It's All Over

So ends the fifth GUADEC. The third day focused less on technical issues and more on political issues, things like using GNOME in schools, in developing countries, in governments, etc. It was interesting, although I think the beautiful weather won out in some people's minds.

Hackers at rest

Contrast with the scene at Paddy's later that night.

Hackers in motion

Frankly, I think more Irish pubs should have WLAN access. Thank you.

The ceremonial Winning Of The Pants this year was done by Andrew Sobala, despite his insistence that they are in fact trousers.

Luis and jdub prepare to award the pants

As pphaneuf keeps reminding me, conferences are all about people, not so much about what specifically you learn. It's always great to meet cool new people, and I really enjoyed catching up with other people I hadn't seen in a while. After the conference, Strike Force NITI went out for supper with Luis Villa and Fred Crozat, where the three of us managed to polish off an unimaginably large bowl of unimaginably good seafood soup.

Burp

Random

Outside Høgskolen i Agder, where the conference took place, is a series of twelve stone benches with seemingly random phrases engraved on them. Nat showed them to me, we agreed that they're incredible, and we each photographed all of them so as not to lose them. Individually most of the phrases aren't too surprising, but the cumulative effect of walking around and reading them all is a surreal experience to be savoured.

I don't know who wrote them, why they're there, or anything else. There were no signs taking credit for them. They were just there, saying what they say.

I transcribed them all on the train back to Oslo this morning.

More birthdays

This is the first time I've been out of the country on Canada Day. I am wearing a festive red shirt.
(Posted on July 1, 2004 17:40)

Finally got my most of my GUADEC pictures online. At least the ones that don't suck too horribly.

Other than that, been working on updating my WvStreams and WvSync papers for the UKUUG conference next month. Or more accurately, that's what I would have been doing if I hadn't been sorting pictures.
(Posted on July 9, 2004 01:20)

Weird Movies

I went to see Camping Sauvage last night with pphaneuf, dilu and hub. It's a newish Québécois movie, and it's crazy. Exploding cars, people incessantly correcting each other's grammar, a witness protection program, a nerdy biker gang called the Wannabees, an old guy who just wants to die, some chainsaws, and lots of surreal humour that is blissfully accepted as though it were all perfectly normal. What more could you want?

It was not subtitled. I had some trouble keeping up with the French, but I was actually surprised how much I understood. Some characters were easier for me to understand than others, depending mainly on how they spoke. Practice is good.

The movie has also awakened hub's desire to learn

Poor Andrew

Poor Andrew has been sacked with his at-least-thrice-yearly job of updating our live demo of Nitix. He did it once, when it was nice and easy and small, and now he's stuck with it, because it's one gigantic set of CVS merge conflicts that makes him pull his hair out, and nobody else will touch it.

Smartest Man Alive

Toys

My camera has been great. As a newbie I really enjoyed its flexibility, manual controls, and good value, but lately I've been finding it annoying me more and more. It doesn't perform well in low light, and cranking up the sensitivity results in lots of noise. ISO 400 is (IMHO) unacceptable on it.

So I bit the bullet and got something new, just in time for OLS and the UKUUG conference, and I'm really pleased with it. Honestly I don't even care so much about the resolution, but the lens is substantially bigger and faster, and the CMOS sensor is so much better than the CCD that even ISO 1600 produces quite nice results. I'm still getting used to it, but it's exactly what I've been wanting for a while now.

Thank you, pphaneuf's friend, for lending him your EOS-10d and thus indirectly letting me play with it. That did the trick. If I end up in the poor-house because of this, I cheerfully blame you.
(Posted on July 14, 2004 18:24)

The Road to Enlightenment

(Posted on July 16, 2004 22:34)

OLS-bound

Tomorrow I head to Ottawa for this year's instantiation of the Ottawa Linux Symposium. As usual, I intend to post updates, stories, and pictures as frequently as convenience and wakefulness allow.

Strike Force NITI this year consists of me, pphaneuf, sfllaw, jlavoie, pmccurdy, and pzion. I look forward to seeing, talking with, and/or getting drunk with as many people as possible. In addition, there is still a fighting chance that pphaneuf will keep his pants on.

Life

While in Ottawa, I will also be meeting with a real-estate agent, as Jess and I are attempting to sell our house. Managing it remotely is pretty difficult, especially when something goes wrong, plus the time is right for a number of reasons.

"Work"

Last night featured office-based bacchanalia, which is always a peculiar kind of fun. We used apenwarr's fabled non-corporate projector in his absence to watch Office Space (I think I was the only person alive who hadn't seen it), Pulp Fiction, and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. The latter is a purposely satiric spoof of campy 50's science fiction horror movies, and it's either really good, or really bad, depending on the degree to which your definitions of "good" and "bad" converge.
(Posted on July 19, 2004 20:55)

OLS Tuesday

The first day and a half of OLS has been a whirlwind of catching up with old friends, meeting new people, attending talks, and eating.

Tuesday night, the six of us representing NITI went to Patty Boland's pub for the opening party.

