event – muellis blog

OpenSuSE Conference 2017 Nuremberg, Germany

As last year I was honoured to be invited to OpenSuSE Conference in Nuremberg, Germany.

The event has grown and I felt a relaxed yet productive atmosphere when entering the venue. Just a few minutes after I arrived I hooked up with interesting people with even more interesting discussions. It was very nice to get together with all the Free Software friends I made over the last years. It was also pleasent to see the event becoming bigger and bigger. I take that as a sign that our community grows although it might also just be consolidation of events.

The organision team provided everything from Brazilian BBQ to perfect weather 🙂 The schedule hosted interesting sessions, including mine of course 😉 I had a small workshop on signing OpenPGP keys and I made people use GNOME Keysign. 😉 It was successful in the sense that we were able to shake out a few bugs to make the application more robust. I also realised that networks are not very permissive nowadays. More precisely, the WiFi blocked mDNS traffic preventing the apps from finding each other 🙁 One design goal of the app was to not have to rely on an Internet connection. But if the networks prevent clients from talking to each other then I think we need to go via the Internet in order to transfer files locally :/ Fortunately, we are working on an Internet transport. Stay tuned for further posts on this issue.

Oh, and we even had a GNOME stand full of amazing stuff.

Talking at GPN 2017 in Karlsruhe, Germany

Although the GPN is an annual event, I haven’t managed to go very often. Last time has already been a while. It’s a pity, because the event is very cute. The location is just amazing which makes being there really fun. It’s a museum hosting many things from our digital world. If you visit only one thing in Karlsruhe, go and visit it. In fact, we tried to organise a small excursion during GUADEC last year. Bloomberg also has an article about the event.

I could only stay one day, but I opened the conference with my talk on building a more secure operating system without sacrificing usability which, of course, was a GNOME related talk. The room was packed and people had to sit on the floor. Based on the feedback I think the people liked to be explained what challenges are to be solved in order to ship more secure systems to more people. You can find the slides here. In case you want to practise your German, you can watch the video here.

The schedule had a few other gems, too. My favourite was Loeschi talking about the upcoming Smart Meter Gateway situation in Germany and how it compares to the rest of Europe. The talk about QR Codes was also nicely done and explained quite well how they work. I hope to be able to attend the event more often 🙂 Especially because I wish the Free Software and the “hacker” people would mingle a bit more.

FOSS.in 2012 \o/

After it didn’t happen last year, it will this year! I’m talking about FOSS.in, the premier Free Software conference in India, if not Asia. I’m very pleased to see that this event managed to pull it off again. Also, everything seems to be very much in time this year, so I expect things to go down smoothly.

If you have something cool to share and want to attract a highly motivated audience, which doesn’t only want to listen, but also to do something, then you should consider submitting something. The FOSS.in 2012 takes place, again, in Bangelore, India, from 2012-11-29 until 2012-12-01.

The Call for Papers is closing soon, so hurry up!

GNOME3 Release Parties

Oh, I almost forgot about the GNOME 3 Release Party that we had the other week. In fact, I had two times the pleasure of showing off GNOME 3 to the people. The first and official Release Party was held in the Attraktor. We even got mentioned by Heise. The second time was in my university during a self organised seminar.

On both occasions, I had to entertain a good bunch of people (around 15 and 30) and, well, it went at least alrightish, I’d say 😉 The second time was a bit confusing, because my Laptop didn’t want to as perform well as I expected so a good bit of improvisation was needed. But it was great fun overall. The goodies, that were provided by the GNOME Foundation, were well received, esp. the T-Shirts.

I showed off the really brilliantly done videos that Jason produced. We demoed and discussed those features and discovered even more stuff on the way. I haven’t really worked much with GNOME3, esp. GNOME Shell before and it’s kinda awkward in the beginning, but I got used to it very quickly. I really like much of it now.

Thanks to the Attraktor for having hosted us. And thanks to the attendees for the nice discussions. I’m looking forward to do some more GNOME3 presentations at coming LinuxTag and other occasions.

Happy GNOME3 everybody!

GNOME 3 Launch Party in Hamburg

For the new GNOME-3 love we will have a release party in Hamburg, just as many places over Germany and the whole world!

If you want to join the fun, be in the Attraktor, the local hackerspace. The address is Mexikoring 21, 22999 Hamburg, Germany, Europe, Earth, Solarsystem. Find more detailed instruction on how to get there here. The party starts on Friday, 2011-04-08, at 18:00 and runs open end.

We have a page in the local wiki to describe the event and further planning will take place there: http://wiki.attraktor.org/Termin:GNOME-3-Launch-Party. As for the program: We intend to have a small introductory talk to show off what new user experience GNOME-3 will bring to the people. Afterwards, we will distribute GNOME-3 images to be put on pendrives to be able try GNOME-3. Finally, we’ll sit around, have some beers and snacks and discuss about the new and shiny GNOME 🙂

Besides the GNOME-3 images, we’ll have GNOME-3 goodies to give away! Thanks a lot to the GNOME Foundation making that possible! So show up early to claim your goodies!

So I expect you to be there 🙂