McEs, A Hacker Life
Can I has intel tablet?
So I missed the intel party it seems. I assume the tablets are GLES2-ready and have a fair pixel density. If that is the case, I can make good use of one for OpenGL-based text rendering I'm experimenting with. If there are leftovers at the summit, I'd happily take one!
kthxbye :)
Labels: desktopsummit, guadec, intel, pango, textlayout
Lazyweb: Conference organizing/scheduling software
Dear Lazyweb:
What are the best Free Software conference orginizing / scheduling pieces of software?
We are looking for things more sophisticated than Drupal's conference module. Two years ago we used
expectnation, a kickass hosted service that
Edd Dumbill kindly offered to GUADEC free of charge. But we are looking to host our own within the GUADEC infrastructure now that we finally have started looking into building real infrastructure for running GUADEC website on an ongoing basis as opposed to rebuilding it from scratch every year.
So, please leave comments and share your experience. Thanks in advance.
Labels: guadec
GCDS / GUADEC slides and videos
Slides.
Videos.
If your slides are not there, send them in.
Labels: gcds, guadec
GCDS days 0,1,2, GUADEC day 1
Lots going on here in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Here's my update as of Monday 7AM while I wait for breakfast to be served:
Done so far:- All day old+new GNOME meeting, featuring Rosanna this year. On my defense, I was jetlagged and had to take that nap.
- Opening party sponsored by Canonical. Got to see many many old and new faces and partied till 3AM, at which point we walked on the beach back to our hotel rooms.
- Still managed to wake up at 8:30 and sit on the opening panel at 10. Though Vincent thinks that I was quite sleepy,
- Sat through morning keynotes. Loved Walter Bender's presentation tool.
- Had board meeting with RMS over lunch. As usual, he ordered for everyone and it was pretty good. We talked about a couple issues. Nothing surprising.
- Took an afternoon nap and woke up to prepare for my talk 10AM the next day. Finally started typing around midnight, and my performance didn't hit its peak until 3AM or so. Skipped sleep and finished the slides right on time at 8:30AM. The actual slides didn't make more than 30 min to prepare since I used slippy again. For the first time however, I first wrote a paper about what I wanted to talk about: State of Text Rendering.
- Got to the venue, took us ten minutes to find the room, right on time, first session, 10AM, no surprise: no one there. I knew these back-to-back 30min slots are going to be a pain (I didn't decide). Anyway, projector issues, and people just starting to come in, I started at 10:15AM and managed to skip enough stuff to finish on time at 10:30. But Matthew didn't show up until 10:50, so I had to entertain people and do a demo of Matthew's stuff. Was good to see Simon Hausmann again.
- Sat through the Poppler talk and finally met Albert Astals Cid, the Poppler maintainer. Another benefit of co-location.
- Attended the real GUADEC opening in the afternoon with Owen's GNOME Shell keynote. Neat stuff. Got to start playing with it.
- MIA: Had to skip the Nokia party. I hear it was one of the better GUADEC parties, with some real action going on and what not. Oh well. Hopefully I'll make up for it at the Igalia party tonight :-D.
- Actually wrote my school paper about my pre-election activities. Finished by the deadline which at 5AM. Pretty happy about it. May clean it up and publish it here later.
Still TODO:- Meet with Rosanna, Stormy, and J5 today to prepare the foundation finance presentation for adboard and AGM.
- Advisory board meeting all day tomorrow (downstairs in Fataga).
- Prepare GUADEC+Akademy survey to hand out later in the week to see what we are supposed to do for next year.
- GNOME+KDE board meeting to discuss next year plans among other things.
- GNOME Foundation AGM on Thursday 10AM. Ugh, first session again. Hope it's not a no show. Please be there!
- Meet with Albert to discuss fontconfig issues in Poppler as well as better PDF text extraction.
- Meet with Alberto to discuss/design new font chooser dialog.
- Meet with Robster to make him learn how to use slippy.
- Meet with Simon Hausmann to discuss HarfBuzz progress.
- Meet with Jonathan since we're both here.
- Meet with Owen and Cody for a quick Pango BoF, discussing extended attributes and extending markup as well as HarfBuzz plans.
- Perhaps do a BoF on Iran situation since that's the first thing everyone asks. Drop me a line if you're interested.
Humm, anything I'm missing? Poke me if we should meet. Now to breakfast. I'll give fixing my sleeping schedule another try next. Good morning everyone in the mean time.
Labels: guadec
GUADEC Day 0
Had an excellent afternoon in Amsterdam with my old buddy Mehrdad. Well, the first officer at the Amsterdam border didn't want to let me although I had a Schengen visa, the second one was happy to do so.
Anyway, got to Gran Canaria last night just before midnight, but my luggage decided to spend a night in Barcelona...
Was in board meeting all day today. Vincent is working on sending out the minutes right away.
