SenseHofstede.nl

Several buildings, including the Maison de Bonneterie as seen from the tram stop 'Gravenstraat', near the 'Le Paris' cafe of the Canonical party.

Today was the first day of the main GUADEC conference and this meant that it was extra busy at the registration desk with many people checking in today. The day was marked by great talks, the first occurrence of WebM streaming for any event and the arrival of some more t-shirts.

I almost overslept this morning because I had worked until 3.40 in the night to make the streaming on the website ready for the first day of streaming. Fortunately Mart was there to wake me up and we made it to the venue just before eight o’ clock, in time.

Almost straight away the first attendees started to arrive and some of them still had to register. There are still some people not registered. We would ask them all to register still, so we can provide them with the necessary information and swag, but also for the municipality of The Hague, which sponsors us for every foreign attendee we have registered. (That is also why bringing the ticket is so important.)

I spent the morning trying to awaken a bit more, doing the regular tidying up, moving stuff, searching for and talking to people, answering questions and looking after the website. The afternoon I spent manning the camera of the Video Live Stream 1, in ‘Paris’, which gave me the opportunity to listen to some talks. I really liked the provocative humour of the ‘State of GNOME’ talk. No patronising, religion doesn’t need any more protection than other fantasies.
That was actually my day. Time does go quickly, but it seems a lot quicker when you’re writing about days you do loads of small things.

T-shirts
Yes, again t-shirts problems. We had hoped to have solved the t-shirt problems today, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to do so. Summary of today’s progress:

• There are no separate speakers’ shirt, they get a regular conference shirt;
• We have run out of men’s M, L and XL definitely;
• Tomorrow we will, at long last, have the women’s sizes and the volunteer shirts;
• Leftovers of the volunteer shirts, if any, will be handed out to the other people still waiting for their shirt;
• Unfortunately the logo of one of our sponsors, Igalia, is still missing from the t-shirts, after the company we ordered the shirts managed to get the logo dropped from the complete template we provided.

Looking at Riviervismarkt from tram stop 'Gravenstraat', near the 'Le Paris' cafe of the Canonical party.

Network
The network isn’t using VPN or any other kind of tunnelling after all, as far as I’m aware. Instead we’re using Google’s public DNS servers. Privacy pundits might not be happy with this, but then privacy pundits would be very stupid privacy pundits if they wouldn’t be using their own tunnel at conferences anyway.

The free GNOME stickers in the shape of the logo of our beloved desktop environment, at the information and registration desk.

This was probably the calmest day of the whole GUADEC conference. At the last day before the main conference there were just some BoFs and the second part of the GNOME Developer Training, and we had a lot of time to finish some preparation and clean up a bit.

Network
The people running the GUADEC 2010 network — baptised ‘Central Command’ by themselves — are less lucky; there are still a lot of problems with getting everything stable. The network set up by them is working correctly, but the uplink to the ‘Haagse Hogeschool’ network is going through a rather nasty firewall: SmartDefense. Its name is aptly like the names of a lot of trojan horses, since I’ve overheard several people with impressive firewall experience (including SmartDefense) saying all kinds of nasty things about it.

To sum it up: the firewall sees one IP address for all conference attendees and starts blocking some when it sees some things as an attack. The person who is able to and has the authorisation to change the firewall’s settings was only available to us Friday and is on holiday, like pretty much every one of the other non-powerless IT staff. The ‘Haagse Hogeschool’ doesn’t want to, can’t and will not fix this issue. This means that, despite the fact that the venue is connected to SURFnet, the Dutch academic internet connection capable of 1 Gbit connections (during testing before the start of the conference the download speed was around 30 MB/s), the internet would be borked…

…were it not for our heroic network managers to work on a solution: VPN. They’re working on setting up a massive VPN to get past the horrific firewall. We hope that this will make the network use bearable, and maybe even more than that.

Please don’t flame our networking staff, but give kudos instead. They’re working very hard and are doing their best to make the conference enjoyable for you. Make sure is enjoyable for them as well.

Every attendee gets this free bamboo USB stick. These 2 GB contain sponsor material, the video message from Neelie Kroes and the Ubuntu Wallpapers.

T-shirts
Any paying attendees — professional and employer sponsored registrations — receive the GUADEC t-shirt. Apart to that there are other people who get (free) t-shirts and there will be children sized white t-shirts with the GNOME foot (cute!) for sale.

However, unfortunately Tuesday we received just one box with t-shirts and are still waiting for the rest. We’ve got the children’s t-shirts and the men’s L, XL and XXL. Men’s S and M, women’s sizes and the other t-shirts weren’t available for the whole day.

We hope to receive those tomorrow morning. If you didn’t receive your shirt yet, please keep an eye on the social media and the registration desk.

Please try to take the size you’ve entered during the registration — if you pre-registered, of course — as we want to make sure everyone who pre-registered for the conference gets the size (s)he entered on the site.

Starting Wednesday there will be swag for sale!

The GUADEC 2010 Love/Hate Wall: hugs, tears you want to share? PostIt!

Love/Hate Wall
Inspired by FOSDEM and previous GUADEC conferences we put up a Love/Hate Wall underneath the huge GNOME banner in the foyer. You can share your hugs and tears with a simple PostIt. At the end of the conference we’ll photograph the result and will make the photos available online, but if you’re attending, please make sure to take a look!

It was pointed out that Love and Hate are strong emotions, and Hate is a strongly negative one. However, the reason we’re not using “I would wish…” and similar structures is because:

• We want to trigger a response, and strong emotions trigger a stronger response and result in more discussion;
• The Wall is nothing formal, it is just a fun way to share your frustration, ideas and thanks.

No flamewars please!

This wall is much more interesting than you!

My day
Comprehensive and concise!
±8.00: At the venue to open it
During the day(ordered randomly):

• tidying up the registration desk, adding information and removing clutter;
• helping with answering questions from participants, lost prospective students and interested Haagse Hogeschool employees;
• trying to keep sponsors happy with the website;
• preparing the website for the video streaming tomorrow;
• setting up the Love/Hate Wall together with Vincent and William
• having lunch
• playing IRC on with the walkie-talkies

18.00-19.00: working on making the website ready for video streaming and emptying the building of people, cleaning up for the day and preparing for the next one.

Registration-related note: if your name is written in a different alphabet than the Latin one and your alphabet is not Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian or similar we can provide you with a badge that shows your name in the correct way! Just make sure you mention it when registering.