Summer 2010: away on a holiday

19:32 5 August 2010

Tomorrow morning at 6.00 CEST we’ll be leaving for Dunkerque, where we will embark for England. We’ll be staying for two weeks in Tiptree, located in the borough of Colchester.

In my luggage I didn’t make room for any laptop or netbook, so for the duration of the two weeks I will be offline. This will severely limit my capabilities to respond to email, comments and IRC conversations.

The UDStream-based WordPress plugin I’m developing, Sociaal, will not be updated during those two weeks, despite its lack of doing the tricks it says it learned. Updates to fix this will arrive after I return.

My partial fix for the Application Indicators bug I was working on will probably be finished by someone else.

If there is anything else: feel free to mail me, but from Friday 6 August up to and including Friday 20 August I will be unavailable.

/away
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Vanavond: LoCo Health Check 19.00-20.00 CEST in #ubuntu-classroom

9:25 3 August 2010

Vanavond, 3 augustus, tussen zeven en acht is er in het #ubuntu-locoteams IRC-kanaal een zogeheten LoCoHealthCheck.

Deze LoCoHealthChecks zijn maandelijks, en zeker de moeite van het bijwonen waard, maar vanavond is het extra interessant omdat er als punt op de agenda staat ‘Introducing your LoCo to the wider Ubuntu community’, oftewel ‘Je LoCo kennis laten maken met de hele Ubuntugemeenschap’.
Als je graag meer wilt weten over de Ubuntugemeenschap, en dan dus vooral de internationale, raad ik je aan om vooral te komen vanavond.
Vergeet het niet! 3 augustus, 19.00-20.00 CEST in #ubuntu-locoteams.
Meer informatie op de Ubuntu Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoHealthCheck.

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Just 1%? That’s a challenge!

19:24 2 August 2010

Assuming everyone reading this blog post heard about the flame-wars that raged through the communities after Dave Neary’s talk revealed Canonical is only contributing 1% of the commits to the GNOME project, I’m not going to fuel it by linking to it.

However, I would like to take the opportunity to try to turn this into something positive. Because, 1% guys, we know we can do better! Don’t see this debate about Canonical’s contributions to GNOME as an attack on the Ubuntu project, but instead as a challenge!

Raise that number! Show your appreciation for GNOME by contributing to it. We all know the One Hundred Paper Cuts project; work on solutions for the bugs reported there and forward the the patches upstream! Go to GNOME Live! and browse the project pages for ways to contribute. For I believe that the best way to deal with criticism is not attacking the critic with starting a flame-war, but dealing with the problem pointed at.

The challenge: just 1% of the commits are from Canonical. The solution: contribute!

It seems from Dave Neary’s slides that @ubuntu.com addresses are also attributed to Canonical (correct me if I’m wrong!), so it is not limited to Canonical employees.

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The last day of #GUADEC is over

15:36 1 August 2010
GUADEC 2010 Hate/Love Wall, close-up of top section 'Love'

A close-up of the top section of the 'love' side of the GUADEC 2010 Hate/Love Wall.

GUADEC 2010 has ended! It feels strange after all those months of preparation, but now it really is over. After a tiring but exciting five days I’m now back home again, recovering from the lack of sleep and encounters with some great people.

Bit first lets look back at Friday. We started the morning like any other, but the t-shirts and USB sticks that were previously only for handing out, one per (paying) attendee, were now up for sale and we requested the Haagse Hogeschool for a room where the attendees could leave their luggage for the day, in case they had already checked out from their hotel.

GUADEC 2010 venue at Friday morning

The venue of GUADEC 2010 a few minutes before eight o' clock at Friday morning.

Talk-wise Friday was an interesting day: we had the lightning talks, but also two great, inspiring talks on Telepathy and Banshee. I myself attended Fabrice Mous’ intersting ‘Changing the Desktop Game’ keynote — although I have to say I found an ealier version of the same talk he held at Dutch at the Ubuntu 10.04 Release Party better — and Sílvia Miranda’s ‘Quality translations in GNOME’ session.

Before we knew it, however, it was already time for the closing session and soon afterwards we started shutting down, but not before the group picture in front of the Haagse Hogeschool! I hope that the picture will be available online soon.

