Rah! Back and rested from GUADEC.
This is a transcript from memory so its probably filled
with inaccuracies..
Thursday:
Got up at 5.30 . Got train from Wimbledon to Waterloo. Met
Iain (Holmes), Telsa (everyone knows Telsa!), and Steve
(Docs person). Got on Eurostar at about 7.20.
Slept sporadically on Eurostar.. woman behind me kept on
talking to her nanny about her "lovely" children on her
mobile - it sounded like the nanny was being beaten about
the head and body by the aforementioned sprogs - and the
woman was saying "You've got to respect thier individuality
and let them grow!" . So that was nice.
Got to paris, had fun with cash machines and got on the
metro . Got to ENST, and found I hadn't been registered
(data loss! doh!) but it was ok. - Got in and paid 300 FRF.
Met whole bunches of people - when I said I was working on
conglomerate people said stuff like " Wow, conglomerate! You
really need to hurry up with that!" or " what the hell is
that then?".
Then we had the never ending fun of Miguel introducing
everyone to everyone and not recognising people he worked
with for ages. When I said I worked on conglomerate, he was
of the "Wow, conglomerate" school of thought. Hans Petter
and Joakim turned up at that point and we met. Nice to put
faces to the names!
Nat Friedman gave an excellent bonobo talk. Nat is really
cool and amazingly clever, hes like 22 or something and
president of helixcode! Next up was the gnome-print talk
which was also pretty good - Chris Lahey and NotZed did that
with help from chema. There was some interaction(!) with
Keith Packard of X fame about querying abilities of
printers.
While I was away, my brother Simon got a windows GDI
printer off one of our cousins who bought a better one.
These things don't work on NT ( which he uses. hmm. ) so I'm
getting it. Theres a postscript driver somewhere so I'm
going to try to hack up a gnome print driver out of that. -
will talk to Chema about that - probably do the same RGB
buffer render/print thing as he does for the PCL driver.
We then had a cocktail thing where I met another whole
bunch of people, and mathieu wanted to be in everyones
photo.
A bunch of us went to a restaurant somewhere. I can't
remember everyone who was there but I know I talked a lot to
Jon Trowbridge (he of guppi ) and James Henstridge (gnome
python and libglade uber hacker). Joakim, Hans Petter, Iain,
Telsa, Jonas oberg(FSF afaik), Alexander Larson (original
dia author), Anders Carlson(gtkhtml), and Nicholas were
there as well I think. Jonas was annoyed at being labeled
as a UK person. I was annoyed at not being labelled at all!
After that, me, Joakim, Iain, and Nicholas( who writes a
video editor called trinity and a canvas scripting language
called skin) went off to a funny french pub on the metro. We
talked about free form computer games like elite where you
can go and do what you like, and loom, which is Joakim and
Iains tile based strategy engine. Very cool.
Went back to the hotel (Ibis) and went to sleep.
Friday:
Got up at about 9:30 . Iain (who crashed in our(mine and
Joakims(lisp alert) room ) had got up at 8:00 and gone to
the hacking party. Joakim ( and as we later found out Hans
Petter) both had food poisoning, but I had the exact same
thing as them at the restaurant. Maybe it was delayed from
their plane. This unfortunatly meant they didn't attend the
talks or coding stuff that day.
Anyway, got to ENST after much confusion about directions
and went to the coding party. Made me wish I had a laptop!
Mathieu gave a mini-talk on the GNOME foundation which
sounds very very cool. Met Rodrigo Moya of GnomeDB fame and
managed to compile evolution on his laptop. He showed me a
lot of cool features from GnomeDB - and told me of his quest
to find Damon Chaplin to add the gnomedb widgets to glade.
Went to lunch with a bunch of people - Robert Brady ( who
writes a ttf font editor which is not yet released) came
along, and I met some more docs people. Met George Lebl the
genetically engineered goat, large, and started the
English-Czech pissing contest that continued through the
conference.
"Czech republic has been invaded so many times. You bunch
of tossers. England hasn't been invaded since 1066!"
"So, you were invaded by the Normans in 1066, and you
still haven't got rid of them!"
"We are the Normans!"
ad nauseam.
Afternoon, more talks. I think it was the Gnome 2.0. talk
first- which was done by Havoc. Followed by the Nautilus
talk, which was by Any Hertzfield of Eazel - and showed some
really great features that made people hit the wall. very
cool. Rapturous applause. Then Michael Meeks gave a bonobo
components talk and demoed the oh so cool feature of bonobo
controls in glade and libglade. amazing. Also the very nice
graph component in gnumeric. lovely. Very energetic talk
which went down tremendously well .
