Boston Summit 2006

Wandering about in Boston

We arrived in Boston Tuesday evening. That gave us plenty of time to recover before the Summit and the Mobile, Handheld and Embedded Hackfest held two days earlier.

Carlos spotted Tomb from somewhere. The tagline “Like stepping into an Indiana Jones movie” should give some idea what it was like. Pretty nice.

Dinner we had in FiRE & iCE improvisational grill. It’s do-it-yourself, you pick and choose the ingredients and they cook it for you. And it was good.

After dinner we went for a übertower of pumpkin beer at CBC. ick. Suffice to say it didn’t make any friends.

Embedded hackfest

The embedded hackfest was great. Though no hacking on the code was done we made good progress on other fronts. It’s almost frightening how similar people are thinking. What the embedded platform is is considered roughly the same. Everyone is having issues with gtk+ performance thanks to Carlcairo. (Sorry Carl, we missed you While there’s steady progress on the performance, today gtk+ 2.6 seems most viable option for FPU-less ARM devices.

Summit

While great in its own way I felt the summit was a bit scattered and the more focused embedded days ended up being more productive. I had a wild goose chase trying to optimize pango extents handling with cairo backend. Others were trying to replace pango/cairo with pango/Xft in gtk+ 2.8. Hope to hear from them soon!

tigert was pimping GeoClue every chance he got Which was good, it seemed well received and accomplish fair amount of hacking.

And I can’t wait to hear more on Echelon for GNOME.