I am just back from GCDS (Gran Canaria Desktop Summit) where I gave a talk
about Moovida.
It was a short stay for me, as I arrived on Friday afternoon just in time for
the registration process where I got a cool Qt beach towel, and left on
Sunday night after the last talk.
Even though I would have liked to stay the whole week to attend more
interesting talks and BOFs and
to get to know more hackers, I must say I really enjoyed my stay in Las
Palmas.
I didn't see much of the city and nothing of the island really (except a bit
of the coast from the plane), but I really liked eating next to the beach,
facing the sea, and the Alfredo Kraus auditorium is an impressive building
pretty well located.
Good geographical conditions for such a summit, the first of its kind,
bringing
GNOME and
KDE communities together.
It all started on Friday night at the welcome social event sponsored by
Canonical (free beer and tapas) where I got to meet a bunch of interesting
people, some of whom I knew from the projects they work on, some not.
I got back to the hotel reasonably early and reasonably sober to do some
adjustments to the presentation I was to give on Sunday.
The real stuff started on Saturday morning with three very interesting
keynotes.
Robert 'r0ml' Lefkowitz spoke about Liberal Software, what it is and what it
is not, why he doesn't like to give credit to people and how he has a very
medieval point of view in that regard.
Pretty interesting and impressive as an orator.
Then Walter Bender talked about Sugar and the work they are doing at Sugar
Labs to promote the use of free software in education, especially in
developing countries.
I sure would get involved in that kind of project the day I have children.
Finally Richard 'rms' Stallman took off his shoes and talked about software
patents, about how evil the Spanish government is in that matter, how evil
Microsoft is, why we should not write applications in C# and why we should
even discourage people to do so.
It would have been interesting indeed to have a confrontation with the guys
behind Mono at Novell, but it seems they were not there, being kept busy with
a release.
And he sang the new version of the Free Software Song.
And wore his costume of Saint IGNU-cius of the church of Emacs.
And held an auction for a stuffed gnu that sold for 170€ (proudly
acquired by
Zaheer).
After a quick lunch break the afternoon was dedicated to a series of
lightning talks (5 minutes each) on various topics, among which I found the
following ones of interest: the Open-PC announcement by Frank Karlitschek,
"Common interface bloopers and how to avoid them" by Matthew Paul Thomas,
designer at Canonical, "Usability Testing for the Rest of Us" by
Celeste Lyn Paul, OCRFeeder by Joaquim Rocha, and
"KDE Bugzilla: Using the new options" by Alex Spehr.
Of that last one I particularly liked the following statement:
"~90% of the crash reports are unusable".
Reminded me of a tool of ours that got a heavy face-lift recently but still
needs a lot of work to produce really interesting results.
After all the conferences I got to meet
Brian whom I
knew through Launchpad and his multiple bug reports on elisa and moovida.
Together with Philippe
we sat down, had a look at a couple of problems he had running Moovida on
OpenSolaris, and in no time we managed to understand and fix
bug #381417.
On the way back to the hotel he gave me some interesting insights on Sun's
plans about OpenSolaris, his work to integrate GStreamer-based applications
in it, and how from the feedback he got from users people seem to appreciate
Fluendo's codecs and DVD player.
It's always good to hear that of course.
After a refreshing nap I rehearsed one last time my presentation and went to
sleep as there was no specific event on that night and I wanted to get early
to the conference hall to test the setup of the room.
I spent the whole Sunday morning in the multimedia room and saw among others
Lennart
speak about audio on the free desktop,
Jan on the direction
GStreamer is taking towards a 1.0 version after more than 3 years of an
ABI and
API stable 0.10,
and Olivier
on integrating video conferencing in applications using Farsight.
And I gave my talk about Moovida, focused on its ease of use, the immersive
experience it provides and how easy and cool it is to extend it writing
plugins.
I demoed some important features of the new version, and got overall some
very positive feedback and interesting questions.
That was a very good experience for me as my first talk in such an event, and
despite the little bit of stress that may have resulted in a weird
pronounciation and me forgetting things I wanted to say, I really enjoyed it.
I can't wait to see the video of it to learn from my mistakes (and show it to
my mum), and I'm looking forward to doing more of this in the future.
After a quick lunch in front of the sea where I joined
Mark's
table, I saw the opening of
GUADEC
with Owen
presenting GNOME Shell, the presentation of GNOME Zeitgeist, a talk on how
successful GNOME was in Google's Highly Open Participation Contest, and a
series of lightning talks on the current state of Clutter, by
Emmanuele.
As the day was over for GNOME hackers I decided to attend the last KDE talk
on semantic contextual menus, by Laura Dragan.
They seem to have this interesting
RDF data store
mechanism in KDE which I'd need to have a look at one of these days.
With that it was already time to catch a cab to the airport to fly back to
Barcelona.
Let's make Moovida rock even more for the next event of this type!