Safe as Milk

Lyon for GUADEC

So – the Lyon candidature was submitted earlier today, and thanks to some magnificent work over the Easter weekend from Vincent Untz and Oscar Figuieredo (especially Oscar), it was looking rather spiffy.

The final copy is online at http://dneary.free.fr/lyon-guadec.pdf (.odt for the OOo source). The introduction summarises why I think Lyon is a good candidate:

Lyon is a great city for this conference for a number of reasons. First, the city itself is young, vibrant, beautiful, and well placed in Europe. Second, the GNOME and free software communities are particularly active in the region. Thirdly, CPE Lyon, the host university, knows the free software community, and has fantastic facilities. It is the ideal location for this kind of event.

Did I mention the food? Lyon is a great place to eat – just ask the people who came here in March for the Libre Graphics Meeting.

It goes without saying that as supporters of this candidature, myself and Vincent Untz will not be taking any part in the decision which town will host.

GUADEC candidates

I was working on Lyon’s candidature as GUADEC host last night, and noticed that the closing date for proposals was next Wednesday, the 19th of April.

I had forgotten it was that close, and I wonder if others had let it slip their minds too.

It’ll be interesting to see if the earlier announced candidacies from Vienna, Vilnius and London materialise – but the Lyon candidature will be in decent shape.

I’m looking forward to the mud-wrestling competition we are going to have in Barcelona to separate the shortlisted candidates – Thomas Wood, are you ready to rumble?

770 adapter: update

Thanks to all who commented on how to get an adaptor for my 770 – several of you mentioned that the chargers are the sam as for the Nokia N70, N90 and others. So I got one of those, but can’t help but feel that I was a bit fleeced – I paid €15 for it. And that was after shopping around in a big department and 2 specialist mobile phone stores.

Thank you, O Lazyweb, thou art wise and knoweth all things.

770 power adapter

I recently lost my adapter/recharger for my Nokia 770 – anyone know where/how I can get a replacement?

Desktop Linux Summit

The GNOME Foundation has a stand at the “Desktop Linux Summit” in San Diego this year – the event is on the 24th and 25th of April.

I’m looking for a couple of volunteers who would like to go and man the stand during the two days, we can cover some printing costs for the stand and send on some merchandising. We can probably also cover (reasonable) travel costs, if you need them. Jeff Waugh, Nat Friedman and other GNOME lovers will be there as speakers, and it’ll be great fun.

Who’s up for it?

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Join the GNOME marketing team! We need all the help we can get!

Mail to warm the cockles

I got a mail today from a Libre Graphics Meeting attendee (hope he doesn’t mind me republishing part of it) and it’s put me in a good mood for the day, I think.

The Meeting was a resounding success especially for every second that
one projects developer spoke to another.

Thanks to things that happened and inspired at the conference massive
progress is being made.

For example,Inkscape is now depending on Little CMS for build as Jon
implements named colors. We’re also now saving out XCF files of Inkscape
SVG files that include gimp layers and using gimp palettes across both
applications thanks to a little symlinking on build. Its a digital
artists dream come true.

LGM has also inspired new contributors to participate and previous ones
to direct their efforts to fulfil common needs. All because we got
multiple cooperative projects in the one room.

Pet peeve

Why do Americans utilize the word “utilize”, rather than the less pretentious and simpler “use”?

Nice story on GNU/Linux migration

Via Marcus Bauer on the marketing list: An art professor gets his students using free software.

There are some gotchas for using external devices like scanners and tablets, but all in all, it’s a nice mix of GTK+ and QT applications which just goes to show that at least in this domain, we’re not in competition with KDE.

Speaking of conferences…

For those who have forgotten, the closing date for the submission of GUADEC abstracts is really soon.

You can submit an abstract directly on the GUADEC web site (after creating an account). The deadline for submissions is the 31st of March, and since the conference is now only 3 months away, you might want to get a move-on.

You can have a look at the existing list of abstracts on the site too to get ideas. Just search for all articles with the “Presentation” type.

The end of an adventure

So, the Libre Graphics Meeting is over.

No matter how much you do for a conference, there’s always more you could have done. I have had people sending me mail all weekend saying that they heard about the conference too late to come – all I can say is that this conference was such a success that there will definitely be a second act next year, somewhere around the world, so you’ll have another chance.

Over 3 days, we had an experiment in conference planning. To make things a little easier for us, we arranged for the GNOME CVS to SVN migration to be sabotaged, but in revenge the GNOME hackers persuaded Lyon’s tram drivers to go on strike on the day of the conference.

We had some really great presentations (all I can say about Xara is “Wow!”), and with people like Carl Worth and Bdale Garbee coming along to hang out for the weekend, there were lots of thought provoking conversations flying around.

For the first two days, the presentations created a central theme to the conference, and allowed people to get a decent overview of some of what’s happening in the various projects. And then on Sunday, the “unorganised” day, we had around 20 sessions on things like the Create project, running Photoshop plug-ins under Linux (without Wine, I think), documentation around the graphics applications, collaboration between Xara and Inkscape, FontForge and the Open Font Lincence, a bunch of Blender workshops but the very cool Rui Campos, and more (my head was hurting at one stage trying to figure out what was going on). It was just the right side of uncontrolled chaos, and it was enormously beneficial to all who attended.

And lots of people came. I was estimating between 200 and 300 people, and we were in that range over the three days, with over 150 people each day on Friday and Saturday.

But we didn’t want this to be a huge conference. The best thing, in my opinion, about the conference was the time we gave people to meet and talk, and the greatest compliment someone could make about the conference would be that they came away with more friends afterwards than before.

Here’s to next year’s organisers. The discussion about who will host the conference next year will be happening on the Create mailing list, which you can find on freedesktop.org – and anyone who has a blog, and works in creative free software applications, send rejon or bryce your RSS feed and get added to the blogroll at create.freedesktop.org.

Oh, and a small side note to say “Up Ireland!”