Present Perfect

Guadec

Well, I got back from GUADEC yesterday late. I hope to read some comments of other people here as well. What can I say ? I was a bit unsure of going the week before. I'm not really the kind of person to meet people I met on IRC. Hell, I never used IRC before helping out on GStreamer. Figured it was just a waste of time(°1).

You know, when I was young I used to wonder if people out there really existed, or if they were just some puppets played by a higher power just to amuse me. As soon as one of them would turn around the corner, they'd be gone and someone else would "walk by". I figured there was no way for me to tell if other people actually existed or not.

Well, being on IRC was kinda like that, and it's weird to meet people in the flesh, and see for yourself they actually do exist, in the same reality.

GUADEC itself was pretty good, overall. I heard some really good talks. Uraeus is a great guy, every project should have someone like him. He is truly wonderful at people skills and each time he gets people to do stuff in a friendly manner. He got us some great embroided GStreamer t-shirts as well, paid for out of his own pocket. He said they actually cost him more than his own trip.

Some of the other GStreamer guys were there too, and I all met them for the first time. Omega, BBB, Sienap, Wtay, hadess the french cockney (who took up ornithology). It is kind of funny though how some people you meet in real life end up being EXACTLY as you expected, and some totally opposite. Weird.

Special mention for jorn, who does stuff on Galeon and even more on Rhythmbox. I knew he was young, him still being in school, but I figured something like 18. He's 15 ! Amazing. At his age and his current level, he's got so much potential ...

My so-called anti-aliased fonts had been sucking for ages ! I went to Keith Packard's fontconfig talk (he's someone old and experienced enough to have worked on X <g>) and afterwards I asked him if I could do anything about it. And he fixed it in under half a minute ;) I have very pretty looking fonts now !. Now I just need to move over all of my favourite apps to use gnome2.

Got to meet damien, the belgian hacker who does FOSDEM and GnomeMeeting. He seems to be a really great guy. His girlfriend has an interesting taste in clothes.

Nights were spent in pool bars (where we got 3-camera footage of Uraeus trying to hit even the white ball, failing four times in a row) and Irish Pubs (out of which we got thrown at closing time). Even being there with more than fourteen people I seemed to be the only one with a basic grasp of Spanish (picked up by going to see an ex-girlfriend in Venezuela a few years ago). So I got to order all the food and stuff all the time, and talk to cab drivers.

Who else did I meet ? Kjartan, Kenneth, Hannah, chrisime, Gman the wacky Sun engineer, Martin Baulig, the black hole of all known beer in the universe, and my personal favourite : jdub, the zany australian dude who made garnome which enabled me to actually run Gnome 2 before going to GUADEC. Pants off, dude ! It is rare to meet someone with a complicated sense of humour while still having all of the bits in the right place and doing some great stuff for GNOME as well. Keep up the good work there.

I hope to meet some of all of these people again. It's kinda funny, now that I see people type things on IRC, I can actually hear them saying the words. I hope Martin will stop buy and type "zont vaste ze beer" soon.

The day after GUADEC we hooked up with the MAS guys (who are looking to write the perfect audio server, and I hope they succeed) and they listened in our code review. I realized it was actually the first time I ever talked about code with someone else. Scary thought. It was really helpful though, at the very least. We were kind of embarassed (and I would have been more so if I'd actually written bits of the code) to have to confess to a bunch of bugs while reviewing stuff. Sometimes it's surprising it works as well as it does considering ;)

Good stuff for GStreamer as well. We'll move to bugzilla, yay ! Also, Ximian is interested in having a GStreamer red-carpet channel, so we'll do that real soon as well.

So, lots of highlights (pants off, bork, picking up lonely girls in irish pubs and placing bets on who they won't be lonely with, meeting lots of people, laughing at the general silliness, and so on...) It was sad to go - I had the feeling the conference ended weird. Not really well-done, actually, it was just done and that was it. On the way back I almost missed my plane because of bad directions at the airport and the plane leaving from a different terminal then they should have.

I came home with a fresh taste for hacking though, and even though a year ago I didn't even really use Gnome much, right now I even want to try and fix some of the simpler things in my Gnome2 desktop. Hope I'll do well.

Coming back home, I started realizing how much I have come to like Linux and Gnome, to the point where I really don't want to use Windows at all anymore. I wouldn't mind doing an all-Linux job, even though my job at the radio station is great. But sometimes you need to focus instead of doing lots of stuff at once...

The best thing about coming home : sleeping, waking up, putting my feet on the couch, grabbing the remote, starting Dave/Dina, and selecting the recorded Temptation Island show. It's great that your hobby project is actually also usable. Dave/Dina is starting to work out really well. I need help on it, so join in !

°1 : it is, actually <g>

Guadec Well, I got back from GUADEC yesterday late. I hope to read some comments of other people here as well. What can I say ? I was a bit...