
Go get them! [smugmug
url="http://ervin.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=8915543\_6uRJn&format=rss200"
start="2"]
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](http://ervin.ipsquad.net/share/AirBeamerTemplate.tar.gz),
and you can take a look at an
[example presentation](http://ervin.ipsquad.net/share/air-example-talk.pdf)
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!
This week I've been participating to the
[FISL](http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/) conference in
[Porto Alegre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](http://akademy2008.kde.org/conference/cfp.php)
when I get back home.
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](http://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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danese_Cooper) and a
few other people, the discussions were very interesting. Last but
not least that's the time when the
[famous Pradeepto](http://foss.in/2007/info/Image:Pradeepto.jpg)
joined us. Always a pleasure to see him!
Now leaving for dinner... Later people!
Damn! I didn't even finish my blogging about the Oslo sprint... so
much stuff to do. Well, I'll probably make another post about it,
more focused on the results we obtained regarding
[Solid](http://solid.kde.org) and what I learned there (in short: a
lot!).
The three weeks which followed were quite exhausting. First just
after the Oslo sprint, we still had quite some work to finish the
required refactoring in time for the freeze on the 1st May. But we
managed to merge the branch, do the work and have it working for
the Alpha1. So you'll get nice Solid and Phonon with kdelibs 4.0
Alpha1. There's probably a couple of cleanups to do until the 4.0
release, but nothing huge. In my opinion, the APIs matured quite a
bit thanks to the trolls expertise. Once again it proves that when
you work next to other people next door you can achieve far more in
less time. We should really keep in mind that more sprints are good
for the project!
After that I spent most of my time on my PhD... My life was the one
of a monomaniac: sleep, eat, write, sleep eat write, etc. But now I
have issued the first draft of my PhD thesis! Was hard but worth
it, there's only half a chapter missing because I'm waiting for
someone else data. That's just nice to finally see something that
looks like a thesis, not a bunch of notes and files scattered on my
disks. It's now in the lab for internal review. When it'll be done
I'll write the missing bit (hopefully it should be straightforward)
and be able to enter the official review process... and maybe get
my diploma. That's still a few months away though, since because of
the length of the review process and the summer coming the
(potential) diploma won't be delivered before september or october.
Administration takes holidays very seriously here. :-)
And now? Well, I'm going to travel again! Actually I noticed that
I'm only spending two or three weeks at home between my trips this
year... It's going to last like this until
[aKademy](http://akademy.kde.org). But, the coming trip has
something special, I'll be on the other side of the globe this
time, the first time I go that far. I got a paper accepted to
[AAMAS 2007](http://www.aamas2007.org) and since I'll attend
tomorrow morning I'll travel to
[Honolulu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honolulu) by plane.
Since I'm staying longer
[for](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Oahu_from_air2.jpg)
[obvious](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Oahu_windward_side_beach.jpg)
[reasons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Valley_Oahu.png), I'll
be back home in two weeks. I don't know since I'll probably have
trouble having internet access (depends a lot on the conference
organisation): see you in two weeks!
I attended [FOSDEM 2007](http://www.fosdem.org/2007/) this
week-end. It was my first time there, it's really a great event. It
looks a bit like a system at the edge of chaos... but it
self-organizes correctly. There's always something happening
because of an insane amount of talks. It's even a bit frustrating
at times because you definitely can attend only a few talks. Which
means you have to choose very carefully... I admit I was
disappointed by two really bad talks but no big deal.
Particularly interesting was the OpenMoko talk. I'd say it's
nothing ground breaking on the technical side, but it looks great
from a business model perspective... Definitely looks like a
tempting cell phone for hackers. :-)
Also amazing was the attendance during the KDE 4 talk. The room was
just full, it was difficult to find a seat. Jos Poortvliet did a
very good job at summarizing the current state of the matter. Keep
up the good work Jos!
Apart from the talks, FOSDEM has proven to be just great for
socializing. It's great to meet known friends again, to put faces
on people you only know from IRC or mail, and new people. That's
probably the best advantage of FOSDEM, a lot of different projects
are present there, so it's really easy to discuss with them. The
cross-desktop and education sessions just showed it.
Wednesday and thursday went nicely. We continued our work during
BoF, some outcome will surely be interesting. In particular Adept
usability will surely be improved, and the plan for powermanagement
in edgy has been consolidated. This release will surely be quite
interesting regarding both points. I'm confident that it'll have
some other improvements though. ;-)
Thursday afternoon, David Faure arrived and it was really nice to
meet him again. It was a small surprise since we didn't expect him
that early.
We got contacted by Philippe Fremy that offered to meet in Paris
center for dinner. All the KDE and Kubuntu attendance went in the
center. We had some troubles to get there by train... apparently
the police found a suspect baggage. We finally arrived but at least
one hour later than expected. The italian restaurant was quite
nice, we had a long table at the first floor and were almost alone
during the dinner. It was an opportunity to strengthen even more
the relationship between the KDE and Kubuntu communities. Thanks a
lot Philippe for this good idea and the great evening.
