J5’s Blog

It is really great to see this year’s GUADEC videos being released so soon after the event.  Thank you Flumotion and Fluendo!!!

My only gripe is that yet again my talk’s timeslot seems to have experienced technical difficulty and is not available (the file is only 27min long).  Hopefully that is just a temporary glitch.

It is still an amazing feat of engineering that such as new technology such as WebM codec was used not only to provide archives of the conference but to also stream live.  Not to mention the software and codec used are both Open Source.

Are you getting excited?  GNOME’s flagship conference, GUADEC, is taking off in a little over a week in Den Haag, The Netherlands.  I’ve got my bags packed and a draft of my talk written.

With one more concert tonight in New York City, I set off tomorrow evening for a much needed vacation in Macon, France where I will be learning classic French cooking at Robert Ash’s cooking school.  The first lesson happens on my birthday, when I will be turning a nice and ripe 33.  Fresh fare such as bar à la crème de fenouil avec ses pommes dauphinoises, confit de canard, and profiteroles au chocolat, among others are set to be learned.  I’ve been playing with the idea of having a fund raising dinner with all the proceeds going to the GNOME Foundation during this year’s Boston Summit.  Perhaps after the course I will feel confident enough to trade donations for my cooking.

Afterwards there are a couple of days of layover in Amsterdam between when the course ends and GUADEC begins.  At GUADEC I am going to be devoting most of my time to whipping PyGObject into glorious introspection shape.   Please join us at the BOFs to learn more, help us hack or get help porting your apps to utilize the power of introspection.  There will be a BOF on general GObject Introspection on Monday the 26th between 14:00-16:00 and on PyGObject(PyGI) on Thursday the 29th between 14:00-18:00.  Otherwise you can find myself or any of the other introspection and GNOME python hackers any time during GUADEC.  If you are a newbie developer looking for something to hack on to get your name out there while learning some core GNOME technologies,  there are some really easy bits to sort of take control of and run with.  There is a lot of detail work such as fixing annotations or doing simple overrides that would take little effort to get up to speed with but make a huge impact on the final quality of the introspected bindings.  Heck, find me over a glass of beer at one of the after parties and I will wax poetic on the thing needed to be done to finish the last mile of our Python plans.

After GUADEC, Colin Walters and I will be travelling to Berlin, both to save airfare by flying out on a weekday and to decompress after a week of non-stop hacking.   I’m looking forward to seeing many old friends and making new ones.  Let’s make GUADEC rock and continue to push GNOME to continue to excel at excellence.  With this year’s focus on GNOME 3 and the underlying technologies that support it there will be a lot of exciting things to see and hack on.

I will be at Farmingdale College tonight giving a talk to LILUG.  It is a draft of my “The Future is JavaScript” talk I will be presenting at GUADEC in a little over two weeks.  I will also be talking about what it has been like working for an Open Source company for the last five years, along with how to get started working within the community.

I’ll be heading to GUADEC this year thanks to the generous support the GNOME Foundation Travel Committee but that won’t be my first stop in my mega marathon travelling month of July.

• I will first be travelling to NY around the 8th for the God Street Wine reunion concerts and will be making a pit stop at the Long Island Linux Users Group to give a dry run of my GUADEC talk entitled “The Future is JavaScript” which will continue with my theme from last year of continuing to meld the GNOME Desktop with the web platform (this year focusing on what JavaScript brings to the table)
• I fly out of JFK Airport on the 17th for Lyon France where I am taking the week long Robert Ash cooking course at Rue du Lac in Macon, Burgundy
• The class ends on the 23rd and my Hotel is booked for the 25th in The Hague so I am not quite sure if I will stay in Lyon or start my way up.  I know I have some GNOME friends living between Lyon and The Hague so I am offering to cook dinner for anyone who will let me crash at their place for a couple of days before GUADEC.
• And then there is the main event – GUADEC.  My talk is on Wednesday the 28th at noon.  It shouldn’t be missed.
• To relax a bit more, save money on airfare and because I love Germany, I am heading to Berlin for a couple of days before flying back to the US

If anyone is going to be in any of the areas I will be in and wants to hang out.  Let me know and I’ll see if I can make time.

Thinking Outside The Box: Bringing the Network back into G(N)OME

Thanks to Paul Cutler’s excellent work on GNOME Journal we have a great stream of articles to keep us up to date on the happening of GNOME. Please consider helping him out if you have time on your hands. It is a great way for those who don’t program but still love GNOME to become a producer instead of just a consumer in the GNOME ecosystem. The potential for making an impact with contributions such as these is just as important as those who contribute with code.

On the heels of Paul’s interview with myself I thought I should post the slides of my talk. Unfortunately the video of my talk did not seem to make it with the numerous other published videos. I’m not sure why that is but it is something we should improve on next year. Being able to reach those who could not attend the conference is just as important as presenting to those in the conference hall.

Dear Foundation Members,

In the past, by this time, the Board would have already sent around the GUADEC call for hosts. In largely closed door meetings it would have been decided where next year’s GUADEC would be held, announcing it at the current year’s conference. Since this has been a year of significant change (this is the first year GUADEC is being co-located with Akademy) we would like to get more input into the process and find out what our members want to see come next summer, as well as how to best pick the winning location.

We have decided to postpone the call for proposals until after this year’s GUADEC has concluded. We fully expect to discuss the topic during GUADEC at the foundation AGM, as well as on the foundation list to find out what you, the members, would like to see happen next year. Please feel free to talk about your likes and dislikes about this year’s conference and if you don’t get a chance to attend, what would make you more likely to attend next year.

As for those who wish to make a proposal, a formal call for hosts is not a prerequisite for starting the process. If you can, we encourage you to meet with us and other attendees at this year’s conference and get a head start by starting the drafting process sooner than later. You may also contact us with questions you may have.

On behalf of the board,
John (J5) Palmieri

View Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009 locations in a larger map

I’ve started a publicly editable Google map for this years GUADEC/Akademy Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. I’ve added a few of the recommended hotels and the conference venue so attendees can get an idea of the distances and locations between each place. Please add any information that would be useful to attendees including the rest of the hotel list, event locations and gathering spots. I hope to see a lot of new and old faces at the conference in July.

UPDATE: Behdad pointed me to a more complete map.

On the heals of having my talk accepted I’ve booked my flight to this years GUADEC/Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Much thanks goes out to my manager Tom “spot” Callaway for finding funds for my airfare. I think it shows a lot of support and commitment from Fedora/Redhat even though I am not in the Desktop group anymore.

My talk is happening sometime during the core days and I will be talking about Open Web Services, open data exchange between projects and melding server side and client side to build an open community of applications. After working on d-bus and seeing the success a standard IPC platform has brought the richness of our desktop I believe it is time we expand that meme to include standard application interaction across the physical barriers of the Desktop. It is time to bring the (N)etwork back into G(N)OME while keeping true to our Free and Open Source roots.