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by calvaris

GUADEC 2013 is over

I departed from A Coruña, flying to Barcelona (where I had time to have a coffee with a friend), then to Vienna and then to Brno by bus. It was a bit tiring so after having a quick drink at our hotel with the rest of the Igalians, I just went to bed.

Web, the future is now by my Igalian friend Claudio Saavedra (different from Garnacho) was my first talk (apart from the keynote). Even after knowing the content already, I found quite interesting the way Claudio spoke about the latest changes in the development of Web (a.k.a. Epiphany), specially the way WebKit 2 helps to provide a much better user experience.

I liked a lot Alex Larsson’s talk of High resolution display support in GNOME. His approach of the abstract pixels and all the way down in the stack from GTK+ was very interesting.

Matt Dalio and his Endless Mobile project just rock, not only because of the tech and GNOME involved but also because of its social implications. Keep going!

Given the rest of my career and my work in WebKit, specially in the WebKitGTK+ port, I am always interested in GStreamer, as it is the framework we use use for multimedia playback (and other ports like EFL and Qt in Linux). What’s cooking in GStreamer talk by Sebastian Dröge and Tim-Philipp Müller was of course mandatory and worth going.

Jan-Christoph Borchardt’s talk about GNOME and ownCloud: desktop plus web for a holisic experience showed everything that is and is coming with ownCloud. I introduced him to Claudio as he mentioned that he would like to see at least Ephy’s bookmarks syncronized with ownCloud. It looks interesting.

I missed Philip Withnall’s talk about Testing online services because it was at the same time as the ownCloud one, but I was interested because of my wife‘s research project about the same subject. Philip, if you read this, leave me a comment or get in touch directly with her as she was very interested.

It is always refreshing to attend Marina Zhurakhinskaya’s talk about Outreach Program for Women: a lesson in collaboration, because I think it is very important to keep reminding ourselves about the relevance of programs to integrate more women into our community and I think we, and specially Marina and the OPW program, get always awesome results, though we cannot fall asleep and keep pushing till, at least, the 50%.

My Igalian friend Juan Suárez had a talk called Writing multimedia applications with Grilo where he showed the easy but powerful possibilities of the Grilo API and its plugins. There was also a lightning talk by an intern about adding support to build Lua plugins for Grilo.

Juan Pablo Ugarte was showing off his Glade skills in his talk about Rich custom user interfaces with Glade and CSS. His slides were made with Glade. Cool!

More secure with less “security” by Stef Walter had a lot of interesting ideas about how to improve security and making at the same time the user’s life easier.

Just after lunch it was the turn of my Igalian friend Martin Robinson who gave the talk about Webkit2 and you and explained many things about the WebKit 2 model, like for example all its layers and how the processes work.

There was another talk given by other fellow Igalians, Alejandro Piñeiro and Joanmarie Diggs, called Tag, your PDF is it that I couldn’t attend. In that case I preferred to prioritize other talks as I can always easily talk to them.

The rest of the talks I attended were:

Of course it would not be a GUADEC without hanging out with friends at the different parties, one of them sponsored by Igalia and Red Hat.

I really enjoyed the tour at the city, which is very beatiful and peaceful, though we had to finish it prematurely because of the impresive storm. On our way back from our unofficial GNOME Hispano dinner, which of course was great, to our hotel, we could see some broken tree branches and even what we think that were some fallen young trees.

The venue was really a nice place (with funny chairs) and the volunteers did an awesome job (THANKS!). Of course, there are always issues, like the AC problem (these things can always happen) and the internet connection which is an inherent problem to almost every GUADEC.

Wonderful work also of Ana, taking a lot of cool pictures, even from me, that you can see in her Flickr collections.

Of course, I cannot forget to thank Igalia for sponsoring my trip.

Strasbourg, there we go!

by calvaris

GUADEC 2012: state of calvaris

GUADEC 2012 A Coruña

Executive summary

Tired as hell but with my hacking batteries completelly full.

