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@ijansch Isn't apple anti fanboy-ism simply the second step to becoming an apple fanboy. Denial.

Year of the gnome desktop talk

I promised to put up my previous presentation as soon as I had some time. Well that took a bit longer then excepted but here it is.

the year of the gnome desktop.odp
the year of the gnome desktop.pdf

You are free to use and adopt this presentation as you see fit and I will try to explain the story that goes with it.

Slide 1: I start up explaining why the question "The year of the Linux Desktop" is very relevant to gnome, and can equally be stated as "The year of the gnome Desktop". I reference to various distributions and their preference of shipping gnome as the default.

Slide 1-9: These are basically a joke in which I show that the question is a very old one. When ending on number nine i take some time to recall some issues those articles have stated for linux not being ready yet for the desktop.

Slide 10: This slide shows some adoption numbers from the gnome marketing page. I make the point here that while the articles are saying one thing, there are governments and companies that are investing in linux as a desktop solution.

Slide 11-12: Here i pose the question, is linux ready for the desktop. I go over some issues that have been resolved and go over some issues that are still problems.

Slide 13: I talk about suppliers who are already delivering linux desktops to the public.

Slide 14: I talk about the software needs of people, what people are getting from windows/Mac and what they will expect to find.

Slide 15-16: I show the solutions for the previously shown needs. I also work in a little joke by changing firefox to Epiphany

Slide 17: I pose the same question as before, but directed not at Linux but at users. I also talk about about some usability work that has been done for gnome.

Slide 18: I end with a novell linux commercial.

The above talk is about 30 minutes based on how much you can tell at each slide. But it could easily be filled up a bit with more recent developments to get in more time.

Tuesday, February 12 2009

Nu.nl blog post

Just made a blog post on my corperate blog about my work on nu.nl. NU.nl; the back-end

Sunday, January 11 2009

7 things

I've been tagged by Lorna Jane in the current internet meme of telling seven things about myself that nobody knew. If your reading this because your following planet gnome-nl, then you have probably missed the meme, but it's the current rage in the php community. But i'll be sure to facilitate some cross over.

So without further ado, let's begin.

I knew i wanted to become a programmer at a rather young age. I can clearly remember lending a "programming" book from the local library containing programmes for the C64 that my family had at that time. However, the book simply contained multiple pages of "code" you needed to copy by hand, and seeing as i was around 10 years old then, with the attention span of your average house cat, it didn't really work out. However, a few years later when we had a PC my mother taught me how to create simple quizzes in DBase, and later i started writing and adapting programs in Basic. After that i never really stopped.
Not much of a new thing, but i used to have long hair starting from 2000 til early 2008. I actually wanted to cut it before i started working at ibuildings, but as things went i forgot about it until i was already working there. There was no real reason to cut it beyond, there being no real reason to keep it, and i needed a change. Any photographic evidence to me having long hair will be categorically denied.
I speak a very small amount of japanese. I've always been fascinated by japanese culture and as such tried to learn the language. I'm still planning to learn it one day, but i'm not in a hurry.
The first "real" program i wrote, that could be called a program, was 'pong' in qbasic. It made use of the graphics mode and contained a algorithm to draw numerals and variable refresh for speed. You played against the computer, who had 3 difficulty settings. The difficulty basically determined how fast his paddle could move.
My first 'hack' was editing the save game of the shareware version of 'one must fall', a old robot centered beat-em up. I used a hex editor to change a certain position to 0xFF, to give me lots of money.
My first involvement with gnome was when gnome-nl announced that they wanted to expand into doing a bit more with marketing and such. Before gnome-nl had been primarily a translation effort. Since i had a lot of trouble contributing back by writing code, i figured this would be a nice way to do something. Before i knew it i was at the novell congress with reinout, vincent and ronald and had a absolute blast telling people about the wonderful world of gnome.
I didn't realise PHP had a professional community before coming to ibuildings and meeting all these people being really passionate about a PHP. Before that, i always figured PHP was a bit of a ragtag community without any real substance. Which was a pretty nice eye opener, and i will certainly try to become apart of this community.

And now you know.
Below in no particular order are the 7 new people i tag.

Harrie Verveer - I knew harrie for a long time from the cafe, but never knew he was a programmer until i joined ibuildings.
Reinout van Schouwen - A crossover to gnome. reinout is one of the mayor gnome-nl contributors.
Wouter Bolsterlee - A fallback crossover to gnome. Wouter is another mayor contributor, and also a php developer if i'm not mistaken.
Boy Baukema - Another of the ibuildings developers farm, passionate about JS and this should be a good excuse to write something new on that blog of his.
Dade - He liked Ruby on Rails, but i'm not going to hold it against him. (yet)
Willem Spruijt - Willem Spruijt is one of the people behind Qash, and since i think Qash is a absolutely brilliant application, i'm tagging him as well.
Paul van Veenendaal - A old-time co-worker of mine, his current job description is (i kid you not) Wizard Digital Lab. I have no idea what that means, but i'm hoping to find out.

