News
So – I’m a daddy again. A healthy 4.16kg boy, we’re calling him Paul. Yay for Anne!
One side-effect of this is that people who sent me GUADEC papers directly are probably not going to get any feedback for a couple of weeks.It would be a really good idea to resend your paper to guadec-papers (which is all I would do anyway).
Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for all the papers!
Can you say “Road trip”?
Murray Cumming’s done some work sprucing up the GUADEC wiki pages for public consumption, and the first task that needs help is getting people ther.
This year, GUADEC is on (as everyone knows) in Stuttgaret, which is a relatively accessible place by car. While Kristiansand, Dublin and Seville are great places, and I really enjoyed the Kristiansand conference, none of them are places which are accessible in under 8 hours drive from most of Europe. Stuttgart, on the other hand, is a handly 7 hour drive from Lyon, so I’ll be coming by car with 3 other people.
The wiki page has space for you to add details if you are coming by car and have places space, or if you are looking for a lift. Feel free to add your names! When it gets long enough, we will probably move that to a sub-page, but right now the goal is to make the GUADEC wiki live!
Also, for all information and announcements about GUADEC stuff, people are recommended to sign up to guadec-list. This should also be a source of general sharing of information, from cheap airlines and good restaurants to arranging meeting places.
GUADEC is now only 2 months away, so it’s time to start thinking about booking flights. We are doing our best to move along announcing things, but if you want to come to GUADEC, start planning now.
Ed Catmur let me know that my t-shirts crashed nautilus and X with librsvg HEAD – cool 😉
The problem is #s in an attribute value which is an xlink:ref, which is bad. Bold inkscape.
Ed went mad and found & fixed 3 or 4 bugs because of this. 17 comments in 2 hours!
T-shirt designs
In an effort to make things easy for artists (and to give them an excuse), I made a t-shirt template in SVG last night, and made a simple monochrome t-shirt (which sucks). The idea was to shame people into doing better. It’s attached to the MarketingMaterial wiki page (link near the bottom).
Sri suggested that it might be subversive to put a beret on Dave Camp, and make a t-shirt out of that. Well, I couldn’t find a beret, but the result of my t-shirting (with another cruddy caption – I need help!) is also attached to the MarketingMaterial page, as tshirt-dcamp.svg.
I don’t know why people like using Dave for things like this. I guess he just has one of those great faces that’s instantly likeable and recognisable. Like Gandhi. Or Churchill.
Croziflette
Especially for Federico, here’s a recipe for a croziflette – it’s like a tartiflette, but with crozets rather than spuds.
Ingredients
Update
Daniel Veillard pointed out that I was being stingy with the ingredients. For the benefit of the people who really want to pig out, here’s what we used for 2 people last night: 200g crozets, 100g lardons, 200ml fresh cream, 2 onions, half a reblechon. Yes, that’s a bit more than the reccommended portions above, but we expected that to do 3 people.
Preparation
First, boil the crozets in salted water for a few minutes – they’re a bit like pasta, and al dente should be fine.
While they’re boiling, brown the lardons and onion together, then add the fresh cream. Season to taste (a bit of pepper is nice, but I don’t know herblore).
Drain your crozets, and put them in an oven dish (lasagna plate type thing). Cover with your thickened sauce, and mix roughly with a spoon.
Cut your reblechon in two along the short axis. You end up with 2 big round chunks of reblechon. Put these gooey side down on top of your dish, and put it in a pre-heated oven (about 200°C) for about 15 or 20 minutes (go with the flow).
Take it out of the oven, and while it is still hot, pull off the skins of the reblechon which will stay on the top while the cheese melts and infuses the rest.
Serve hot, with a nice white wine (de Savoie), and don’t count the calories.
Wake up the following morning, and go skiing.
GUADEC progress
So I managed to get the GUADEC acceptance mails out over the weekend. If anyone was expecting a mail about a GUADEC presentation, and didn’t get one, please let me know. It’s entirely possible that I missed one or two.
