It all started at the Google party last night. Thanks Google for the dinner, beer and ice cream but I have to say it had all the charm of a corporate mixer. Perhaps they should take page out of the Fluendo party handbook on how to throw a compelling mixer. Now that was a party where everyone talked to every one else, even if it was through slured speech.
Rob Taylor and I figured there was still time to catch the 7:30 Literary Pub Crawl so we gracefully ducked out and headed for the exit. Foiled. The door leading us to sweet freedom and good beer was locked. One needed a Google badge to get in or out. Read into that however you would like. Luckily an employee, clad in his black leather motorcycle armor, a guardian of the gate thinks I, was coming in just as we had decided to knock down the door. Actually we were just going to go get someone from the party to open the door but that would have been a bit awkward. As he came in we slipped out and set upon or goal of finding total strangers to drink beer with and listen to prose of long dead writers.
Success – we were a bit late but arrived at the Duke pub on … can you guess? … Duke st. and proceeded to down some Guinness. Each stop was preceded by information about local writers and even scenes from their plays or novels which were acted out by our two professional actor guides. They were quite fun even if I don’t remember the substance of anything they said. And you wonder why they don’t have taps in classrooms. On the other hand I might have gone to class more often. In any case, we stayed at each of the four bars for about 20 minutes a piece. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t normally down a beer in 20 minutes not to mention the thick ambrosia they sling here in Dublin. I was pretty sauced when we reached our last bar where we found Zack Rusin and a small group of other KDE hackers along with a pretty decent performer throwing back classic British and American rock songs on his six string acoustic. We put on a couple of more there and had all sorts of friendly banter until the pub signaled last call with a couple of flicks of the light switch and we shuffled out into the night.
Robert and I then went to look for Daf and Robot101 (aka the other Robert or his royal majesty McQueen). On our way we noticed a bunch of clubs we wanted to try out. One in particular with a large line out the door caught our eye and we decided to go there after we found the others. When we caught up to Daf and Robot101 they were a bit to tired to go clubbing so Rob and I went off to the club by ourselves. This would later prove to be fortunate for us. As we waited on line, a bit of chatter happened between the group ahead of us and a guy behind us. The guy behind us was being a bit of a idiot in his black collared shirt, picking on a guy in front of us for wearing a tee. The entertainment came to a head when a girl who was standing right next to the tee guy mentioned that the collar guy looked good if he was a waiter. She then proceeded to start ordering as if she was in a restaurant. Being sufficiently burned by this and taking a hit to his pride collar guy retorted with something no guy would ever get sympathy for saying in a large crowd. If it were in some bars in the US the guy would have gotten a pretty good beat-down by the other guys in the line but here it just elicited very loud boos. What he said was so over the line it bears no repeating here. Rob and I even came to the woman’s defense at that point which got us high fives from her and scorn from him. He proceeded to start to pick on my tee. I simply ignored him.
When we got to the front of the line Rob and I were pulled aside being that we did not think to tag onto the girl’s group and most clubs are hard asses about letting a group of just men in. We were standing there for a few minutes and Rob wanted to leave and find another place but before we did that I leaned towards one of the bouncers and asked “my friend, is there any chance we will get in sometime tonight?”. “It is just the two of you?”, he asked back. “Yes”. Click. Unlatch. Ding. “Get inside”. It just goes to show, it never hurts to ask. A shot of Jeger and some Jim Beam and Pepsi later ( Rob had a Vodka double and Pepsi) and we were out on the dance floor dancing up a storm.
It ended up being quite a night I thought to myself as I sauntered back to my hostel after the club closed. Pretty soon I leave to go back to Boston where I will start work with my new group. I can say I am very rested and this conference was a great way to transition between my roles at work.
Thanks KDE and thanks Dublin for a great time. Next up is the GNOME Boston Summit in a few weeks.
[read this post in:
ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
I actually made it to Dublin for aKademy after my ticket debacle. I even managed to finish my talk on the plane ride over and even more remarkable, deliver it to a packed room of KDE developers and enthusiasts. There have been a number of positive blogs over at planetkde.org so I think it went well. Money well spent if you ask me. Being able to connect and build bridges with the KDE community is priceless. Competition and cooperation are NOT mutually exclusive.
I plan on giving an abbreviated form of my talk at the Boston Summit in a few weeks since it does not really have a lecture format. The Boston Summit is more of a collection of BOF sessions. The good thing about this is after my brief presentation there will be a large and healthy discussion that should follow.
