A French article comparing Skype, Wengo and Jajah.
(tags: openwengo wengophone2.1 wengophone blog)
I got back to Lyon on Saturday evening after 3 days in Martigues (sun, sea, sand) and a quick trip to the “Journées du Libre à Montpellier” 2007 – a local conference organised by the ALL (Association des Logiciels Libres).
It was a very nice conference – apart from the small detail that they forgot me. Well, all’s well that ends well.
I had a nice meal & conversation on Friday evening with some members of the association (lightning struck twice – I was forgotten again) and other invited guests (who weren’t forgotten).
I was especially impressed by the president of the association, who is a fan of martial arts – he is a 1st dan black belt in Aikido and Kendo (which is his favourite) as well as having skillz in jujitsu and judo.
So I forgave him for forgetting me.
I learned the difference between a “jitsu” (dangerous) and a “do” (less dangerous).
For example, “Kenjitsu” was the art of sabre fighting, “Kendo” is the art of fighting with bamboo sticks. “Jujitsu” is a vicious fighting style with kicks, punches, chokes & holds, and “judo” just keeps the holds.
On Saturday, I caught up with Frédéric Couchet and Pascal Chevreul, from APRIL and Mozilla respectively, and saw Richard Stallman give a presentation on free software in French.
I was also very pleased to meet Thierry Stoer from formats-ouverts.org for the first time, after several email conversations.
My presentation of the WengoPhone in the demo space attracted a nice crowd and went pretty well – VoIP is a big topic at the moment and lots of people wanted to know how to hook their home Asterisk up to the Wengo service, or how to make video calls. A nice feature people seemed interested in was the file transfer (which is funny, since it’s not one of those features I use a lot, or consider important) and having a real phone number for people to call you on your VoIP phone.
The presentation afterwards got a lot more attention that me – someone showed off all of the free software games that are available these days, from Neverball and X-Moto through FPS games and flight sims, and brought people up from the crowd to show off. Good fun.
After my presentation I gave a short interview with FreeNews and Divergence FM, media partners for the event. I’ll post links when they have it online.
Many thanks to Pascal K. of ALL in Montpellier – they’re going to fit me in somewhere for the Journées du Libre on Saturday in the “Espace demo”. I don’t know where, but I’ll be there.
I was going to blog about my demo/presentation of OpenWengo at the Journées du Libre à Montpellier, but it seems like I’m not on the agenda, in spite of having had a session accepted.
I don’t know whether I’ll still go or not – but I’m a bit annoyed about being forgotten.
My bosses at Wengo have organised a few days away for everyone in the company to relax together, get to know each other outside work, announce some news and generally pamper us a little – I’m not one to complain about a little pampering.
For these few days, I will not be reading my email. I’ll be back in the normal world with internet access on Saturday.
In the meantime, I’ve packed swimming togs, sports gear, sandals, … all I need now is a good storm & I’ll be set.
I’m back running – made just over 48 minutes in the 10k run in Lyon, with a little pain, at the end of April, and I’m now able to do a 5k training session at a good speed with almost no pain at all. Just finishing up physio, and hopefully I’ll be able to ramp up to running 3 times a week for about 20km total in a few weeks. The day I run for an hour with no after effects, I’ll be a happy man.
For those interested, I saw a chiropractor who gave me some good training tips (don’t over-train, mix low-impact sports like swimming & cycling until you have more distance under your belt) and who thought that the root cause of my injury was probably the fact that I was wearing shoes which corrected against pronation, while it appears I don’t need them. So I also got a new pair of runners for €120 – the most expensive footwear I’ve ever bought.
I never seem to get tagged by these blog memes (or at least, I’m never aware of it). I don’t know whether to consider myself lucky or unloved.
