Month: February 2013

conferences

sadly, this year I missed FOSDEM — and I saw from the blog posts on PGO that the DX hackfest was also amazing — but I had a good excuse, as I had to give a talk about Unicorns and Rainbows at linux.conf.au, in Canberra. I had the chance to explain what are the plans for the toolkit(s) used in GNOME in the coming future, as well as (obviously) enjoying one of the best free and open source software conferences, so all in all, I think that it was a good trade off. plus, I didn’t have to deal with the FOSDEM flu, apparently, so: good stuff all around. the video of the talk is already available on the LCA website ((and, seriously: how come the GUADEC videos are always, always late or not available even when we do record them? it makes us look really bad; GUADEC teams: fix this crap. it should be a hard requirement)) so if you weren’t there, you can still watch it. I’d put the slides somewhere, but I’ll have to make sure that the notes are up to date first ((I had my notes on the tablet, to avoid the focus back and forth when I had to advance them)).

life

after LCA, I took a week off in Sydney with Marta; the city was really enjoyable, and we had a great time exploring it. when I say “a week off” I don’t mean a week off of work, given that I’m currently not working: January 22nd was my last day at Mozilla. I detailed a why I left, and what my current plans are, on G+, so I won’t repeat them here — the executive summary is that I burned out pretty badly before leaving Intel, and I made the mistake of not taking a clean break before starting to work for Mozilla. right now, I’m trying to get back in a productive groove, so I’m looking around for cool stuff to do, as well as fulfilling my roles in the GNOME community as best as I can.

happenings

while in Sydney, I got a notification from my VPS hosting, the kind of notification that you really don’t want to receive when you’re on holiday and on a hotel wifi connection: apparently, my WordPress installation got hacked, and it started serving malware. cue various profanities that I clearly cannot repeat on a family-friendly website. I learned some valuable lessons from the first security breach I’ve ever experienced in years, but the main one is definitely the old adage from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: don’t panic ((the other, and equally important one is: never trust a pile of PHP brain damage)).

beers

apropós of events, there’s a new GNOME London Beers meet up scheduled for celebrating the 3.8 release — or, at least, that’s the main excuse for meeting up, drinking beer, and having pizza with the GNOMErs in (and around) London. if you are in the area on March 1st, sign up on the wiki!