GUADEC 2003 I said I was going to write a bit about GUADEC, but didn't get round to it til now. Saturday 14th Arrived in Dublin in the morning after about a day spent in airports and on planes. Took the AirLink bus from the airport into the city centre, and walked from there to Trinity College, Dublin. I ran into a number of hackers at the gate who pointed out where the accommodation office was. Dropped my pack off and took a walk around the area close to the college. I went out to take a look round and get some lunch. Was surprised how expensive everything seemed. Even though the exchange rate was about AU$1.80 to each Euro, the prices looked like the exchange rate should have been closer to 1:1 :(. Afterwards, I explored TCD a bit more, and found out where the conference was going to be held. Made my way down to the network room and met jdahlin (at first, I didn't realise who he was). Went to dinner with a bunch of hackers at a Japanese restaurant. Had a very large bowl of chili/chicken noodle soup. We then moved on to Messrs Maquires for some drinks. Sunday 15th On the Sunday, I went to the Gnome Foundation Board meeting. This was the first time that we had had a face to face meeting of just the board (last year we had a meeting with the advisory board, but that was it). Was a very productive meeting. Monday 16th The start of the actual conference. Saw a number of great talks including Havoc's freedesktop talk and Johan's PyGTK talk. I gave my first talk in the afternoon: EggToolbar and EggMenu. It had a fair turnout and was pretty successful. After the talk was finished, I had a conversation with Hans Mueller who was looking at some similar issues with menu handling and merging in Java. Had dinner with the AbiWord hackers. Tuesday 17th The second day had a lot of great talks. I got to Alan Kay's keynote a little late, but what I saw was very interesting. He made a lot of good points (although I don't agree with of all of them). I then went to Anders' D-Bus talk. After the break, I gave my PyORBit talk. Less people attended this one than the previous one, but there was still a fair number. I gave a few demonstrations of remotely controlling Nautilus through its CORBA interfaces, and getting notifications on metadata changes. Bill Haneman was at the talk, and asked how it worked with the accessibility framework (as expected). I hadn't actually tested it but I am fairly confident that PyORBit would be usable to script the AT-SPI interfaces. It would be great to see Gnome become more scriptable in the future. Whether CORBA is used for this purpose or not remains to be seen. Went to the Ximian party in the evening. Got to catch up with some more friends I hadn't…