After this we had the GTK+ object system talk by Tim Janik
and Owen Taylor. A lot of features were discussed - new text
widget(by havoc, port from TK), pango, gobject (with
parameters/ properties), and better tree/list widgets -
which may be adapted from Etable in non canvas form.
After this, I can't remember what happened for dinner.
Odd.
Iain has just reminded me it was at ENST, a free meal. I
ate with Robert Brady, plus Sven Neumann and Mitch of the
gimp.
After this we went to a french pub with faux irish
bagpipers due to st paddyd day. This was fun. Talked a lot
to Dave ( a guy who writes PSX games and is planning a gnome
class browser) , James Henstridge, Alexander Larson, and
Anders Carlson.
A bunch of us went on to an internet cafe where we tried
to install a umsdos based distribution on the windows
machines. We failed so made do with sticking "GNU & Linux -
The dynamic duo" stickers on the monitors. George takes full
responsibility. I got to talking to Dave Camp ( Gnome
Debugging Framework) and Eskil ( Gnome-pilot - eazel guy).
Got back to hotel at about 2.00 am.
Saturday:
Got up late - about 10.30. Went along to the coding party.
Met a few more people, and went to lunch with George, Iain,
John Harper of Sawmill fame and some thin polish guy I can't
remember. Oh yeah, it was maciej ;-) of eazel, nautilus,
scwm and general hackerishness. George ate some raw meat
like the funny beast that he is.
After this there were some more talks - Dave Mason gave a
good one about docs, and Miguel gave one about Evolution.
Sounds mucho asynchronous and componenentized.
I went and had a burger at quick! which is a mcdonalds rip
off with a good name. From then it was on to the evolution
party, held in a boat on the seine. I had so much beer paid
for by helixcode that I eventually didn't even have to ask
the bartenders for it, as they knew my face! thanks helix.
Got talking to Michael Meeks , who is a very cool person,
about how to implement gnome-vfs stuff in conglomerate. Also
talked about life, the universe, and everything. Talked to
Daniel Veillard from the w3c (he wrote libxml) about how we
could possibly share code for doing DTD validation and
XSchema and stuff with libxml and conglomerate.
Technical ramble follows
This got me thinking a lot about how to implement the main
congle editing widget along with Nats bonobo talk on
Thursday, and I really want to do it fully gtkobject based
model-view now, like e-table. This way we can have a small
version which doesn't even need flux for viewing xml files
in nautilus, and we just load up another bonobo component
which implements Congle::Model to do other stuff like using
network transparent trees. This could be so clean , as we
can implement a model which gets a libxml/gdome model to do
XSchema and DTD validation, and just passes it off to the
TT model for doing TT stuff. Now I just need to convince
Hans Petter! Also, I want to get something like what I have
done (but a lot more generic and typesafe. using gtkargs for
marshalling) for undo/scripting in conglomerate into a set
of bonobo interfaces, and use GtkObjects for most of it.
This would hopefully allow everyone to just use this for
doing undo and everying in a really nice way. But don't hold
your breath ;-) At the moment, a lot of the names are
screwed up in conglomerate and I will be doing a big load of
stuff when I get the time... we use model/view but its not
as nice as using signals of gtkobjects, just a callback atm.
alsod, the undo stuff is sort of clean but a bit ad hoc
struct based and bonobo + gtkobjects will just make it
really yummy. Also means I don't need to make up yet another
plugin system, just use shared library bonobo components.
Ah, the joys of bonobo.
Technical ramble ends
I won a GGAD in a non existant drinking competition and
everyone signed it - met Frederico , Havoc,
Owen, Tim Janik, and a lot of people I have forgotten -
email me and I'll put you in!
After the boat a lot of people went to a club "La Loco" in
paris. This was tres cool and tres expensive, but hey.
Everyone danced a lot (except jacob ;-) ) and we had a lot
of fun. Eventually , me, Dave Camp, James Henstridge, and
Robert Brady decided to walk all the way back to Hotel Ibis
- a long way! Was pretty cool- we saw a lot of paris, and
Dave was saying how crazy it would be to do this in a lot of
US cities. We saw the louvre. Got in at about 4:30 where we
met Iain who had left his bag in the creperie where a bunch
of people went.
Iain was not amused.
Went to bed.
Sunday
Got up at 10am . Iain had found his bag, we went to
Eurostar on the mtro, I got on and he had to wait for his
train a while.
Got back home.
The end!
Phew, that was a long one! Feel free to email me at
rob@conspiracy.nu if I need to make corrections.
I have to write a LOGO turtle simulator in a funny pascal
clone language now....