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.
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!
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! 😉
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.