Looking forward to meeting everyone at the opening party tonight at 9.
Labels: 2009, guadec
GUADEC: Where are you staying?
Fill it in:
l.g.o/GUADEC/2009/Rooms.
Labels: 2009, guadec
Amsterdam on Thursday
On my looong way to Gran Canaria Desktop Summit later this week I'll have a six-hour afternoon stop in Amsterdam, perfect for grabbing lunch and a walk around town. Anyone interested drop me a line.
Cheers,
behdad
Labels: amsterdam, guadec
GUADEC schedule now available, 2009 edition
Ok, we're finally ready to share with you the final GUADEC 2009 schedule:
Err, I mean, GUADEC 2009 schedule.
Expect minor changes, but this is basically it. We'll add the Saturday schedule in ASAP. Lightning talks go there as well as keynotes. For more information about non-GUADEC activities see the main site for the event.
Labels: guadec
Lots of GNOME happenings
Many good things have been happening around GNOME. Others have already blogged about most of them, so I cheat and link frequently.
A Very Late “Happy New Release”
The release team did it again: GNOME 2.26 was release
d on March 18th, on schedule to the day.
Thanks everyone involved: translators, developers, release engineers, and release note authors.
Humm, darn, I just remember that I didn't hold a release party this time. What a shame. I sure have been busy. More on that later.
Google Summer of Code
It's that time of the year again. GNOME is participating in Google Summer of Code 2009.
The deadline for submitting student applications is April 3rd. For more information (for both students and mentors) as well as project ideas check here.
I decided not to run cairo for GSoC again. And I'm not involved in the GNOME GSoC organization. That makes this year the first GSoC that I have no involvement in. I plan to pick up again next year. That said, I'll be in a GSoC panel at UofT next Tuesday March 31st, in GB244. Students welcome.
GUADEC Call for Participation
The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit website is finally up and running. Which means, you can register for GUADEC now.
The Call for Participation is also up. April 10 is the deadline for submissions. So, hurry up! Bastien, Emmanuele, Paul, Ross, Ryan, as well as myself will review the submissions.
The conference layout is going to be different this year, which makes scheduling harder. Earlier-than-last-night-and-late submissions are highly appreciated. Yes, I'm talking to You ☟.
Next Foundation Elections
The current GNOME Foundation Board of Directors' term ends on June 30th. Which means elections will be coming up in a month or two as Vincent explains.
Take a couple minutes and read his post again if you are passionate about GNOME.
The board work can be frustrating at times, but in the long run it can be quite rewarding. While I miss the days that I could focus on coding and let others worry about organization, money, etc, I'll be running again this year.
Friends of GNOME Love ♥
In January we launched the new Friends of GNOME website. The main feature of the new site has an option for recurring donations, called Adopt a Hacker.
The fun part about the Adopt a Hacker option is that you get to choose your favorite hacker from a list of about a dozen hackers, and the adopted hacker will send you a postcard as a token of appreciation.
One thing about the postcard idea is that since we started the program recently, we are still sorting out the logistics and no postcards have been sent out yet. Which I guess will make receiving it more unexpected for our friends, and hopefully more delightful.
I certainly felt that way when I came back from vacation a few weeks ago and found this in my mail box:
The back of the card reads:
Hi!
I recently joined this
adopt-a-hacker programme
It is something about post
cards. I think I am
supposed to send you
one? See you soon.
R
Thanks you R from Zürich. Now I owe you two. And I feel adopted!
So, what are you waiting for? Adopt a Hacker today!
Labels: elections, gnome, gsoc, guadec
GUADEC+Akademy News
We are making some progress on the joint GUADEC+Akademy conference organization. Time for a quick post.
Last week we
announced the dates for the joint GUADEC+Akademy conference: July 3..11.
Today the local team set up a twitter account for the event. Follow
it to stay tuned!
In two weeks teams from GNOME and KDE will meet with the local organizers on the spot to further work on organization.
Combined event site. We should be updating guadec.org soon.
I also like to thank three long time GNOME lovers who kindly accepted to represent the board in GUADEC organization for next year:
Alberto Ruiz, Chema Casanova, and
Dave Neary. We all owe them beer in July.
Labels: akademy, guadec
Setting the record straight
In Heathrow for another hour, then will arrive in Istanbul for
GUADEC. I'm staying at Golden Horn. Guys, lets meet at the lobby around 9PM for mild beer tasting.
Also, it's a shame to read "Ista
mbul" on pgo so frequently. Please, write "Ista
nbul", read as you wish :).
Can't wait to meet everyone... For those of you not coming this year, sorry guys, have to live with it for a week. I'm talking to you sri :-D.
Update: There are two Golden Horn hotels. I'm in the Sultanahmet one. But gather in the lobby of either one and you'll find enough familiar faces to go out drinking with.
