digital home of MacSlow

I was sponsored to attend the UDS 2006. Holy s**t! What a week! What a intense time! What a cool community-bunch! What an assorted amount of great opportunities! First of all huge thanks to Mark Shuttleworth, Claire Newman, Daniel Holbach and Jono Bacon for each playing a part in getting me over there! I’m still stunned by this very fact. The chance to meet and talk with people like Matt Zimmerman, Rodrigo Parra Novo, Brandon Holtsclaw, Scott James Remnant and other core people from the Ubuntu-community and Canonical for the first time was terrific. It was nice to get a first hand experience of how a distribution is put together and developed step by step at the planning level. There’s really a ton of hard work involved in this process. Another nice thing to experience was the easy getting along of e.g. upstream Gnome and KDE people. Nobody questioned the other ones preferences. This is a good example to follow!

The UDS 2006 was hosted by Google (building 44, former SGI building, Mountain View, California). Google’s geek-herder par excellence, Leslie Hawthorn, made sure everything ran smoothly on the Google-side of things. She’s also the one running the “Summer Of Code”-program at Google. Thus she has some wicked geek-herding experience. Google is a very nice place to work at. Totally awesome food hands down! Non-compromise infrastructure and conferencing equipment all over the place (VoIP, video-converencing, whiteboards, projectors… you name it). The whole surroundings there felt very inspiring. Another nice fact to boot was that, besides all UDS-participants, most of the google employees run Linux exclusively on their workstations (everybody there seems to have at least two 24″ flat-panels connected to their machines) too. That’s quite something to experience for somebody like me coming from an environment where I’m the only OpenSource/Linux person in a sea of Windows-users. The only drawback there was the non-reliable wifi-hotspot. Having roughly 100 folks on one wlan-router isn’t a good idea.

Some obligatory name-dropping… I met again with Sebastien Bacher, Raphael Slinckx, Mike Hearn, Christian Schaller, Wim Taymans, Alex Graveley, Christian Kellner, Murray Cumming, Jonathan Ridell. The cozy mood of gathering around a campfire with “old-time” friends was also in effect again. First time meeting with Tim Müller, David Schleef, Jorge Castro, Melissa Draper, Evan D’Andrea, Joey Stanford, Dennis Kasprzyk, Jason Smith, Colin Watson, Ryan Lortie, Lennart Poettering and Simon McVittie and lot of other people I whose names I cannot fully remember.

A big thanks to everybody for the very funky week I had in Silicon Valley!

I took the opportunity to head to San Jose (just 15 miles away from Mountain View) during the week of the summit, because nVIDIA held the GeForceLAN 3 there. While the whole LAN-gaming is not my thing the scheduled world-wide launch of the G80 (now known as GeForce 8800 GTX or GTS) interested me far more. It was great to attend such a launch-event. I won’t list all the chips features (you can read about them elsewhere), but let me tell you… it’s a nice pixel- and vertex-pushing beast! BTW, all but one of their four tech-demos (cascade, frogger, smoke in a box, virtual Adrianne Curry) they showed on stage were running on OpenGL. Only cascade was not using OpenGL. So much for DirectX10 *g*. Aside from the launch-event itself I was able to chat a bit with the very few technical-staffers from nVIDIA and even the man himself… Jen-Sun Huang. I tried my best to do a fair bit of guerilla-marketing for OpenSource, Linux desktop-graphics and Ubuntu by running around the event floor chatting with people and answering question of people, who recognized the Ubuntu-shirt I was wearing. But this was not planned and only happened by chance. Nevertheless it had left a paramount positive impression with showing them all the “big guns” (gnome, beagle, compiz/beryl, lowfat, deskbar, my other desktop-graphics hacks etc.) I had installed on the laptop I carried around with me. You certainly get them with the eye-candy bling *g*

nVIDIA had two of their Linux-engineers sent over to the summit on thursday. Thus I was able to chat a bit with Andy Ritger and James Jones during the X11-related sessions. Nice things coming our way in terms of OpenGL 3.0 soon. Apart from that the new geometry-shaders and the overall unified shader-architecture of the new G80-chip is exposed in the Linux-drivers right from the start. It’s actually totally transparent to application developers using GLSL. Just in case you were wondering. Oh, btw… the nVIDIA folks know about the black-windows issue when running a composited desktop and your card is running out of texture-memory. They are working on it. Furthermore I hinted them towards us OpenSource folks wanting to see nVIDIA’s PureVideo HD chip-features exposed in the Linux-drivers too. They have plans for that, but not in the immediate future. I tried to hook them up with the gstreamer people.

Here is the bunch of photos I was able to make during the week.

This just came in…

Attilio Drei compiled a stock 0.3.2 version of cairo-clock under MacOS X with the new gtk+-port to quartz. Except for some themes and the window-titlebars the bling from Linux works on MacOS X too. A good indication that the work Imendio did sofar on the gtk-quartz project is solid. Thumbs up! I wonder if the shaped input-masks work too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 8:27 pm and is filed under OpenGL, cairo-clock, gnome, gstreamer, ubuntu. 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.