Finally friday came after a very short night since we got back to
the hotel early in the morning. After a few hours sleep we were
ready to work again! A few more BoF took place... until some of us
left one by one. It's always sad to see people that you like are
leaving: Ellen, David, Peter, Sebastian, Tonio, etc. This time I'll
also have a thought for
[Myriam Schweingruber](http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/myriam), she's a
very kind person from the
[Free Software Foundation Europe](http://www.fsfe.org). We had
interesting discussions together and that was a great pleasure to
have her around. I'll miss you Myriam!
For this evening, I plan to stay away from the exciting stuff,
which means that I won't go to the "Au revoir Dinner" organized by
Canonical in Paris center. I just don't feel like going to sleep
late and being in a hurry tomorrow to pack my stuff and go to the
airport. So I'll have dinner in a small restaurant nearby and I'll
surely be back early.
It marks the end of my report from the Kubuntu Developers Summit,
see you later folks!
The Ubuntu Developers Summit is taking place near Paris since
yesterday. I arrived in the hotel on sunday with two Canonical
employees who work on Malone (afaik). They were quite friendly and
we chatted a bit during sunday afternoon.
People came one by one, and we started to team up. I was glad to
meet Jonathan Riddell once again, we shared some fun in a bumper
car
[as one of his photos prove it](http://www.kdedevelopers.org/blog/57).
It was really nice to go into one of those after so many years, I
was like a child for a moment. Thank you for this Jonathan! ;-)
During dinner we had the opportunity to wish Aaron a happy
birthday, I hope it was a nice evening for him even if he was away
from his home for this important day.
On monday, we had an introduction session. And then the BoF
themselves... almost no kubuntu BoF were scheduled, so I attended
other topics of interest, some of the discussions were really
great. The idea of using TeamSpeak to allow people to virtually
attend the submit is nice in theory, but proven to be difficult in
practice (it tends to work badly on some computers, some people are
missing headset, etc.). We'd surely need something to replace it.
Today, started a bit similarly to monday... A short introduction,
and not many Kubuntu or KDE related BoF scheduled. It's a bit
unfortunate, but the KDE and Kubuntu people there decided to start
to work on some of our topics today trying to fit in each others
schedule. It was definitely the way to go, we've been really
productive. At the moment sebas is even working on a prototype
addressing the power management spec. "Strangely" we didn't see
Aaron much today... too much beer yesterday night? ;-)
It's really a nice start for this summit, I'm looking forward to
the next few days. We still have quite a few topics to address, but
if we keep the productivity as high as today, I'm confident that
we'll finish in time.
Last but not least, I'd like to thanks again the Canonical crew and
Mark Shuttleworth for the nice organization and the invitation,
that's really appreciated.
I obviously survived the trip... It's nice to be home again. I'll
surely miss a bit the
[MIT Stata Center](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stata_Center) it's
really a unique building (as you might notice from the
[linked](http://live.gnome.org/BostonSummit_2fStataCenter)
[pictures](http://web.mit.edu/evolving/stata/photos/photos.html)).
For the last day in Boston, I managed to walk a bit around before
going to the airport, it was pleasant. Moreover I managed to buy
postcard... but not stamps. The only place I've found stamps I
needed to use a machine and I didn't figure out how to use it. So
I'll deliver my postcards by hand it seems. :-)
In the airport I noticed that the booked Paris/Toulouse flight was
planned for Paris Orly, while I was supposed to arrive in Paris
CDG... hmm changing airport, lot of trouble ahead. Luckily the Air
France crew in the Boston airport was kind enough to modify my
ticket in order to get my connection in CDG, which doesn't mean "no
trouble" either since CDG is really messy. Here what happened. My
plane landed in the terminal 2F but we didn't have the right to go
in 2F ourselves, so we had to take a bus to go in 2C (still
following?). But (and that's where it starts to be ridiculous),
when I arrived in 2C I had to take yet another bus since I was
supposed to check-in my Paris/Toulouse flight in 2F... that's sick.
In particular when you have only 30 minutes between the two
flights. But, I don't care anymore I'm finally home!
Now it's time to relax a bit, before going back to work tomorrow.
I'm also happy to see that
[some of my feelings about the discussions I had during the Gnome Summit are shared](http://www.martianrock.com/?p=152).
It was definitely worth it, thanks again to all the people
involved!
Today is my last day in Boston. I'll take my flight back to France
in a few hours. I'm taking my time, relaxing a bit before I take my
plane. I'll surely go to the airport early and try to buy postcards
from there... I didn't manage to find an open postoffice, since
it's the Thanksgiving week-end, lot of shops are closed.
This week-end was really nice, attending this summit was really a
great opportunity. I've been well accepted there, we had fruitful
discussions, and I hope it'll be the beginning of a better
collaboration between KDE and Gnome in some important areas. We can
definitely do a lot of interesting things and push the UNIX desktop
at another level. It could become the only platform I know
proposing two different desktops (in philosophy, etc.) while
keeping consistency when it makes sense with shared frameworks
under the hood. Of course, it'll be a permanent trade-off to also
keep diversity, and we'll have to make compromises in order to make
everybody happy... interesting times.