Organization

There was always something to do here and there, which I needed to help with, but I think the most important things that I did were:

  • Organizing the Lightning Talks session, I guess you all remember the sound of the sea and the seaguls that I choose to indicate people that they were running out of time.
  • I helped Marina and Christophe in organizing the Interns’ Lightning Talks, which you can also guess because Marina liked the sea sound and decided to use it also for their session.
  • I helped Juanjo in organizing the BoFs. He planned them and I managed them at the indico.
  • Random stuff
  • Keeping hackers happy. Having Zeenix at my place implied hanging out almost every day with the hackers for dinner and beers so I needed to do my best to have them properly fed and with the deserved ‘party level’. I took some people to do some sightseeing and to several restaurants like A Roda, O Galiñeiro… I even remember going to a place with live music at Os Maios close to a Pulpeira de Arzúa.

The only bad thing I can think of is that I missed some talks because of having a lot of things to do.

Interesting talks

I attended all the talks I could and just tried to avoid the ones by Igalians because for obvious reasons I already knew what they were about, so I’ll mention the ones that I liked most:

  • Jacob Appelbaum’s keynote: Personal data exposure is underestimated by most people but it is something very important that we should care about. It would be interesting to have Tor integrated with GNOME.
  • Every detail matters by Allan: Suddenly you realize that you are in a better mood when using your GNOME 3 and the reason is because there are some guys focusing on having the small bugs fixed that were annoying you without noticing.
  • MinGW-w64 by Marc-André: Quite interesting talk about tools and recipes to crosscompile your programs for the Evil. This is quite important to help us with the task of showing that the GNOME world is as multiplatform as other options (you would be a fool if you think that you can have everything working like a charm on the Evil when using some frameworks that claim to be multiplatform just out of the box).
  • i18n by Gil: Random though: No native English speaker developer was on that talk. We really need to improve this. Then we can talk about tools and other stuff. Though I did not attend the BoF, I talked to Fran Diéguez and my wife Laura about some stuff the students of the Universidade da Coruña could help with to improve translators’ lives, maybe combined with GSoC or OPW.
  • GStreamer talk by Tim Müller: Can’t ever miss it. 1.0 is almost there and it shines!
  • PiTiVi by Jeff: Constant lol. Cannot wait to see the videos uploaded. Really enjoyed it not only because of it being fun, but because of all the new features coming to our favorite video editor.
  • Defensive publications: Patents suck in all senses and even more at FLOSS. These guys should be keynoters at all FLOSS events all over the world, because something I learned lately is that people can do things when they unite. If we help with bringing things to the public knowledge before they are patented by others (because Patent Offices workers are far from perfection considering their model that I do not agree with) we can do something. I recommend you to have a look at the Open Innovation Network.
  • History of GNOME: it is always interesting to look back to see how much we have walked.

Fixed bugs

  • After speaking to Matthias Clasen, I got the permission to apply the patches I had submitted for GB#613595. This was quite an old bug that I had worked on from the times of Hildon in Fremantle. Just after pushing I realized that I had caused a small regression but fortunately I fixed it before having consequences.
  • Bastien closed FDB#49945 about GeoClue by pushing my patch.
  • Edward promised to have a look at the patches I submitted for GB#663869. This is not closed yet, but I hope he does not forget 😉

Thanks

And of course, I need to thank Igalia for sponsoring me by attending and helping at GUADEC:

Igalia

by calvaris

GUADEC 2012

Wow, something I think I would not see, but GUADEC is happening less than 3km from home in less than a week!

GUADEC 2012 A Coruña

I have collaborated in organizing the Lightning Talks and BoFs/Hackfests and of course, I’ll help wherever I can. Poor Zeenix will be at my place so he will need to wake up early to come with me and my wife Laura to the faculty.

I also want to thank Igalia for sponsoring me with time to help organizing and attending the event and I might be also helping the Advisory Board meeting that will happen at Igalia headquarters on the 25th.