Jul 17, 2008

GUADEC Report: Late As Usual

GUADEC was effing awesome. I have successfully repayed my sleep debt, and can reflect on all that I observed and learned for the week. In bullet point form;

Insurance to Wake Me Up _Insurance for the last night (WAKE ME UP, English and Turkish) _

  • My Conduit talk went really well. I thought I was able to reach a good balance between 'this is cool for users', 'this is cool for developers', and 'this is a flagrantly useless technical demo because I can'. Following the talk, and over the rest of the week I had a number of chats with people regarding

    • Improvement hints for the UI. Thanks a lot Bastien and co.

    • What is considered a useful, and achievable, level of mobile device support.

    • Some technical clarifications on matters how to integrate into the desktop (webkit, gio, ui-via-dbus, etc)

    • Slides available here

  • I felt the reception to Conduit was positive, and I look forward to the module inclusion discussions for 2.24.

  • I was not productive on my summer of code project for that week, but I have come back with an overflowing amount of motivation to not only complete my work on binding syncml, but to also continue to add improvements that will help Conduit operate on Maemo and iPhone, and operate really well with Windows mobile devices, and Nokia devices (via gnome-phone-manager).

    • Dear Team (aka lazyweb): I have quite a large conduit branch I am working on. Whats the plan with bzr-playground.gnome.org. Can I easily push my existing branch there?

  • It was great to meet some of the people I have been corresponding with over email, and have never actually seen. You know who you are!

  • Electronica Festival Istanbul was a great adventure. Thanks to all that made it happen

  • Thanks to the GUADEC volunteers.

  • The 'tab meme' on planet.gnome.org was pretty funny. I was most fooled by Davyds. (am I the only one who kinda likes this metaphor?). I was also fooled in Federico's key note, when he proposed the NET_WM_I_CAN_HAS_TABS window hint for easy window -> tab transitioning (just kidding).

  • Captain common sense awards are hereby given to:

    • Team Gtk+: For the reasoned future of Gtk+ discussion/keynote. While I was disappointed to learn aboutthe lack of canvas plans, it is not really surprising. I use Goocanvas, but I am hardly a power user, and without a chosen Canvas, I have zero motivation to switch. I would describe the Gtk3.0+ plan as necessary+pragmatic. That is a damn site better than what it has appeard to be over the last few years (stagnant+idealistic).

    • Realease Time: Nice reveal on the Gnome 2.30 -> Gnome 3.0 animation

  • The BZR vs. git thing seemed to reach a whole new level of weirdness at GUADEC. First there was team BZR, whom I shall liken to a Turkish taxi driver. They seem to promise everything, they have the hard sell on, and you can never really be sure how much the cost will be. The git team seems to be like the seasoned traveller. They are showing the finger to the taxi drivers, and generally alternate between cursing at the incompetence of the taxi service, and ignoring them with glee. Instead of discussing the price with the taxi drivers, they instead have a prepared presentation on how flying cars are actually a million times better than taxis because they look so hot.

    • I actually dont really care what I use. Im not a power user. If I could somehow pay some sysadmin money to setup a unified GNOME themed viewvc that tracked both git and bzr I would. Thats all I want - to be able to track and see what folks are up to. I wrote more about this subject here.

    • I also support the notion of 'Pick the system that makes it easiest for the distributor to work with'. That likely means git. As a thought experiment, what might be the result of choosing git, or more correctly, rejecting bzr, in the wake of the Ubuntu is moving to KDE fear meme.

  • I Didnt realize the enormous (positive) influence that Nokia has on GNOME. Positive influence is a polite way of saying 'how much money they spend on Gtk+ related subcontractors, and employees'. Apparently something cool is coming for Maemo $NEXT_VERSION

  • If I have forgotten anyone, apologies. See you all next GUADEC!

  • Does anyone look like their Hackergotchi? (and can someone make me one - if you have a photo of me, and its moderately acceptable...)

  • Funniest moments would have to be

    • John Carr with a rats tail and silver necklace!

    • Me and Marks completely ineffective adventure from one side of Istanbul to the other, with no phone, no watch, no computers, no idea where anyone is, and death by hangover.

    • The humiliation/irony of singing really bad English Kareoke in a country whose official language is Turkish.

  • I have some interesting Conduit work going to land soon

    • Officially supported Windows Mobile sync support

    • Nokia phone support via gnome-phone-manager

    • Massive refactoring to improve platform abstractions

    • Which includes a move to GIO

    • Which adds a pygtkwebkit based browser

    • Which removes the hard dependency on gnome-keyring

    • Which adds and native python file/vfs abstraction

    • These improve performance and make it a billion times easier to run Conduit on Windows and Mac.

posted at 9:34 am · 
conduit guadec turkey Nerd Non Nerd Planet GNOME