A long pending task of moving this from my personal site to this blog.. finally got around to doing it.
GUADEC 2004 update
The highlight of the entire trip was that we (me, surf, srag, parag and ganesh) were able to meet most of the Evolution team – JP, Rodrigo, Chris Toshok for the first time, face-to-face. It was nice getting to know each of them in person, though we have interacted on a daily basis for the past six months or so.
It was also the time to meet Nat, Dan, Dave Camp, Luis Villa and Michael Meeks again and get introduced to other GNOME luminaries like Glynn Foster (gman), Jeff Waugh, Frederico, Dick (Mono) and Tim Ney as well as a number of hackers and hacker wannabies.
We also discovered the hidden talents amongst us – surf’s passion for photography and flowers and his ‘impeccable timing’ with the camera, Parag’s culinary skills..And all of us must have set personal records for the longest walks during a day..
Saturday
We landed at Kristiansand, 2 days prior to the meet and located the Agder University with ‘some’ difficulty. The first GUADEC delegate we met was, er, a Danish lawyer, who was into Linux advocacy. I was bowled over by the slick systems, HP had sponsored for the delegates in the ‘Hackers room’.. Met a bunch of community folks there.. I figured out soon that there were two ways to break ice and build a relationship with a hacker – 1. share a beer ( i did not have this option, though ) 2. give away gmail accounts.. I was to stumble upon the third – more powerful than the above – on Monday.
Sunday
Armed with the city map, we set out walking across the town. True to the sobriquet of being the floral city of Norway, Kristiansand is full of flowers.. every street, the doorstep and the windows of every house – tastefully adorned with flowers.. Srini and more so, Surf, could not resist clicking them all – capturing the beauty of the town in their digicams. We then took off for a host-sponsored Boat trip – walking down to the harbour. I chanced to meet two developers from Montreal, who develop Evolution plugins for their proprietary backend, called ExchangeIt. It was a proud moment for me and Siva, as they revealed that they have borrowed quite a bit of code from the Groupwise modules and followed the happenings in the GW backend closely. We had a good conversation with Tim Ney. He enquired about Parag’s BOF and told us about a couple of delegates from Chile and Brazil, who were doing similar work in their countries. Also, had an interesting chat with Dick, who showed off his MonoDevelop.. I had hardly noticed him in the irc before but found him to be an extremely talented and insightful guy. And MonoDevelop truly rocks! The cold winds on the boat ride were no dampeners for Srini and Surf who tried to capture the Kristiansand shores in every possible angle into their digicams. Met Rodrigo Moya, one of the Evolution calendar maintainers and is quite popular with the nosip-evo hackers. Exhausted by all that morning walk, we had a leisurely lunch only to find that we had missed the Guided tour of the town.. So we set out on our own, exploring the town by foot. We soon discovered that the city was expensive, er, EXHORBITANT and decided that it would be wiser to buy stuff and cook at home, rather than eating out for a week. Back at our accomodation, we had a brainstorming session on the BOF…though we were still unsure how it would turn up the next day.
Monday
We started early to the University, armed with the posters – Our posters clearly stood out from the rest – ‘flying colors’ (thanks to Krishnan). The other notable ‘chromatic treat’ was the dark background of the GUADEC meet poster, that ensured that Novell was the only sponsor logo, that was visible from a distance (and RedHat, if you looked down enough). The meet took off with the announcement about the RealPlayer being GPLd, which was met with a thunderous applause. Nat delivered the keynote address in which he tracked the GNOME timeline – prehistory to the future – presented as screenshots of his desktops at various points of his career. He discussed about a few trends – on usability and visualization as well as the evergreen topic of hacker motivation. He then demonstrated Beagle, the new Desktop indexer and search tool, integrated with apps like Nautilus and Evolution. You can take a peek at this presentation (Swinging the Pendulum) as well as the rest at http://2004.guadec.org/wiki.
A 2-minute ad film by RedHat – on the growth and acceptance of Linux and conceptualized around a famous quote by Mahatma Gandhi – was very catchy..It was sad to know that the ad was copyrighted and could not be downloaded over the net. The first talk of the day was by JP Rosevear on Evolution and Evolution-data-server. He described the proposed plug-in architecture in Evolution, the use of evolution-data-server for desktop integration and finally, demonstrated BrainRead. This component, hacked by Dan in a couple of months, allows you to read the blogs of your contacts from within evolution. I rushed back in time to the GNOME Bangalore BOF session, the only talk I had witnessed in the entire meet, that had an interactive (and may I add, an interested) audience. We discussed about the NOSIP programme and how Novell Bangalore is nurturing the GNOME community in India amongst the students. The meeting was attended by gman, Jeff Waugh, Pete Goodall and the gentlemen from Chile and Brazil. The audience were amazed by the ‘numbers’ we had managed thus far and the targets that we were aiming at..We also discussed the difficulties we are currently facing in realizing the true potential. We gifted the GNOME Bangalore T-shirt (Jeff told me it should be called a jersey instead) to each of the attendees…Most of them wore it that very day and our T-shirts soon became a rage with the Ximian folks as well as Novell guys from Europe…We were flooded with requests for the T-shirts and some even offered to pay for them. I attended one more talk on GNOME Accessibility and was impressed by the work done by some of these hackers (apart from the Sun guys) – who contribute to this project – as a social cause.
Tuesday
The JDS session was a bit bland. It was strange to see all the hackers to rush to the talks on time, only to look down into their laptops and start frantically typing code into their emacs. They were mostly interrupted only when they had to get up and head for a different room for the next talk. Some of the spicy stuff on JDS, included a list of the plusses they offered on top of GNOME as well as a brief description of their nightly build model (called the Common Build Environment), built over jhbuild. [ print option in nautilus menu, world clock, now applet for evolution and themes.] They also talked about the APOC i/f (lockdown), Desktop Configuration Manager, the issues with nautilus scalability they faced for their thin clients deployment. The focus for JDS in future would be on project mgmt, multimedia, authoring and collaboration, according to the speakers. Also attended the gnome members meet – where the hackers questioned the gnome foundation members – It was not a planned talk and hence, ended up as an amorphous mixture of many topics. Some of the stuff worth mentioning was the decision to move the gnome-foundation elections closer to guadec and allowing local institutions to hold money (generated by merchandising) instead of having to wire the money back and forth to the foundation. GNOME Bangalore was provided a special mention amongst the regional GUADECs (GUADLAC, japan) and the figures of about hundreds of people registering was met with awe. (GUADEC, i guess, managed around 300 this time). Somebody suggested that generating TODOs from the bugzilla could be dished out as a bounty. A small debate on the effectiveness of bounties ensued.
Wednesday
As Surf got busy with the Exchange connector discussions with Dan, I managed to spend a little more than an hour with JP. We chatted about the things lined for Evolution and Groupwise, contributions to Evolution from NOSIP interns etc. He also taught me a few i18n fundas and shared some of his emacs lisp customizations for handling the translation strings. This was followed by a chat with Nat and later with Larry Ewing. At the end of the day, the T-shirts we had carried were all exhausted, and so were all of us. Overall, it was a great experience meeting all these wonderful people, who amongst all the things they share in common, expressed their desire to visit Bangalore for a Linux/GNOME meet.