Wednesday, October 08 2008

software freedom day

A few weeks ago i was at software freedom day in baarn. I would link to the website, but apparently there are some problems, it used to be at www.softwarefreedomday.eu but it appears to be down now. Anyhow, as you might know, software freedom day is the celebration of freedom in software around the world. Bas de Lange organised one the dutch parties this year, where he manages to fill the day with all kinds of talks about all the wonderful free projects we have here in the netherlands and around the world.

After a short meet and greet and introduction speech from bas, the day started off with a talk about the vision and future of KDE by Jos Poortvliet. Because of time constraints he couldn't go into much of the eye-candy that KDE 4 brings us, but his talk was smooth and showed a lot of shared ideals and visions that are present in the GNOME community.

Next up was myself. Last year i talked about '10 years of gnome', celebrating the fact that gnome has a long and interesting road behind itself. This year however i chose to speak about 'The year of the gnome desktop'. I tried to answer the question using some available adoption figures, and after that, questioned the question itself. Because the question simply can't be answered, at least not when reading articles that sport the question in their title. If you would look back at articles written in 2003, all the reasons why linux/gnome isn't ready for the desktop yet, are all taken care of. But they simply keep thinking up new reasons why linux hasn't been adopted yet. Which in my opinion, is a explanation of a different question. I then ended the presentation with a commerical from novell

To tell you the truth however, it didn't really go that well. The presentation and idea behind it where solid, however my preparation was sub-par. I hope the people didn't notice it that much, but i had a few bad moments and also lost track of time. I actually thought i had only been speaking for 5 minutes when one of the organisers alerted me that my half hour was almost done.

What i was very happy about was the presentation itself though. I tried to avoid putting too much information on the sheets and instead focused on the story. This actually avoided the whole "looking at the sheets to see what i should be talking about" effect. I will try to put up the presentation as soon as i have time. I could do it now, but because the sheets are empty without the story it would be a waste of both of our time.

After my talk, in the obligatory question round, we got a nice little discussion about increasing adoption/awareness rates for linux/gnome. I also spoke about this with Jos for a bit. grassroots telling your neighbour about it, and getting those IT companies that serve the small business to take a look at linux as a valid alternative.

Because of the discussions, i missed the talk about GNUradio, i talked to Martin afterwards, and was pretty much blown out of the water for the scope that the project had. Their software enabled everything that does radio, and when they say radio they mean waves and not just music radio. Apparently they can also tackle things like radar and wifi.

All in all, it was a fun day, i found out about some projects it didn't know of before and met some new people in the dutch open source world.

Saturday, June 28 2008

Dutch PHP Conference

Ibuildings, my employer, recently organised a dutch, php centric conference called Dutch PHP conference, (Hey at least points for obvious naming). Of course all employees could attend the conference for free. Now i've been to quite a few conferences and gatherings over the years but i've never really been to a programming language conference before. So i was actually kind of curious to what it would be like.

With around 300 people and a fairly concentrated location the atmosphere was nice and relaxed, perhaps also because it was a developers conference the overall feeling was casual, also because of the relative low amount of people it had a very personal feeling, but perhaps this was also because ~70 of those people where my colleagues.

The talks themselves where interesting and the speakers where all good at keeping the room concentrated on the speaker but i found that the talks lacked some technical depth that i would have expected from a programmers conference. On the other hand the first day i was absolutely a wreck because i had to wake up at 5 o'clock. It also might have been my choice in talks, because i just followed the main track which might have been the 'light' version of the conference talks.

Some notable thing i took away from DPC would be the crash coarse in Zend Framework by Matthew Weier O'Phinney. I especially like the fact that ZF can be used as much or as little as you want, making it ideal for those small projects you have where you just want the ease of use of a framework without the fuss of overcomplicating the project by actually using a full fledged framework.

PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 - A look ahead by Stefan Priebsch was nice, although it was a pity his talk was only half a hour+. He had a very nice relaxed style of presenting with just the right amount of facts and his own opinions on those. It was nice that he allowed for a discussion on the namespaces feature, but since i don't really care for that feature i would have rather had him cut that short a bit sooner.

The two closing keynotes by respectively Marco Tabini and Terry Chay where also real nice, not so much because of the body of their talks, but more because the energy with which they presented their talks.

Marco's talk was mainly about there being no real mayo in america, we should focus on the cost-per-page when considering the business model and that cloud computing can help control those costs.

I don't really remember what Terry's talk was about, except that he used a lot of shrek movie snippets and slagging ruby on rails. His talk was really chaotic and i think missed some focus. But it might also be because it was essentially the last talk of the day so i might have been a bit drowsy. Hearing PHP being compared to a ball with nails sticking out of it was pretty funny though. His reasoning was that PHP might be ugly from a language standpoint, but at least it sticks to things.

A thing i noticed was that there where very little vendor stands, the only three where Zend, PHPWoman and phpGG. I would have at least expected there to be some stand from red hat, mysql and/or oracle.

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