Labels: gnome, guadec, istanbul
Akademy+GUADEC *2009* Hosting Proposals
In response to our
joint call-for-bids earlier this year, the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. boards received three proposals tohost Akademy+GUADEC 2009. The bids are available for review
here.
The boards did not receive any separate bids for Akademy-only or GUADEC-only hosting. Which proves again, how excited the community is about the joint conference. Note that we got only one bid for GUADEC 2008, and two bids for the year before that.
At this time we are soliciting comments from the GNOME community and other GUADEC regulars. Please use the thread on foundation-list to submit your comments. The review period closes on July 4th, in preparation for making a decision in Istanbul.
Regards,
Behdad
On behalf of GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. boards
Labels: 2009, akademy, gnome, guadec, kde
GUADEC schedule now available
Thomas is still
uploading last GUADEC's videos, but...
The schedule for GUADEC is
available now. There are still a bunch of slots awaiting confirmation from their speakers before showing up in the schedule, but the core days (9th, 10th, 11th) are pretty much complete now.
Expectnation made it relatively easy to do the schedule after I upgraded to Firefox 3 (it was painfully slow with FF2 under Linux). Thank you guys. Doesn't mean I didn't have to use the pen though. This is how it was done:
Still better than last year.
Labels: gnome, guadec
GUADEC CfP closing
Have been in Iran visiting family, but "vacationing" in Dubai for an Arabic-domain-names meeting now.
Just a quick note that you still have a few hours to
submit your GUADEC proposals.
I also want to stress that financial issues should not keep anyone from coming to GUADEC. If you need sponsorship to get there, register and follow the instructions there
now.
Labels: cfp, gnome, guadec, istanbul
GUADEC 2008 Website and CFP
Another announcement:
GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference will be held in Istanbul, Turkey from the 7th to the 12th of July 2008. The conference will bring together the GNOME development and user community and key personalities from businesses and governments, to discuss the future direction of the GNOME project.
The call for participation in the conference is now open, and will close on March 30th. A variety of presentations and session can be proposed. “Emerging GNOME trends set the dialog at GUADEC. It was Online Desktop last year, and GNOME Mobile the year before that.” said the program chair, Behdad Esfahbod (that would be me), “We are excited to see what the community brings to GUADEC this year.”
Read the full
announcement.
Something we are doing differently this year is that we are accepting technical keynote proposals. If you have a great talk in mind, propose it as keynote! We'll just downgrade it to regular talk if need be. Now go work on your proposals!
GUADEC website:
http://www.guadec.org/Call for presentations:
http://guadec.org/guadec08/public/cfp/1Keynote speakers:
http://guadec.org/public/content/keynotesLabels: announcement, gnome, guadec, istanbul
GUADEC 2008 Dates Available
Thanks to hard work of
Baris, the dates and venue for
GUADEC 2008 are
announced now.
Mark your calendars and book your tickets for 7th-12th of July, 2008 for an awesome week in
Istanbul's
Bahcesehir University.
Cheers!
Labels: 2008, baris, gnome, guadec
GUADEC Presentations
So, again, GUADEC was awesome and all. Could be a better experience if I didn't get sick on the way back.
Anyway, please link your presentations slides
here. Or just fill it in with others.
Labels: guadec, slides
GUADEC
GUADEC is mostly over and I didn't get any chance to blog about it. The vacation week before it in London didn't help either. Anyway, awesome conference, met many people and still many many more to meet. Too many good stuff to list, I'll just link to highlights from
Lucas and
Vincent instead.
Carl and I talked about cairo code and community. The slides are now available here.
In the spirit of cairo talks for the past five years we wrote our own presentation tool. We wanted to be able to be able to have arbitrary cairo drawing in the slides without having to make SVG/PNG out of them first, so we spent 24 hours writing the tool in PyGTK and the final hour before the talk to populate the slides. Anyway, the code is available as a git tree here, or just browse it here. I think it's pretty cool and I'll be polishing and using it for other talks in the future.
One interesting aspect of writing the above tool is that Carl and I totally understood what people mean when they say cairo is slow. Got a lot to do. Stay tuned...
Labels: cairo, guadec, slides
UK
My UK visa arrived this morning at 9. I sent the package out to Ottawa the day before yesterday, in the afternoon! Very, very, nice of them.
So I'm going from my deferred schedule to original schedule. all things going as planned (and not much is left), I'll be at
Text Layout 2007 /
aKademy,
LUG Radio Live!, and last but not least,
GUADEC.
Interviews:Interview with Hans Reiser in prison. Quite touching, particularly the closing.
Mehdi, an Iranian Free Software evangelist
interviewed me a few weeks ago, it's up on Hezardastan (Persian).
Labels: akademy, guadec, lrl, reiser, textlayout, travel, uk