As the Desktop Conference had just ended, at Boland's we ran into wlach, ppatters, and apenwarr, whose presentation on UniConf apparently went well. I spent a while chatting with Ken Bantoft (Openswan) and Jean-Luc Cooke (kernel crypto), who I knew from last year's Linux-Kongress.

Ken Bantoft and Hugh Daniel

I left Boland's early due to extreme tiredness. I haven't been sleeping well lately.

OLS Wednesday

The talks started interesting and then my interest sort of dwindled toward the end of the day. I did, however, enjoy seeing Werner Almesberger and Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo (more friends from Linux-Kongress last year) speak. Werner's TCP connection passing is pretty interesting, although still rather theoretical. It's interesting how he's using umlsim to test this, because it would be rather difficult to get the timing right otherwise.

Jean-Luc hacks in comfort

At dinner and the welcome reception, sfllaw and jlavoie introduced me to Jeff, a super-interesting smart-seeming person who's been debating applying for a job at NITI. Go Jeff go. Also chatted with Alan and Telsa, who were forthcoming with advice about surviving English pubs during my trip to the UKUUG conference in a couple of weeks.

After the reception, where I escaped my off-by-1-or-2 curse by not being even remotely close, anonymous 16th-storey use was made of someone's water-balloon launcher (impressive stuff), and we retired to a nearby pub for more beer. Enjoyed meeting Jody McIntyre, who knew lots about NITI because he used to work for one of our competitors. Asked good questions.

And I am now, once again, tired.

"Cat Condos" near Parliament

(Posted on July 22, 2004 07:32)

OLS Thursday

An extremely enjoyable day, overall! I hung out in the hacking area in the morning, where I met mulix and ladypine and chatted with them for a while.

The highlight of the day had to be Damian Conway's abridged, compressed, and abbreviated talk about Perl 6. It's taken years of work already, and it won't be ready for another couple of years, but it does look spectacularly neat. It left pphaneuf drooling, and it certainly left me interested. I talked with pzion and we agreed that they are not only cleaning up the language syntactically, they are actually creating some new, extremely interesting ideas in programming languages. In particular, junction types have never been done before as far as I can tell, and look like they could be handy. Ditto for iterating more than one list at the same time.

Hi Damian!

A bunch of us watched Jim Gettys and Keith Packard talk about the (re)architecture of X. It's partly about adding eye candy, and partly about improving efficiency in both 2D and 3D environments. The idea to add a customizable display manager process (separate from the window manager) which controls how windows and other controls are displayed (fade in/out of view, translucency, etc) is interesting, and I could imagine a lot of people wanting it. Keith gave a fantastic demo of this, with movies playing in overlapping windows, with translucency enabled. Very fast, and moving the windows around was pretty seamless. Most impressive. It ended, as so many talks do, with a resounding plea for help.

sfllaw with "Happy Hacking" t-shirt

In the evening I went to an Indian buffet with Jean-Luc, Ken, Hugh Daniel, H. Peter Anvin, Mike Halcrow, and a couple others. They were discussing improvements to the kernel's crypto API to make it asynchronous, among other things.

Rideau Canal

I felt like being antisocial last night, so I figured some night photography was in order. I used to live in Ottawa, so I already know where everything is, and I'm far from being a tourist, but I never really took any pictures while I lived here, so I feel justified in my actions.

War Memorial

There was a free music thing on Parliament Hill including cool lighting and effects projected onto the façade of the Centre Block, but I only caught a glimpse as it was just ending. Regardless, I lay on the grass for a while and enjoyed the night.

Centre Block of Parliament, and Centennial Flame

(Posted on July 23, 2004 20:34)

Back from OLS

The parts of OLS that I haven't written about yet are kind of a blur at this point, due largely to the passage of time and increased beer consumption toward the end. I witness it every year; people really slow down during the last day or two of the conference. They start to arrive later in the morning, and have that glazed look in their eyes throughout the talks.

Someone suggested to me that Andrew and the other organizers should have the talks start an hour later each day to compensate. I thought about it, and I'm not sure it's a good idea. It's a fine line these guys walk between having a serious conference and having a big party. Right now it's both, but too much in either direction would ruin the effect.

I enjoyed Robert Love's talk about D-BUS, something I hadn't paid much attention to before. Beyond that, I can tell you that Colonnade Pizza was eaten, beer was drunk, foosball was played, sushi was devoured, more balloons were launched with surprising accuracy, PGP keys were signed, pants were dropped, rail-gun design was discussed with Donald Becker and Matthew Wilcox, death was cheated while swimming, and I think, at some point, that I actually managed to get some sleep. But I couldn't tell you what order it all happened in.

Pictures are here.

Off to Leeds

And soon I do it all again. I'm speaking about WvStreams and WvSync at the UKUUG Linux conference next week. I'm flying on Sunday, I'll spend a day in London, a day in Cambridge visiting a friend from a past life, and then up to Leeds I go.

Fun

But before that, I intend to see the last instantiation of the fireworks festival tonight, and on Friday I'm going with mich and dilu to see Yann Tiersen perform. This is the guy responsible for, among other things, the score for Amélie, which I find increasingly haunting every time I see it.
(Posted on July 28, 2004 20:58)

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