Some people have queried why there is a proceedings for GUADEC, and why authors have to submit papers. The explanation is two-fold.
First, writing a paper beforehand helps the presenter organise his material and gives attendees a support for the conference, which allows greater participation, and a more coherent presentation. Writing slides in the train before a conference is a practice that should be discouraged.
Second, several attendees can get funding to attend if the conference is an academic conference – which means having a proceedings. The Norwegian guys were really great with this last year, especially Janis who took care of all the administravia, and several people got to the conference on college grants thanks to that proposal. Since funds are typically tight, any help that we can give to attendees is a good thing.
Finally, we’re not asking for a formal oeuvre. You’re not going to have your article submitted for a Pulitzer. A couple of pages presenting the major concepts you want to present, essentially a long abstract, is fine. And if you don’t have time, or just don’t want to, let us know at guadec-papers, and we’ll sort something out.
That said, I encourage everyone presenting to write a paper, at least 2 pages, at most 5, since it will really help the GNOME Users and Developers in Europe, who are, after all, what the conference is about.
Eeek!
Will people never learn?
Twice in the past two days, people have proposed using the wiki for art competitions (splash and theme) for GNOME 2.10.
Please don’t use a wiki for an art competition. It doesn’t handle concurrency (at least moinmoin doesn’t), and it will die under heavy load. If the art contest gets slashdotted (and art contests, because the LCD can easily participate, tend to get slashdotted), you can kiss goodbye to the wiki for a couple of days, and you risk losing some good submissions lost simply because they got over-written.
The GIMP splash contest started out there, and I think that the GNOME sysadmin team will testify that that was an absolute and unmitigated disaster.
We moved to a CGI based solution on the GIMP web server pretty quickly (which yosh, Helvetix and carol had put in place, but which had been disabled around the time the website changed). This guaranteed that static pages were going to keep getting served, art submissions weren’t going to get lost, and when traffic died down, there would be no problems. Sure, some of those CGI requests failed when we were under slashdot load, but the webserver kept on ticking along.
That code is in the gimp-web CVS module, in the programmatic /contest directory, if anyone is interested.
Update Jeff – OK, whatever you think. I suspect that people will attach stuff inline anyway, and possibly that external material will change during the contest. Having data locally has lots of advantages, and having it remotely opens up a couple of cans of worms. But I guess it could work.
Moving Granny to the Penguin
I found an inspirational story by someone who migrated their grandmother from her old Mac to a new GNU/Linux based system. This should be required reading for anyone who is hoping to expose newbies to the joys of Linux.
A friend of mine (Hi Emmet!) wrote something in a mail to me recently that I thought was worth sharing. He has an annoying habit of coming up with pithy epigrams, which makes me very jealous (and a slightly less annoying habit of flogging them to death afterwards, but let’s not get into that).
Beginners are, by necessity, task-oriented. It is very hard for us techies to understand beginners, not because we know the stuff well, but because we’re professional learners who have evolved a highly efficient personal learning methodology without even thinking about it. Our tendency is to present facts and examples. We structure information the way we would like it, not the way the user needs it.
GUADEC, again
In the interests of letting people know as quickly as possible the status of their GUADEC papers, I sent out the first round of mails letting people know that their papers weren’t accepted. It’s a really hard thing to do, because some of the people in that list had topics I would have loved to see.
By way of explanation, this year we have tried to avoid talks which present latest developments/features in a program. Talks were selected if they had one of two characteristics – either they were intended to show off how cool GNOME is to new or casual GNOME users, or they are intended to be “important” sources of brainstorming on the strategic direction of GNOME.
This is in line with the philosophy I talked about a couple of months ago. We want GUADEC to be jaw-dropping in the coolness of stuff presented, and really inclusive, with lots of hands-on experimenting, tutorials, BOFs. But we also want it to be thought-provoking and productive for hardcore developers, who have different needs. We want to have a conference that is a facilitator on all levels, and it’s a hard thing to do. But we’re doing our best.
