Bobulate

I see that Bertjan had the scoop (over the dot story) that the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit videos are online in a Free-Software-friendly format (ogv). Please note that the talk listed as Mustapha Abubakar is not, in fact, Mustapha himself, but some shoddy stand-in who didn’t even bring his Hausa man’s hat. I’m going to have to show the wife this one, because she’s always wondering what it is I actually get up to at these conferences.

Also, Albert has an excellent idea with KDE 4.3 release dinners; that one is past already (vids guys?), but KDE 4.3 is still upcoming.

There’s a KDE-NL Summer BBQ to celebrate the midpoint between KDE 4.3.0 and KDE 4.3.1 on August 23rd, too. Lots of opportunity to demonstrate your secret talents this summer.

The new legal journal IFOSSLR was launched officially yesterday; see also Carlo Piana’s description. For a legal journal, I think we can claim a real success already, with many thousands of downloads. The topics covered include procurement, risk, the Jacobsen case and random comments by myself around Free Software branding. At the launch event, kindly hosted by Berwin Leighton Paisner, I ran into Glyn Moody (a bit on open access journals, too) and Karen Sandler (from the SFLC). It was just like being back on the Canary islands, almost.

I also discovered that after ten hours of exposure to lawyers, I pass out. Sorry about that, Malcolm.

[[ Some notes from behaving like a BugSquad member. Picture of the real deal on the dot. ]]

There was a BoF session on a timezone bug, where Pau Garcia y Quiles brought together folks running all kinds of Linux distros and other Free Software operating systems to examine system timezone setting. That has yielded lots of new information, but not yet a resolution. Changing system timezone on Solaris seems to require a reboot – that doesn’t seem right. I’ll have to play with the GNOME code to see what it does.

Re-tagged a bunch of old bugs that were not FreeBSD-specific to the “All” operating system after checking the bug still exists in current 4.3-rc1 on Solaris.

On monday evening, I wrote a BugSquad song. I guess those are the only 12 lines of original content I’ve written so far?

Claudia tells me I should use microblogging. I don’t know. Maybe I can write 140-character paragraphs instead. Is that ok?
The Canary islands are beautiful and rugged. I will leave it to Jos to wax lyrical about them. I have been hiding out in the ops room, compiling.
There will be Solaris Nevada b.115 packages for KDE4 out in a few hours. Then I can demonstrate the same on Sun Ray — and how ugly it is.
No one has exploded from stress *yet*. But then, the first real event of the day is about 25 minutes away.

Last week I gave a talk at an NOiV event (NOiV is the Dutch government agency created to oversee the motion to prefer Free Software in government procurement) and today the speakers got back the evaluation results. I’m happy to have gotten good marks (7.5 out of 10) and to have had “Adriaan’s enthusiasm for Open Source” named explicitly by two different respondents as a cool thing about the event.

Now I need to change my style for any speaking I may be doing at GCDS. I’ve promised to bring the traditional (?) speaker-motivation instruments for Akademy, and I’ll need to lay off the buzzwords a little.

Gosh, I go on about upcoming interesting Free Software conferences all the time, don’t I. But there’s just so many of them. I got four to pimp out today, and all of them have the word “Open” in their name — which reminds me I really need to deal with that word at some point in the near future. If you’re in western Europe or the middle of the United States (you may apply geography lessons to me, but it will cost you a plane ticket), harken:

• OSDevCon is in Hamburg, september 23-25 2009. It’s an OpenSolaris developers, contributors and application porters conference. The CfP closes july 26th. I suppose I should try to get something about KDE in there, although since I’m also on the programme committee there’s definite conflict-of-interest. And if you don’t particularly care about OSOL (it really does have a cool package manager), you might want to try the co-located Linux Kongress.
• Utah Open Source Conference is in Utah (which contains interesting cartoonists) from october 8-10. I can see — given the current list of abstracts — a real need there for Desktop or Free Software talks.
• The NLUUG fall conference on the Open Web, october 29th 2009. Officially the CFP closes today, but I think I can give you an informal reassurance that abstracts will continue to be accepted for another week or so. Frank Karlitschek, this means you.
• Open Rhein Ruhr is a regional conference (closer to where I live than Amsterdam is!) november 7th and 8th. All things Free Software considered, and the CFP is open until august 23rd. No reason not to submit your “stuff that will be cool in KDE 4.4” talk now, though.

That’s it for now, and until next week, when I try to explain why the 2009 Maemo summit isn’t on my list yet.

This year’s CCOSA was done without me, as I no longer work for CodeYard — and anyway, I was speaking elsewhere. Ah, CCOSA: The CodeYard Capgemini Open Source Award, which is awarded each year to the coolest CodeYard projects. It’s a cash prize for the students involved and their school (split fifty-fifty) rewarding their dedication and talent. The two winning projects were OpenOffice Share and FretsWeb. I’ll let their websites speak for themselves, as they testify to the professionalism of the students involved. FretsWeb has since moved on to SourceForge (let’s face it, CodeYard serves as an incubator for the “big time”).

It’s the OpenOffice Share project that particularly piques my interest. Adding a collaborative editing workflow to an application like OOo is a big feature win. OK guys, now do it again for KOffice, ok?

Yesterday I gave a talk at an NOiV event (the NOiV is the Dutch government bureau leading Open Systems, Open Standards and Open Source adoption). You can find the schedule here where you’ll find I was the closing keynote speaker (warning: both sites in Dutch). I never got around to blogging this in advance, possibly because I assume readers of my blog aren’t IT managers at Dutch local councils. It’s quite interesting talking to people in this area, because they do have long-term societal responsibility — which is something that the four Freedoms of Free Software address — and yet at the same time are stuck with interoperability and transition questions from decades of proprietary software use. So I seized the opportunity to learn more about the tax office, libraries and the police and they way they operate their IT infrastructure and software selection process. On the whole it was a pretty successful day, and I was glad to hear from several folks that they appreciated my talk. I’ll probably end up at the NOiV again in September at one of their inspirational events. That’s enlightened self-interest on my part, too 🙂

[[ As an aside, I found www.ictkalender.nl today, which seems to have a pretty complete view of IT events in the Netherlands. I’d never heard of it before, nor have I checked if it actually lists all the Free Software events in the Netherlands or any of the non-commercial offerings, but it seems fairly complete. There’s a DrupalJam going on tomorrow, for instance. ]]

Back from Spain. Speaking in Utrecht tomorrow (managers). Dancing and organizing dinner in Lent thursday (square). Speaking in Nijmegen friday (high school students). Weekend. Mopping up KDE-Solaris stuff. Organizational matters monday and tuesday. Gran Canaria wednesday. And then the real rushing about begins.

I was reading some article on the Register just now and one of the doubleclick ads was for OpenOffice. “Gosh, Free Software really has gone mainstream”, I thought, although the domain name of the target was a little odd; I clicked on it anyway (wear rubbers!) and ended up on www dot openoffice dash dash plus dot info slash nl slash and .. whoa. That’s a fascinating way of getting people to download a very big, presumably very poisonous, .exe file. It’s a good thing that the site is a mish-mash of Dutch and Spanish, as that might tip off some potential victims that this is not entirely kosher.