GUADEC Day #1
July 16, 2007
I am writing this in the morning of the second day (posted at the end of the second day). Just had breakfast and there is a bit of time before making it to the conference venue.
Yesterday Sunday, was the first of the two days of warm-up for the GUADEC conference. At 11am the registration started. I was in front of the queue and got my badge quickly, then picked up the bag with the goodies; three cool t-shirts, a copy of Ubuntu 7.04, Fedora 7 Live, Linux stickers, two Linux pens, a mini Google Code notebook (no, that’s an actual notebook (not that type of notebook, it was just the paper-based thing)).
During registration I met up with Dimitrios Glezos (of Greek Fedora fame) and a bit later with Dimitrios Typaldos. It was the first time I met both of them in person.
Between a choice of two sessions I went to the one on X.org developments (XDamage, xrender, etc extensions and how to use them). Ryan Lortie gave the presentation.
Next was lunch time, and Dimitrios T. recommended a pub for traditional English food and drink. Sayamindu came along.
The next session I went to was the Hildon desktop, which is what we used to call Maemo; GNOME for internet tables such as the Nokia 770 and Nokia 800. There are special technical issues to solve. Lucas Rocha mentioned refactoring issues with the source code. In addition, as far as I understood, there is an issue with the internationalisation support for the platform.
Next, Don Scorgie talked about the GNOME documentation project. Several things can be improved and one of them is the introduction of a simplified XML schema for the needs of GNOME documentation. When compared to DocBook XML, the new GNOME documentation schema has only 6 elements (or do they call them tags?). In addition to this, there is a documentation editor with a special rich-edit widget for this schema. Mallard is a type of duck(?).
I also attended the last 10 minutes of the presentation on project Jackfield (sadly no special significance between Jackfield and what the project is about). Jackfield is apparently a way to run Javascript scripts on the desktop. OS/X is supposed to have it, and there are already scripts available. With Jackfield, you can run those scripts unmodified on Linux. The demos where really impressive.
The final session for the day was a presentation by Richard Rothwell on free software for the socially excluded. No, you do not have to go to Africa for this. His work relates to families in Nottingham, UK. It reminds me the situation and effort in Farkadona, Greece, that was described by Kostas Boukouvalas. I think it would have been helpful if Kostas Boukouvalas could have attended this. Richard is running a 3-year project that provides a number of PCs (in the hundreds?) with Linux to socially excluded families. Even in the UK, funding is hard to come by.
Google Groups: Member Invite Request Approved
July 6, 2007
When creating a Google Group, you have the option of auto-subscribing a list of e-mails. That is, the owner of the email address does not have perform the subscription task. To avoid the apparent spamming opportunity, Google Groups puts a human to review those requests. After you pasted the e-mail addresses, you press Submit and then get a text box where you can write a message to help this person decide.
While filling such a request, I made a gross mistake and I added 140 more email addresses than I should. In the text box I write with capitals, PLEASE CANCEL THIS REQUEST, MISTAKE.
Just now I got a reply, and that requst got approved. On the positive side, the auto-subscription request was thankfully converted to a notification request, so all these people received a request to join the group.
Thank you all for not complaining!
p.s.
My regular blog is offline for a few days so I am using this one for now.
