It has been a very long time since my last blog. I was busy working on my Diploma Thesis (the German equivalent for Master's Thesis) the last few months, and am still working on it for some weeks.
Talk
This year I've been to GUADEC again. About 1 1/2 weeks before the event Dave Neary asked me if I wanted to replace Sandino Flores Moreno from Novell because he couldn't come. He wanted to give a talk about PyGTK, libglade, and his new code generator. Being quite familiar with PyGTK, I said yes and prepared a talk for GUADEC.
The "Haus der Wirtschaft" where GUADEC took place was equipped with lots of beamers who had problems with Radeon graphics chips. They didn't recognize the resolution and always fell back to 640 x 480. My presentation desklet wouldn't have any problems scaling down to that resolution, but there seems to be a strange bug in gDesklets which prevented me from using full-screen mode in 640 x 480 resolution for my slides. So I decided to talk without slides. From what people have told me, the talk still went fine without slides; the major part of my talk was a live demonstration anyway. You can find my slides for download at http://www.gdesklets.org/~pycage/rad-slides.tar.bz2, though. The PyGTK people also want me to add it to www.pygtk.org. I'll do that soon.
Lightning Talks
This year's GUADEC introduced "Lightning Talks" which are actually very cool. Every participant gets 5 minutes to present a project, and may answer one question from the audience. That way you get to learn a lot of new projects in a short amount of time. Our gDesklets talk was the first, so I think people will remember that well. The gDesklets lightning talk went very well. We talked about what gDesklets is and about our plans for the future, esp. about the keybindings stuff.
That nifty Nokia device
The Nokia 770 is an internet and multimedia tablet which is based on Linux (Debian) and GNOME technology. Nokia arrived with an army of about 20 people at GUADEC to introduce and demonstrate this toy. The best part is that Nokia encourages hacking this device and provides a SDK for free.
So, when are we going to see gDesklets running on it? I'm pretty confident that it will happen this year! :)
I had lots of chance to play with the N770. At first at the speakers-only Nokia-Party one day before GUADEC started, and later at GUADEC in Nokia's VIP room.
More about the N770
The N770 is an internet tablet with 64 MB RAM driven by a Strong ARM processor. It's a lightweight device flat as a matchbox and about the size of an O'Reilly pocket reference book. Its display is quite big and very sharp with a fine resolution. Under the hood there was a Debian Linux with 2.6.12rc2 kernel and some patches and proprietary drivers. The user interface was GTK with additional widgets (LGPL) on the matchbox window manager.
My points of criticism are the loooong booting time (Nokia is working to improve this) and the fact that the battery only lasts for about three hours. Also, the system lacks memory and feels a bit slow. Handwriting recognition had problems with my handwriting also, but that might be because of my handwriting. ;)
The device can play videos with RealPlayer but it's not too smooth.
However, since the device is still in beta-stage, and since this is the first device of its kind, there is hope for improvements. :)
Python on the N770
At GUADEC party I had plenty of time to talk to Nokia's Python guy, who is from Germany. They got Python running on the device and are currently in the process of porting PyGTK, gnome-python, and making Python bindings for their Hildon widgets. Nokia is very eager to have Python on this device!
Some strange meat
Some of us GUADEC people have been to "Sidney", an Australian restaurant in Stuttgart. There they were serving strange meat such as kangarooh, emu, or crocodile. I haven't tasted emu, but kangarooh is very tasty. Crocodile is also good and a bit like fish (it's a scaly reptile after all).
