And I am very tasty. Though I missed the main portion of the Desktop Summit I will be in Berlin early tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. I should be in time for the Introspection BOF provided I don’t get lost. I trust that taking the TXL bus to the Staatsoper stop will prove to be uneventful.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]August 9, 2011
January 26, 2011
Hackfest Thanks
I would like to thank everyone who came and hacked at the PyGObject hackfest, thank the GNOME Foundation Board for supporting us, Collabora for sponsoring us and Brmlab for hosting us. I would also like to give a big thanks to Tomeu for showing us true Prague hospitality (besides being a super hacker). I was a bit distracted the last day of the hackfest because of a small scare that ended up with me cancelling the talk I was going to give and rushing off to two Prague hospitals. I hope I didn’t worry everyone too much as it turned out to be a minor issue that was taken care of with some antibiotics. Tomeu was key in getting me where I needed to go.
A hundred things were going through my head as I had never had medical issues while being abroad – should I wait for my flight back home in three days, should I get emergency tickets back home, how much would it cost to go to a local hospital? Luckily my doctors office has web apps set up so I could securely be in communication with them while I was deciding what to do. I found out my insurance company would cover me though as it ended up Prague hospital care was a little more than what my copay would be. it all worked out in the end.
I promised the board to write-up a how-to on setting up a successful hackfest. I believe I will add a section on handling issues that may come up. We should have a policy of listing emergency information on the wiki of events we hold, including the closest places to seek care and approximate costs for travellers abroad. It is important to keep out guests safe and make them feel comfortable when they take time to help make GNOME better.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
Comments Off
July 16, 2010
GUADEC is Almost Here!
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.
Comments Off
June 7, 2010
The Road to GUADEC
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.
March 10, 2010
Buy concert tickets while floating in the clouds
Ladies and gentlemen, God Street Wine is getting back together for a couple of shows this summer and their fan club presale tickets go on sale in a half hour. I was bummed because I was getting on a flight to Austin for a friend’s wedding, right before ticketing opened. Well, I am on that flight now and apparently all American Airlines domestic flights have WiFi. Technology can be awesome sometimes (usually when it makes it easier to do every day things). Let’s just hope my battery doesn’t die before I can snag a few tickets.
Note: Fedora connected flawlessly. Bar none, we have the easiest networking setup out there. Dan Williams has done a kick ass job with Network Manager!
Update: Just purchased six tickets for Friday and six for the Saturday shows! The money goes to a good cause and I have plenty of friends who will come back to NY for this.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]December 2, 2009
Public Service Announcement – FUDCon and Passports
For those who are going to FUDCon on the FUDBus, expecially those flying to Boston first, remember to bring your Passport. Luckly these days they check both ways but at one point you could get into Canada without a passport but would be screwed on the way back. In any case I thought I would remind people as I had run into a problem where I didn’t check for my passport until a week before my sisters wedding in Italy. Sure enough I couldn’t find it and ended up having to get it done the night before I left. Not to mention the years it took off my life trying to figure out the best way to tell my twin sister I might not be able to make it to her wedding 
See you all at FUDCon!!!
August 19, 2009
To Vegas
In an effort to recreate “The Hangover” I am heading to Vegas tomorrow morning for one of my closest friend’s bachelor party.
I’ll be back Monday with some pretty cool announcement involving JavaScript and native messaging support. Let’s put it this way – if this works out implementing D-Bus in pure JavaScript might be a fun side project.
Until then I’m going to be incommunicado except for my cell phone. Get in touch with me only if there is an emergency, otherwise I’m pretty much stepping into the alternate dimension that is Vegas.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
Comments Off
July 19, 2008
Birthday Bash Done – Houston We Have Liftoff
All in all pretty good for a last minute event. It ended up being a night at the good life bar as it was too much fun to leave. People ended up rotating in and out all night and we all had a blast. My dinner was pretty good. The spinage was amazing but the steak was a little overdone. The vodka martinis were also good but I would stay away from the mixed drinks as they didn’t seem to be of the same quality. I still prefer Om for martinis and cocktails but overall Good Life was pretty good. Dancing was fun on such an intimate dance floor and we even had a show of the local hip hop dance crew showing off their moves. Well it is 4 o’clock here – a bit late for this old man. I need to pack for my trip to Aruba on Sunday and am meeting someone for dinner tomorrow night. I will be mostly absent for the next week as I try to relax and soak in some sun and beach but I will be checking e-main every once in awhile and my phone will still work for emergencies.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
Comments Off
May 15, 2008
Canada, the final frontier
Well perhaps not but I am taking off this weekend to a place I have been in spitting distance of but have never crossed the border. I find it strange that I have been all around the world and to almost every state in America and still have not bothered to visit our kind neighbours to the north. So with my roommates Bryan and Chris leaving this summer for far off jobs we decided to take a trip with a bunch of friends up to Montreal. I went down to NY last weekend for mothers day and to swap my car for my parents van just for this trip. It should be fun.
Oh and Les Halles, Anthony Bourdain’s home base, is fantastic. If you are down in New York City and in midtown I highly recommend it
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]March 24, 2008
BOSSA Fun and Productive
I got back from the BOSSA conference last week. It still is my favorite conference for just talking to people and getting things rolling. The organizers keep it small and limit the number of talks so that people can get to what they do best and just talk to each other. While I am no longer directly involved in embedded development I still feel this should be the target of most developers. A win on current generation embedded devices means improvements across the board from those devices to the desktop and even the server room. Most of my debugging and optimization techniques for D-Bus, the focus of my BOSSA talk, were gained from working with it on embedded devices. I continue to gear my work with the idea that in the near future a large portion of the people consuming those technologies will be doing so on devices that are considered to be “embedded”.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
Comments Off