Posts Tagged ‘events’
Nearly time for FOSDEM!
Sunday, January 20th, 2008LUGRadio Live 2007 Retrospective
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
After missing LUGRadio Live last year, I decided to go along this year. There were a few really good talks, the first of which was Thomas Vander Stichele’s Flumotion talk (I’ve since played with Flumotion and a post on that will be forthcoming). Also good was Scott James Remnant’s ‘Ten Really Cool Things’, which included a look at Compiz Fusion (born from the re-merging of Beryl into Compiz) – I normally fail to be impressed by 3D eye-candy as it usually serves no useful purpose, but some of the stuff in Compiz Fusion looks cool and actually useful usability-wise. It was also good to hear from Becky Hogge about the work the Open Rights Group has been doing since it was formed; it seems they are doing some really useful stuff and my £5 a month is being put to good use. I tend to be wary of new groups that pop-up and request money since in the past one well-known UK-based group (which I won’t name) started taking money and then did nothing useful or productive at all – they just sat around having AGMs and forming work-groups that never did any work. Anyway, there were lots more talks I would have liked to see, but the scheduling was far from ideal – in a few of the time-slots I wanted to see all three talks that were happening. Also for many of the talks the titles weren’t even published in the printed schedule on the day, making it somewhat difficult to choose what to see. I’m hoping there will be some audio or video of the KDE4, ‘I am a Lawyer’, ‘Free Software Rocks’, Google and BBC talks. There were some cool talks in the somewhat cringeworthy-yet-unmissable Gong ‘a’ Thong event (yes it included both a gong and a thong…) but there were also some really dull ones too. Perhaps next time the audience can have the power to cut-short talks like in The Comedy Store’s Gong Show.
I thought the exhibition area was very disappointing, with many notable projects and groups being unrepresented. Certainly there seemed to be more exhibitors at LRL2005… I guess clashing with the end of aKademy didn’t help. There were also very few well-known speakers – now I know well-known speakers don’t necessarily make for better talks, but it was just something that I noticed fairly quickly from looking at the schedule. Again, in 2005, there were several well-known speakers.
OK so I’ve given LRL a bit of a kicking for a few things, but there were some more good things too. The venue was pretty good and although the sunlight coming through the roof of the atrium area made it difficult to read slides, it did make it a very pleasant place to sit. The location was pretty good too – right near the railway station so easy to find and make a quick getaway from. The Friday-night meet up at the Hogs Head was also good, with several real ales to choose from and a free (and fairly substantial) buffet.
Unfortunately getting home from the event proved difficult, as a four hour journey was made to take eight hours by the rather inept handling of a technical fault on a Virgin Train (after sitting on a broken-down train for three hours, they finally arranged coaches for us). I was not very happy and won’t be losing any sleep over them losing their franchise.
Anyway, overall LRL2007 was a good event and I’ll probably go along next year. Unfortunately all my photos are pretty rubbish (I can either spend my time running around getting good shots or I can focus on enjoying the event – I chose to enjoy the event) but I’ve uploaded them to my photo album anyway.
FOSDEM retrospective
Thursday, March 1st, 2007Well having finally recovered from the beer and traveling associated with FOSDEM (it was a 10 hour journey for me, since I went by train in order to save a few quid) I figure I should do a quick write-up.
I didn’t take any photographs this time, simply because 1. I was feeling a bit lazy and 2. it has been shown from previous visits that my camera is not good enough to get decent photographs.
Anyway, for me the best talks of FOSDEM 2007 were Simon Phipps‘ Liberating Java and Sean Moss-Pultz’s OpenMoko.
While I’m not really interested in Java itself (I really don’t like Java as a language; it’s too object-oriented, if that makes sense), I am interested in Sun’s reason for GPLing Java and in their new-found commitment to Free Software. Simon Phipps is a really good speaker; he is somewhat like Stallman in that he has the ability to clearly convey what he’s trying to say and when he says something, you believe him. I think it’s essential that Sun have someone like Simon to speak for them, since as a community we’re somewhat wary of corporations that claim to be on our side, since that’s exactly how Novell were before they turned around and screwed us.
In any case, the talk actually wasn’t really about Java, but more about how Sun has come to recognise the importance of Free Software and are making a serious commitment to it – such as, announced for the first time during the talk, Sun becoming a corporate patron of the Free Software Foundation. What was also emphaised was that ‘Sun are listening’ are want to know if they’re screwing up in the eyes of the FLOSS community – this is good to hear and I hope that continues. I was hoping to catch up with Simon to discuss OpenSolaris licensing and how it is impacting on my Linux kernel development work, but unfortunately didn’t get the opportunity. I’ll have to mail him instead.
The OpenMoko talk was really interesting, because these guys have some really big ambitions and are bringing some new ideas to a somewhat stagnant industry. The company behind the OpenMoko project are producing a mobile phone (the Neo1973) based on 99% FLOSS, which is completely hackable: you can write standard GTK applications for them – none of this cut-down-slow-as-hell-Java nonsense to worry about. The small room the talk was in was not just full, but over-full – people were spilling out into the corridor. Clearly the popularity of the OpenMoko project had been grossly underestimated – it should have been in one of the main lecture theaters. A development model will be available in about a month for just $350 – I will absolutely be having one, presuming I can get a nice discount when they launch the final hardware revision a few months later. One thing that really annoys me is when I buy a mobile phone, only to find that the firmware is full of bugs (my current handset has more than its fair share). The prospect of having a bugzilla in which to report firmware bugs and having the ability to fix such things myself is really cool.
Looking at the handset in-the-flesh, it was cool to see it booting a regular Linux kernel with all the usual boot-up messages and framebuffer penguin in the top-left of the screen, but it did take about a minute or so from power-on until the UI was loaded – I hope this is fixed before they go into production!
I have to say that having been to FOSDEM each year since 2005, this has been the best one. Previously I’ve had difficulty finding enough talks that I’m interested in seeing, especially on the Sunday, but this time I was in talks all day on Saturday and most of the day on Sunday. Good work FOSDEM organisers!
FOSDEM is coming
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
It’s that time of year again!
If you know me and you’re going out to FOSDEM, mail me or leave me a comment here and we can meet up for a few fantastic Belgian beers.
St. George’s Day
Sunday, April 23rd, 2006