[read this post in:
ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
I just made the stupid mistake of buying nonrefundable tickets to Dublin a week after aKademy. Problem rectified with cash that would have gone to buying me a nice piano to practise on. Live and learn. It sucks to grow up and to actually have to live up to your responsibilities. Oh well, the week in Dublin and meeting the KDE guys will be worth it. Now instead of my plan to leasurely write my talk, I’ll have to get it done on the plane and at the Hostel this Friday.
[read this post in:
ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
Comments Off
GNOME.org
Wow Mo, that mockup looks great. I personally would love to use a GNOME sidepanel widget on my websites. So, not only are the mockups a vast improvement to the current site, they also provide a way to market GNOME and direct people to the site. GNOME Web Team go, go, go…
Orca and Usability in Accessibility
Orca is a great app but part of me wishes we were a little more demanding in letting it into the release. No doubt it is much better than what we had previously but the acceptance process should in general push for higher standards. This time around we had bigger fish to fry so Orca was accepted with little debate most likely because none of us on the release team are really experts in the area of accessibility. Last night I spent my time hacking up a patch that would integrate Orca into the desktop a bit more. It is a hack and needs to be done better upstream but basically I now have the at pref dialog starting and stopping Orca when accessibility is turned on and off. I even added a pref button which brings up the Orca configuration dialog. One still has to deal with Orca’s strange behavior of killing the current Orca every time a new Orca is started (even if it is only to bring up the config dialog). Tell me, does Orca actually work without X? Why not use X selections or D-Bus to handle making Orca a singleton? In any case we should be thinking about usability in accessibility in the same way we look at usability everywhere else. What is needed is a framework where by it is easy to start, stop and get the advanced config dialog of an at service. It should also be easy for at services to respect pref dialog options on the fly. The patches can be picked up from the Orca and control-center source rpms in Fedora.
Leaving the Red Hat Desktop Team
This is at the bottom because it is a bit of non-news. I’m not leaving Red Hat, just moving to a new project. It has been over two years since Havoc hired me onto the Desktop Team. Since then Red Hat has grown in leaps and bounds. New project were created, people were moved around and things changed generally for the better. Yesterday was my last day on the Desktop Team. David Zeuthen and I swap roles today. He is going back to Desktop to concentrate more on HAL and I am going to OLPC to do who knows what.
What does this mean for my involvement with GNOME? Nothing much really. OLPC is still a desktop though very targeted and different from what most people think is a desktop. What is GNOME anyway? Bryan Clark often asks me this question whenever I talk to him. Is GNOME the panel? The apps? According to Luis GNOME is People and the ideals those people represent. We have a certain direction we all believe in. “Simply Powerful” is the abbreviated way of stating this direction. So, me moving to OLPC means I will still be working on GNOME for a long time to come.
[read this post in:
ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
Update: It is not quite a Desktop deployment but a POS Desktop one but it is still pretty cool
An interesting little article turned up on zdnet. It is light on details but perhaps some Fedora people can shed light on the deployment. I often read in comments around the internet that Red Hat hasn’t done anything for Desktop Linux which sometimes hurts given the amount of time and thought I have personally put into making the Linux Desktop kick major butt along with the huge amount of work I see all my colleges put in every day on Fedora and GNOME. The real reward comes seeing people use the software successfully.
But it is not just Red Hat that contributes to the success. I joined the Red Hat Desktop during the release period of Fedora Core 2 and I have just seen the community grow in leaps an bounds. They contribute a huge amount and are often unsung. Also the GNOME community, of which I have been a part of since before the 1.0 days, just provides such a great environment for collaboration. The truth is any time any distro is deployed from one computer to a million and beyond, we all win. Eyes on the prize; we are getting better every day but there is still a long way to go and we need the diversity FOSS gives us to figure out different ways to spread deployments even further.
[read this post in:
ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
Release Candidate 1 for D-Bus 1.0 (official version 0.93) has been released. This brings us one step closer to the actual 1.0 release. Barring any blocker bugs, this along with a couple of other outstanding patches will become 1.0 final.
Have fun, download it, bang on it and help us make sure D-Bus 1.0 is as solid as possible.
You can download this release at:
http://dbus.freedesktop.org/releases/dbus/dbus-0.93.tar.gz
[read this post in:
ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]