GVADEC
Finally got yesterday home, back from Kristiansand, so before I forget, here is
a report of the 3 days of GUADEC. All photos are here.
As always, it’s been a lot of fun; hanging around with people is what is GUADEC about,
at least for me. Very nice to meet the Indian gang from Novell (with, BTW, very nice looking
t-shirts that they were giving away in their talk about the
GNOME
Bangalore group), the people from GNOME
Germany, with whom I had a lot of laughs, the Latin mafia (with some additions, like
Fernando from Chile, Paco from Extremadura and Paulinho from Brazil), and, of course,
to see again (after almost 2
years) the Evolution team (or part of at least).
Special thanks go to the streaming guys, who had all working pretty well so that people could
follow the talks from Internet
New software
I’ve known about a couple of new pieces of software during GUADEC. The first one is
Beagle (I already
knew about it, but didn’t know it was already working so well), which is an indexer to search
the user’s data, with a very nice integration into Nautilus. The other one is
MapEditor, which is a
very nice map application. The most interesting thing is that the maps are being generated
by Amaury, the author, by using a computer with a GPS drive in his car.
Another interesting piece of software, which I knew about while I was in Extremadura for
the GUADEC-ES,
and which was presented by Jose, from Extremadura, in his talk,
is Squeak, a programming
system, based on Smalltalk, which allows teachers and students to do their own applets,
which makes it a perfect tool for teaching purposes, and so is being used for that in
Extremadura.
GTK+ team meeting
I attended the GTK+ team meeting, where some sort of roadmap for the next two versions was
decided. I completely forgot to raise one thing I wanted to, which was to put the tree models
into GLib, so that other non-GUI libraries/applications can use them (and not have to create
their own data models, as we do in libgda).
I’ll probably look into it as soon as time permits.
GNOME System Tools
Carlos Garnacho’s talk on GNOME System Tools had quite a lot of attendees, which I hope means
there will be more and more interest in bringing these tools into the official GNOME distribution.
One question that was raised though was, what about Yast, SuSE’s setup tools. And yeah, what
about it?
Dr Edgar Villanueva’s keynote
I was asked to help on the simultaneous translation of Dr Edgar Villanueva’s talk, so, with the
help of German,
Fernando and Daniel, I think we managed to do it fairly well. Dr Villanueva’s talk, in
Spanish, was perfectly articulated, with a very clear explanation, so it was easy to
translate. I hope we managed, with our 2nd division English, to transmit Dr Villanueva’s
message, which clearly exposed his commitment to continue fighting for having laws that
help the Peru in the introduction of Free Software, very needed indeed in this kind of countries
to manage to close the digital gap there is (getting even further with the adoption of
Free Software in European countries and the even more monopolization in under-developed countries)
between them and the so called first world. I have also to agree with
Thomas
about Bruce Perens question to Dr Villanueva. The question indeed was not that bad IMO,
but it was indeed too long. I hope anyway something comes out of the talk, focused on
trying to help Peru and other countries in getting digital knowledge via the use of
Free Software.
Ximian Parties
The Ximian (or Novell) party was this year in the University’s pub, where there was a concert.
We thought, as was announced, it was going to be a R&R; concert, but it wasn’t. But anyway,
it sounded pretty good.
There was, on Wednesday night, an alternative Ximian party. It all started in the afternoon, when
I won the Pisco bottle at Fernando’s talk (it was the prize for answering the questions he
asked after the talk). After dinner, we went to the student flats, and started by having just a
bit of the bottle Fernando had left, but then more and more people started coming, so we opened
the other bottle, and all ended pretty crazy, with Roozbeh bringing two other bottles (gin and
something else I don’t remember) and lots of people around.
With a bit too much of alcohol in the body, we started playing a football game (soccer for the
Americans). It was a Latin countries with Iran’s Roozbeh against Americans, with two infiltrated
players, one from Germany and the other from Australia. I don’t remember who won (or if we were
even having a result), but it was a real football game, with even injuries (Fernando will be out
for the next 3 games). That was too much for me, so I went to bed to try to sleep a few hours
and get ready for the second part of the Europe odissey to go back home.
Joe Shaw’s fan club
It was the first time I saw Joe after he
had won the Emp** *f the Y**r (sorry, promised Joe to not say it anymore) award, so I
congratuled him. He was really upset, and told me he’s fed up of being called that thing,
so I now declare started the campaign against calling Joe E**Y**r anymore. Be nice, call
him something else 🙂