February 5, 2007
gnome, openwengo, work
Comments Off on Life as a jet-setter
Solutions Linux
Last week I was in Paris for Solutions Linux all week – hobbling about on my sprained ankle, catching up with some cool people like Michael Meeks (with whom I profoundly disagree on some of the community-related stuff we discussed), Fred Crozat, Daniel Veillard, Dodji Seketeli and David Faure.
The dichotomy of Solutions Linux is the cohabitation of sleek professional commercial teams such as Novell (who undoubtedly paid a healthy six-figure sum for their presence at the show) and the Association Village – a bazaar-like environment which is kind of other-worldly. You can’t stand for two minutes at a commercial stand without someone coming up to you to bar-code scan your badge, and ask you if they can help you out. In the association village, you could probably stroll in, sit down, roll up a joint and make yourself at home in a stand without anyone asking you why you were there.
I went with a colleague, who said it was like walking off the main drag in Morocco and wandering into a market – “Did you notice”, he said, “that the smell changed when we came here?”
More travel
Next weekend, I will be travelling to LA for SCALE 5x – hopefully I will have some time to help Eitan with the GNOME stand aside from my presentation on the OpenWengo project and meeting other projects (which I really want to do).
I will also be trying my best to catch the first Ireland international to be played in the mythical Croke Park – kick-off at 8am local time in LA.
After that, I will be trekking off to Brussels to FOSDEM, where I will be giving a lightning talk on OpenWengo, and two presentations in the GNOME DevRoom – one on the promotion and marketing of GNOME, and a repeat of the presentation I gave in Brazil in November – attempting to explain how & why people get involved in free software.
From there, a short hop (via Paris) and I’ll be in San Francisco for eTel. It will be my first time in the Bay area, and I’m looking forward to meeting up with people I’ve only met online up until now. If anyone is interested in meeting up the week of the 27th of February, please drop me a line, and we’ll meet up.
January 29, 2007
openwengo
Comments Off on KDE hackfest in Wengo offices
We have some guests in the office today – David Faure, Laurent Montel, Benoit Jacob, Eric Pignet and Laurent Rathle from KDE (and KDE France) dropped by for a hackfest working on KDE 4. I did everything I could to slow them down, of course, but they were having none of it.
It was good to meet people from the KDE side of the fence, and David even gave us a presentation on some of the new stuff in QT 4, which was very well received by all involved.
Wengo is a proud sponsor of the KDE stand during Solutions Linux this year – drop by their stand if you want to see a demo of the latest releases of KDE or the Wengophone (if we manage to have working network).
January 26, 2007
openwengo, work
Comments Off on OpenWengo summit – one week on
(Reposting from the OpenWengo blog)
Last week, the Openwengo developers (with a couple of notable exceptions due to exams) got together in Paris, and we had a great time.
Some of the photos taken over the two days by Aurélien Gâteau are now up on Flickr (finally! I hear you cry).
Among the highlights of the two days were having 25 people stuffed in a tiny meeting room for 2 hours (in this photo, half of the people have gone outside to faint), going on an antique carousel under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower before taking a guided boat tour on the Seine, and having a lovely meal in “A la Pomponette” on Montmartre without Antoine (you know what I’m talking about).
We also managed to get a lot of work done – it’s rare that a development team takes the time to sit down and think about where we’re going for two days, and the feedback that we got over the two days will enrich the project for many months to come. It was really great to meet up with people like Didier, Lukas, Séven and Vadim, who have been involved in the community for ages, but who I had never met before.
And it was great to meet new faces like PH who just came along to meet everyone and ended up taking great notes of everything that happened, or students like Florian and Stéphane,from Calais, Ludovico and Livio from Turin, Tristan, our usability expert, and Yann, a former Code Camper who worked on IAX support during the Summer.
Among other attendees were of course the Wengo employees working on OpenWengo – Tanguy Krotoff, party animal as ever, Sébastien Tricaud, Philippe Bernery – the master of CoIP, our new plug-in framework for OpenWengo, Minh Phan who maintains our copy of phapi, and all of the others in the team.
Thanks to everyone who came, I hope you all had as good a time as I had.
