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.

Sunday, March 02 2008

FOSDEM

Last week was FOSDEM weekend, and this year the GNOME project had a stand there. While initially I was a bit worried that we might be a bit understaffed it all worked out quite wonderful. Lots of great GNOME hackers, translators, artists and others pitched in and spend some time behind the stand.

We had some great merchandise at the stand. Consisting of buttons, flyers and even t-shirts for both male and female. And the t-shirts where hot! In the first few hours of FOSDEM we had already sold dozens of them, and while I'm not sure how many we had in total, the girlies where soon sold out.

We where also graced with a few OLPC laptops that belonged to 4 OLPC hackers who hung out at our stand. Informing the public and of course ourselves about the project and the machine. I can tell you, having OLPC's at your booth is a sure-fire way to attract lots of attention. Many people stopped at our stand to try them out and ask questions about them. Because we where of course manning the stand a lot of those questions got asked to us, which meant that I learned a lot about them in a short time :)

Also present was the GNOME wall of love, where people attending FOSDEM could write about what they loved and hated about GNOME. Lots of post-it's where written and eventually threaded discussion emerged, like a analogue mailing list as it where.

At the end I think our stand was a great idea and I'm sure our presence there had a positive influence on the way people look at GNOME as a project. If only because there are now lots of people who are proudly walking around in a GNOME t-shirt.

Also since my phone makes really bad pictures I took all the pictures from flickr.
OLPC - jcorrius
stand decoration - ebassi
gnome love wall - joseppc
t-shirt - zugaldia
wall post-it's - isriya

On other news i've updated the look of my website. The old look is still available if your browser supports alternative style sheets. But i doubt anyone would care enough :)

-edit-
Just to correct something Dave Neary wrote. I didn't co-ordinate anything. As far as i know all praise should go to Vincent Untz and Philip van Hoof.

Thursday, February 14 2008

ibuildings & FOSDEM

Well since last time i blogged, (which was a while back) i've started working for my new employer, which is ibuildings. I feel pretty good about them and the new job is pretty good too. At some later date i'll probably blog more about it, but for now this will have to suffice.

Also i've finally made my bookings for FOSDEM, february kinda sneaked up on me and where already half way. Which means i now had the choice about sleeping in a expensive hotel or the street. All the other places where full. *sigh* Oh well, i can take it financially i guess.

This year whe are going to have a GNOME stand at FOSDEM, and like always at the moment where horribly understaffed. So any gnome-ies out there who could give a hand, even if its only for a hour or so, please visit the gnome fosdem pages and sign up.

StratoS Online

twitter | <= =>