Finally, the funny thing is that I more or less discovered two
cultures this week-end, the american culture and the Gnome hacker
culture. Yes, they have a different culture in their own community,
and that's perfectly fine: diversity. I like to go in another
country and discover some different habits, way of thinking, etc. I
had this exact same feeling with the fellow Gnome hackers. Of
course, I'm also happy to go back home, both in my country and in
the KDE community. ;-)
Now, it's time for me to move on, I'll take a breakfast/lunch in
one or two hours, and then try to find my way to the airport. I'll
surely won't blog before I get home. See you later all!
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](http://www.cambrew.com/) 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.
Woke up early this morning, so I started looking at my mails. And
then prepared to go out. I decided to not take my breakfast in the
hotel (don't ask me why... I was just tempted by taking a
"pedestrian breakfast". I walked down the street in the general
direction for the subway station. Explored a bit the streets
around, and found a place to buy a breakfast, took a "small" hot
chocolate (and they're not joking since I burnt my mouth) and a
muffin... The chocolate was far enough for me (and they call this
"small"!), the muffin was big. Everything is larger here, cars are
larger, street are largers, train are larger... I'm not a tall guy,
and I feel even smaller here. =)
Took my breakfast under the rain, next to a tree (in order to
protect myself) in a park near my hotel. And then took the subway,
it went almost smoothly (had some difficulties finding the right
track in the station) and reached the MIT Stata Center easily...
but, very early! I was there at 8am (but the event starts at 9am).
I helped some people around to prepare stuff for the attendance,
and people where slowly coming.
I chatted a bit with people around they generally look amazed when
I tell them that I'm a KDE developer ("what the hell is he doing
here?") but that's well accepted of course, they are friendly. I
feel like a diplomat, I've already some possibilities for
cooperation between both projects through books ideas someone
raised to me. I have to admit that it's really tempting... some
topics we could cover would be interesting.
My diplomat role became even more "official" during the
presentation session, during this session everybody had to
introduce themselves. I then stated that I was basically here to
improve collaboration and sharing in my own area (hardware
discovery and interaction) but that if some Gnome developers wanted
to point some other area where we could do better, they just have
to ask me and then I'll take the time to push the information to
the right persons in the KDE community. Ok, we have the FreeDesktop
but most Gnome people don't know KDE people working in the same
topics (and vice versa).
For lunch, we had loooot of pizza sponsored by IBM. Very good idea,
free geek food!
I contacted David Zeuthen already, he's really friendly and
passionated about his work. I'm sure it'll be really a pleasure to
work more with him in the future. Because of the small discussions
we had with him and some other people working on DBUS or HAL, we'll
surely have a BOF about FreeDesktop tomorrow.
This evening I'll surely go to dinner with other people that
expressed an interest in improving the collaboration between both
projects. It'll surely be interesting. Overall, I'm really happy to
be here, doing all that. :-)
Today started with a call from Air France informing me that my
flight from Toulouse to Paris CDG had been cancelled. Grrreat!
Initially they only proposed me to take another flight going to
Paris Orly (which means troubles to get to Paris CDG) or to
reschedule for tomorrow (which is plain stupid when you have just
two days). I told them I need some time to think about it (and take
a shower and shave...). They finally called me back again proposing
another flight going to CDG directly... but I had only 45 minutes
to reach the airport and check-in. Which meant no breakfast... and
possibly troubles for going from home to the airport. But thanks to
E. (a fellow PhD student) who kindly proposed to take me to the
airport I was in time!
And that was the start of a looooong day... since I got to CDG
earlier than expected I waited more hours before taking my flight
to Boston. I was wondering if the situation was about to get worse
to the point where I would actually live in CDG (something similar
to Tom Hanks situation in The Terminal). :-)
The flight went well, lot of time... reading, watching movies,
"eating" in the plane, and finally we landed! Some formality with
the border... which looks impressive to me. I mean they took my
fingerprints, and a picture of me. As if the passport wasn't
enough... weird.
The last step was to reach the hotel, I took a courtesy bus and
surprise the driver was speaking french almost fluently. :-)
So now, I'm writing this from the hotel, using the free wifi
network. It's really terrific, this is the best hotel I have ever
seen! I had almost the feeling that I landed in another planet when
I entered it. It looks a bit retro, that's really a nice touch. I
definitely like it.
Ok, time to sleep now... otherwise it'll be difficult to be
productive.
Yes, I'll obviously attend
[this year Gnome Summit](http://live.gnome.org/Boston2005). I
expect this to be very interesting, I'm planning to meet at least a
part of the [HAL](http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fhal)
crew... I'll surely learn a lot of things which is always a good
thing. I'm looking forward to meet [clee](http://c133.org/blog/)
again, I just hope I'll interact more with him this time (we didn't
succeed during Malaga, shame).
I'll take my flight tomorrow around noon. I hope I won't be too
tired when I'll land there. I just need to finish to pack my stuff,
I'm almost done.
That's really a great opportunity, I'm really feeling a lot of
gratitude for [Waldo](http://www.kdedevelopers.org/blog/70) and the
persons at [Intel](http://www.intel.com/) involved in this trip. It
would have been impossible to make it without this Intel
sponsoring.
