Safe as Milk

Upcoming travel

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be hitting the road again.I’m eager to meet up with Openwengo and GNOME people when travelling – drop me a line if you’re available.

• LinuxDays.ch, 23 & 24 May, Geneva:
  I’ll be giving two presentations during LinuxDays.ch, one on contributing to free software projects (including a focus on marketing GNOME) and one on the OpenWengo project, and our recent 2.1.0 release.
• LinuxTag, 31 May – 1 June, Berlin:
  A flying visit, I’m arriving on Wednesday evening, and flying out again on Friday. I’ll be on the look-out for GNOME people, and I’ll be giving a workshop presentation of OpenWengo.
• Journées du Libre, 15 June, Montpellier:
  A flying visit, I’m arriving on Friday night and training out again on Saturday evening. Looking forward to meeting up with people on Friday evening, and I’ll be giving a presentation on OpenWengo on Saturday.
• COPU Summit, 21 & 22 June, Guangzhou, China:
  I was invited to this last year but couldn’t go, this year I’ll be going along to meet with Chinese distributions and spread the Free Software gostpel to a high-powered group of executives from free softwarte companies and from the Chinese government.
• LUG Radio Live, 7 July, Wolverhampton:
  After exotic travel, I’ll be in the Black Country, telling LRL fans about the joys of OpenWengo, a great free software project that’s only going to get better. On condition that Anne my wife doesn’t need a lift to the hospital in the middle of the night. This will be my last travelling until after the Summer.

So there we have it. Aside from that, the company has organised a “retreat” for a few days in the South of France (oh, the pain) and I’ll be going up to Paris every week, as I have been for the last 6 months.

Ho hum.

Solutions Linux update

I was contacted by a Belgian author of Ekiga who will remain unnamed to thank me for pointing out that he was not cool enough to make my list of cool people.

I met many people in Paris who didn’t get mentioned in my previous blog entry – including, but not limited to, the members of ALDIL, several members of Mozilla Europe, the guys from Silicon Sentier, several people from KDE France, OO.o France, Mandriva, RedHat, Novell, APRIL, Linux Auvergne, GNU/Linux Magazine France (hello Denis!), and many more. Oh, and a Belgian author of Ekiga.

Any implication of uncoolness was unintended, but being mentioned in this blog entry does not constitute proof of coolness. E&OE.

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.

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.

Laptop update

Thanks to everyone for the advice on the laptops. In the end, I priced a Dell D420 to budget, and went with that because Wengo buy a lot their computers there, so it comes under the support contract (that, and it’s light and fast with lots of RAM yum yum).

Laptop purchase

Joining in the recent trend of people blogging about their laptop purchases, I need advice on hardware.

I’m looking for a laptop in a €1500 budget, which is light, has wifi and ethernet, works perfectly with free software (including projectors), has at least 1GB of RAM, and is fast enough to do some hacking on. I’m not picky.

Any suggestions (in comments or mail)? The D420 Jeff got looks cool, but is a bit over my budget.

The latest UnThing: Coworking

Anyone who has worked for long periods from home gets lonely. You miss having a coffee machine where you can complain about the problem you’ve been having or chat about your dog’s gastritis. You miss eating with other people. You miss having office noise around you (OK, maybe not so much that one).

So here comes coworking. What is it? It’s a shared space, somewhere where you go to get your human interraction while working – an office with café culture, someone’s apartment with an open door day for people tired of working alone.

Interesting idea. The next step is shared living space, for those of us who spend a lot of time travelling, and prefer to stay with like-minded people rather than in hotels.

Begining of a Great Adventure

I have never been paid to work on Free Software, and have often wished I was – I would have loved to be able to spend my working day striving towards a grand goal that I am passionate about and believe in. But circumstances (and a lack of backbone on my part) conspired against me, and so for the first 8 years of my professional career, I have never been paid to do what I am passionate about.

Until now.

At the start of November, I will be joining Wengo, where I will be working on growing the community around the OpenWengo project, a Free Software, open-standards based VoIP softphone (and instant messaging client).

It’s a big challenge, but one I am very happy to take on. Talking to people at Wengo has convinced me that there is a real willingness to open up the development process and be a good citizen in the free software world, which is a great starting point. My first job will be to look at the development processes of the company as it is, and identify ways that we can make that process even more open, even more welcoming to new contributors.

It’s going to be a fun ride.

Hands up…

…anyone who has ever been confronted with “budget chicken” at work.

/me raises hand.

Cegelec to be bought by leeches

After all the talk of being bought by another company in the public works sector, it turns out that whatever happens, Cegelec will continue to be owned by an investment fund.

The problem with investment funds is simple – no emotional involvement. Without emotonal involvement, there’s no passion. And without passion, your business is fucked in the long term.

Luckily, investment funds don’t care about the long term, they have a 5 year exit plan.