Thoughts 'n Stuff

FOSDEM 2013

I am back from FOSDEM and I am always surprised how quickly it’s all over. Would you believe that I only got to attend two talks again, one of them being my own about Wayland input methods?

Friday Feb 1st

I arrived Friday evening, this time by train. Since I bought my first BahnCard ever in August last year, I am slowly convinced now that flying is just a huge waste of time and should be the last possibility to consider, not the first. Even though I spend much more time on the train than I would on the airplane I still travel more relaxed. Others claim to be super-productive on trains. I am happy enough if I get to braindump my thoughts into my notebook (the dead-tree variant) and then read a book (more dead-tree) to forget about work for once.

Another trick for better conferencing is to arrive (or leave) 1-2 days earlier (later), as this helps catching up with sleep and allows to process thoughts or just do some random stuff not related to conferencing, say, going to a museum or gallery. It allows me to be reckless to myself during the conference without needing one week to recover.

But back to that Friday evening: I was very happy that Quim could make it to our dinner at the Kabash. I knew he had a busy schedule for the next days and that I probably wouldn’t be able to meet him in Berlin. I think he enjoys working for Wikimedia even though he now has to pay for phone calls and 3G. We also had people from Igalia, Digia and Intel OTC joining. We enjoyed great food and nice conversations, then headed off to the beer event. This one has become crazily crowded. It’s nigh impossible to find people you know. Meeting new people is also a challenge. The entire concept of what should be a simple meet&greet is lost these days.

Saturday Feb 2nd

Jens and I arrived around 10am at the campus on Saturday, probably a first for both of us to be so early. It was so empty you could think they’d cancelled FOSDEM but that quickly changed of course. I had zero slides done by then and no motivation to do them either. I went to Dave’s talk and it was nice to see him and Mardy working on a relevant project again. As expected, GOA is dead in the water by now and work will most likely continue with accounts-sso. I realized that I would have to recycle an older talk for some slides, something I loathe to do.

Somewhere in between I had to meet some OpenEmbedded guys to debug Maliit on their custom hardware, but we didn’t get much further than realizing that dlopen() didn’t work properly.

Funniest thing that happened that Saturday was probably rasterman, timj and thiago trashing-talking about the kernel when they could have told each other how much their toolkits suck!

Biggest reveal of the day, however, was that Rob Taylor toured with the Darkness in his crazier years.

Jens was unlucky with his hands-on DLNA talk, but I blame it on the room (Lameere). I remember that my talk there last year was crap, too. None of his prepared demos worked and people started to leave the room. I felt bad for him because I the was one who pushed him into giving the talk. Mark took over the second half and surprisingly, all of his dLeyna demos worked. He got applause (and rightfully so) for each of them.

I only had two hours left by then for my talk (slides). Meeting more people all the time didn’t exactly help with my preparations. I was close to call Luc (organizer of the Xorg DevRoom) and ask him to cancel my talk. I am glad I didn’t because it turned out that worrying about my talk for the whole day was the best way to get back into the topic. You have to understand that Wayland input methods is a yesteryears project for me, all the hard thoughtwork as been done already and I have been mostly working on new projects since August last year. I think the talk was well received by the audience (at least the room was packed). However, I cheated by simplifying and ignoring the actual complexity of input methods a bit.

It was already getting late and by the time we arrived in Brussels center it was about time to head to the Gnome party. Same place at last year, but by around 11pm we had occupied the whole building. I didn’t even know half the guys. Gut feeling tells me this is a side effect of the UX hackfest that happend before, but I would like to believe that the Gnome community is growing again. It was great to see Gnome legends such as Federico or Alp attending, I think both of whom I had last (and first) seen in 2008.

Sunday Feb 3rd

I thought I’d be able to attend a couple of talks on Sunday, but I got stuck talking to people interested in actually working open-source DLNA stacks. I got invited to join the Xorg dinner in the evening, with half of the people being BSD guys. Xorg? BSD? I was fearing for my sanity. Some other embarassment might better be left unmentioned in this blog but the food and wine at least was great! Afterwards we ended up at Delirium again (where else …). At 2am we had to move to the Absinthe bar right next to Delirum. Wiser men than me (such as krh and Rob Clark, who now works for Red Hat!) left before, however. And so we ended up with more beer and several shots of Absinthe until the wee morning hours. Jon made the mistake at that point to ask me about my honest opinion (I actually don’t know why he tagged along with the Xorg hackers for so long), he might regret that by now. Wrong time, wrong place. Happens.

Monday Feb 4th

I had to checkout at 11am and get my train at 2:30pm. How I managed to get up by 11:15am I still don’t know. But luckily I was able to meet with Kat, Dave, Martin & Tobias for some waffle & chocolate breakfast. This was a much better FOSDEM ending than last year.

Tobias chose the same ICE train as me. Poor him, he had no idea what was coming for him: He had to endure my satirical reality talk from Brussels to Cologne. Both of us had to change trains then, with him heading off to Hamburg and me returning to Berlin. I wish I could have made it back a couple hours earlier now because I missed Quim’s presentation in the Wikimedia office.