Slowly the photos and slides of the conference start to come available on the internet. I cannot promise anything about the many hours of video we captured during the talks, but we have already a lot of images available. I added a small selection of Flickr images to the frontpage of the GUADEC 2010 website, but you should really check out the ‘guadec’ tag on Flickr if you want to see some more.

View from the place where I stayed during GUADEC 2010

The view out of the window of the place I stayed during GUADEC 2010 in The Hague.

The evening we cleaned up, which mostly consisted of removing cables and put them away. For the clean-up team there was pizza and an afterparty started as soon as 19.00 in hackers’ space RevSpace. I didn’t go there, though. After fetching my luggage from the place of the guy who had kindly offered me an empty room, I went on to Den Haag Centraal to catch the 20.08 to take me North, back home.

I hope to be able to do the stuff I delayed before and during GUADEC the next week, since I will be away on a holiday to England for two weeks starting 6 August, next Friday.

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Thursday: the second day of the #GUADEC core conference

1:52 30 July 2010

As the end of GUADEC draws nearer my blog posts get shorter and today also there are no pictures, for the first time. To make up for that terrible loss on my side, I would like to point you to the GUADEC 2010 Flickr stream. There are some really nice photos on there.

The day

There were some really interesting sessions today. I haven’t attended much, but I did go to the keynote about activists and journalists and the treats for them in an online world, and what the (FLOSS) desktop can do against that.
Another interesting one was the “GNOME 3 for your Application” talk. Some really interesting plans were shown. I can’t help and wonder, though, if a lot of this isn’t just duplicating stuff from Ubuntu’s Ayatana project, or at least touching it very closely. RedHat’s GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Ayatana seem to have a lot in common, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much cooperation and so far the standards and APIs proposed upstream were declined and refused to be used. It would be really a shame if GNOME Shell — which seems to be the big chunk that is going to contain all the new neat functionality — would be using a new API, separate from existing projects. If it would be using standards, but not be using existing libraries for them, then we’d have just dumb duplication of code. I can think of a better way to spend resources.

I hope there will be more cooperation, or at least communication, between RedHat and Canonical on this matter.

T-shirts

I hope this will be the last time I mention those blasted shirts here. Finally we were able to hand out all t-shirts today after some of the organisation went to pick them up from the printer in Nijmegen yesterday night. The good news here is that the Igalia logo, which the printer somehow had made disappear from the final prints of the first batch of t-shirts, is on the newest batch. But still, with the Igalia logo missing from the first sponsors and the huge delays in the deliverances we’re of course not too happy with the service.

Social Media Livestream

The first view days there have been some issues with Identi.ca the UDStream based Social Media Livestream on the GUADEC website. At first the dents were shown with the time in GMT, whereas the tweets were correctly shown in CEST. After I had fixed this everything appeared to be right, but fortunately Stéphane Maniaci was kind enough to keep nagging me about it until I had completely fixed all problems with the microblogging system used more often than Twitter by the attendees. See, my hacky fix for the date problems (‘+ 2 * 3600′) was only working on Google Chrome/Chromium, but made all dents disappear in any other browser. After fiddling a bit with the date format I thought things were completely fixed, but they weren’t in all browsers.

Then I cleaned the code a bit up and by delaying the formatting the Date until after the Date class has been initialised the time is now correctly everywhere without hack, and Identi.ca isn’t broken anymore. This also means that the screen of the livestream in the venue is working at long last!
I’ll push my changes to the GUADEC 2010 Website’s Git repository next week(end) and will backport the changes back upstream to UDStream as well.

Collabora barebecue

Unfortunately, after two weeks of very hot weather, the summer started to fade a bit at the beginning of the conference. Now, this isn’t that bad for a conference, it makes being inside much more bearable, but it is a shame for beach parties. We were having a barbecue at “Beach Company”, but no swimming! The party was very well organised, and the vegetarians were happy with their own stuff and barbecue, and everyone had a great time. New to most of the international guests was the presence of large quantities of the Dutch version of satay sauce (or ‘peanut sauce’), which we seem to put in litres on everything, according to some of them.

Last words

Tomorrow will already be the last day of the conference! I can’t believe that after all these months of preparation GUADEC 2010 will be over! I can surely say that it has been a great fun so far and I’ve met some really nice people. Despite some problems with ordered goods (ahem, t-shirts, ahem), there weren’t any major problems and I’m glad that everyone seems to be enjoying the conference so much.

On to a great last day!

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