digital home of MacSlow

People have asked me for the slides of my talk. Note, that I generally don’t see much sense in putting just the slides of a talk online. In general a video-recording of a talk would make more sense. But this is not available, as there was no recording done in the GNOME dev-room at FOSDEM 2007. Be sure to read the license information once you grabbed the tarball of the talk from here. From the audience reactions I got during the talk and after it, I conclude that it was well received and people enjoyed it (and hopefully learnt something they did not know yet). I was really very nervous especially since some of the maintainers and contributors of projects I stressed and “criticized” sat in the audience. In retrospect, considering what I got to know about X.org and cairo at this FOSDEM-weekend, my talk should have had a revamp before presenting it. But this flexibility-presentation-fu I do not master yet. Keith Packard clearly put this into one sentence going something like: “You have to live with these kind of things, when dealing with the bleeding edge.”. Who am I to argue with the Packard *g*

FOSDEM itself was great. I almost managed to meet all the people I planned to meet and talk with them about the things that are on my mind. Sadly the brainstorming I wanted to do with Sven and Philip totally did not take place. I blame myself for not trying hard enough and being too distracted by the amount of other interesting things at FOSDEM. But at least Sven and Tim made sure I remember to stick around the gtk-devel mailing-list for discussing the things I wish would be available in future versions of gtk+. BTW, did you know that gtk+ and X.org need contributing man-power? Step in, contribute now and become world-famous!

As somehow expected, I mainly hang around with the X.org and gstreamer people as those projects are among the most interesting ones for me… from a desktop-graphics-stack perspective. I was glad to be able to meet Carl Worth, Keith Packard (the stuff X.org is made of), Michel Dänzer again and was lucky to meet Kristian Høgsberg (his talk on AIGLX… lots of very crucial information) and Øyvind Kolås (check out his talk on GEGL… I had no idea!) in person for the first time. Furthermore I also met Stéphane Marchesin again this year and enjoyed his talk about “X.org Myths”. Kristian’s call to arms “Let’s finish COMPOSITE” and Matthias thorough lecture titled “Video on dope” were also great. Sadly I didn’t make it in time for Stéphane’s update on nouveau and Keith’s summary on video drivers.

I also could not make it to Edward’s talk about “What’s new in gstreamer” and I could barely make it to Miguel’s Mono workshop. FOSDEM was really packed with a lot of things worth seeing… too much to see it all. The schedule made choosing talks to attend very hard for me this year.

I had good chunks of time chatting with Thomas and Philippe about Elisa. I’m looking forward to my time at Fluendo in a few weeks. As part of my requirements for an degree in computer science I need to do an internship. Finally the talks with Christian at Vilanova last year turn out to become reality. I’m thankful for this opportunity! My semester abroad, also needed for the degree, is hopefully going to turn into reality in 2008 as well. Then I aim for Bosten, USA.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Nat Friedman attending FOSDEM and being able to meet and talk with him in person for the first time ever. Also a great opportunity was meeting Michael Meeks, right after I gave my talk. I think Michael was around GUADEC’06 and LRL’06, but only this FOSDEM-weekend it worked out to be possible to chat with him a bit. A modest attempt to file a bug with OpenOffice in real life failed. So here is the result of doing things the correct way *g*

A large portion of people I saw again this time around are not mentioned here. Nevertheless meeting up with them again was as enjoyable as meeting folks I just mentioned. But I draw the line here as I don’t want to bore readers to death *g*

Finally, thanks to Thomas for his great guidance to the restaurant landscape in Brussels this weekend, and thanks to intel for paying for the great dinner on sunday evening.

Oh, there is one more thing… within the next 24h lowfat will start its breathing in the open at f.d.o, but I still have to do some preparations. It’s tough for me as the amount of and work (and noise) I expect is going to be huge. It will get a dedicated blog-entry.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 5:59 am and is filed under cairo, gnome, gstreamer, gtk+, lowfat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.