11 Jun 2005 DV   » (Master)


Blogs

It has been months since my last blog. I just installed Drivel 2.0, this rocks.
Sorry for the very long entry, I have a terrible backlog, here you are !

Vacations

In April I took a couple of weeks of vacations, first I went to Hong Kong for a week, William Brack and his wife took great care of me, we visited a lot of places in the peninsula, ate fantastic food, and went to Shenzen special economic area of China. I must say I got very impressed by that week there, on a variety of aspects, cultural, economic even the landscape and how completely overcrowded towns (from an european viewpoint) and nature are intermixed. It changed my perspective on quite a few point, I know understand better how China is just affecting everybody's life on the planet (for good and bad). It reinforced my belief that maybe we will be able to preserve our culture here, but there is no way we will be able to preserve the manufacturing industry, we must shift even more to services, high-tech and customer oriented work, or we will loose any capacity to sustain our current standard of living.

In comparison the next week in Ko Tao island in Thailand was very quiet, I enjoyed relaxing, snorkeling, and food. The coral reef there is very well preserved, and being in the Siam Gulf they were not affected by the tsunami.

I took approximately 700 MByte of pictures during those 2 weeks, including underwater, everything is in my April folder 11 to 19 is Hong Kong, 19 to 24 is Ko Tao.

Flowers

Since my anniversary last September, I have orchids at home again, I resurected one of the small green house now sitting in my office here next to my desk. I have been fairly successful so far, 3 of them are blooming right now one white phalaenopsis a gift from my mother in October is having a new set of flowers, another pink phalaenopsis from chrismas is still blooming (yes it held flowers for nearly 7 months in a row now) and a Zygopetalum I bought in November is having 3 flowers again. I also discovered the miltassia (hybrid of Miltonia and brassia) which started the set is about to get new flowers too. I also planted a rose and iris on the balcony, I love iris and finally managed to get one good picture of them. The S50 is making
really crisp images once it gets focus, but in macro mode it's a hell to get it to actually focus where it should and not 10cm behind.

GUADEC

Was fantastic. It wasn't without issues, but from the audience it was truely good. Congratulation to all the people who made that event. Now we need to make sure everything goes into place for the next one.

GNOME Summit at MIT

First the dates announced in the advisory board meeting were wrong, sorry about that, the event will be held 8, 9, 10 of October, at MIT, Cambridge MA, USA. Second we need to coordinate with our corporate partners and try to give some highlight topic, for example they are interested in the performance aspects (those who discussed with Nokia understand the trade-off on embedded devices are different, and it is clear Sun is also looking at it from a network oriented standpoint). It is clear that UI stability though regression testing is also a goal shared by the corporates behind GNOME, and if we plan to discuss those
topics we will get their involvement in the event and lots of their engineers will show up.

On trust

I think trusting each other on an invidual basis is the key to keep the project successful, that's something I repeated in all my board candidacy statement, I'm afraid lack of trust between individuals can seriously harm the project, I won't get into any details though. I have only one message "be friendly, trust other people, don't assume hidden agendas".

To telsa

I can't tell for others, I missed you at GUADEC, please keep your blog (hum, I would not say I'm examplary there :-), we love you !

Mountains

That time of the year the mountains around Grenoble are georgeous, I took the cat up there last week-end, and will probably do the same this week.

Astrolabe

That's my toy app to find office documents on the desktop. It's not a beagle replacement more an experiment into GTK programming, playing with UI code (PyGTK rocks, excellent documentation !). I like the name, it's an old navigation instrument used before sextants were invented there is sone very nice pictures on wikipedia (english).

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