Exhausted but happy, I finally arrived at home on Monday night.

Travel plans for September

Planning my travels for September made me yearn for a travel assistant — it’s impressive how much time one can waste with crappy booking websites and clueless hotel staff. On the other hand, doing it myself allowed me to shuffle things around until I was happy with the plan. Not sure my imagined travel assistant would have had that much patience ;–)

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll be attending the 2nd Automotive Linux Summit (Sep 19-20) and the schedule is packed with interesting talks. Sadly, there won’t be any time for me to visit Warwick Castle again, which is just 15 minutes away from the venue. They say it’s for kids, but the Warwick Castle daily shows are well worth a visit, even for grown-up kids.

The Automotive Linux Summit clashes with the X Developer Conference (Sep 19-21) in Nuremberg, which means I can only attend XDC on Friday (and perhaps the beer hike on Saturday). Now, I haven’t suddenly become a X hacker over night, but I want to know how the progress in Wayland is perceived and whether there’s some good advice for our Wayland input method work. It would have been a great opportunity for me to learn more about EGL and new trends in OpenGL, but I’ll have to leave that to my colleague Jan Arne Petersen, who will attend the whole conference.

After staying in Nuremberg for the weekend, I will spend a few days in Munich (not for the Wiesn) before I head home to Berlin.

Thanks to Openismus for sending me to ALS and XDC!

Questions for MeeGo

The MeeGo Spring Conference in San Francisco was nice, perhaps not so much for the press folks (uninspiring key note, no product announcements). As a speaker, I was fortunate enough to receive sponsorship from the Linux Foundation (special thanks to Brian Warner for the unbureaucratic approach to this). I got to meet a lot of people face-to-face and the hallway track spawned interesting discussions, circling around questions such as:

• Why would 3rd parties pick up MeeGo if it comes with an unfinished and unpolished UX?
• Why would 3rd parties perceive the MeeGo Conference as the wrong place for product annoucements?
• Is the MeeGo community inherently hostile towards the Open Core model of MeeGo?
• Where is the place for commercial engines in MeeGo?
• Why is Nokia's Qt development generally not regarded as an active MeeGo contribution coming from Nokia? QML scene graph, anyone?
• Why does a company such as Intel, which does not see itself as a MeeGo vendor, come up with its own app store?

And, of course the poisonous:

• Is MeeGo dead?

(I am going to be mean and won't answer the questions for you, as I am too opionated here, sorry.)

Other than that, San Francisco was of course great. I also spend some time travelling through California; the country side is simply gorgeous.

Skiing in Avoriaz, France

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I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Kat's invitation to Avoriaz since I've only been skiing as a kid. Suffice to say: I didn't regret accepting it!

Since flights were cheaper on New Year Kat, Dave and I already arrived at this amazing ski resort on first of January 2011. The worst part of the trip was actually the S-Bahn trip at 3am that seemed like an eternity. Crowded with drunk people, meh.

Avoriaz welcomed us with nice sunshine. We got our equipment and I came to realize that I can't ski at all. The next day made that painfully clear when I went down a beginner's slope without being able to turn or break, only to stop myself through falling. Got some bruises but it were the ski boots that felt like medieval torture tools. I felt sick and decided that I had enough for one day. That's when I decided to take ski lectures offered by the école du ski français. The three different instructors I had were all great: calm, patient but also pushing you once they realized you weren't challenged. After my first two lessons I already knew enough of the basics so that I could explore the remaining beginners slopes in Avoriaz on my own. More importantly - I started to enjoy skiing!

The instructors were happy and promoted me from "bloody beginners" to next skill level. Then again, when seeing how quickly kids can pick up skiing, all my efforts were put to shame ;-)

The downside to this approach, of course: I spent most of my skiing time isolated from the rest of us, but the alternative wouldn't have been fun for me anyway, given the huge skill gap.

What I liked about Avoriaz with its horse-powered taxis is that you could focus on skiing; lifts and slopes formed a maze such that minimal walking was required. Restaurants were always nearby. Although everyone else pointed out the exclusive prices it didn't feel too expensive to me. The advantage of spending your last months in Helsinki, FI, I guess.

I think I already miss skiing ...

What I hate about online booking

Dear websites offering online booking,

please include the possibility to pay in cash (put more precisely: to pay "offline"), as often as possible. There's no reason you need my detailed contacts/banking information for smaller amounts of money when all that I ask for is a simple transfer service. Most often, an online reservation (without the online payment part) is all I want and more than sufficient. And it should only require a valid email address - and perhaps a (mobile) phone number - to do so. You're most likely losing business opportunities because of your current online booking mess.

I don't mind paying cash, on the contrary - I start to truly admire the simplicity of it. I mean, let's think about it: When was the last time you had to give your contact details to the cashier from the supermarket?