Bobulate

Smallest possible result: the punchline “she got the clap from a gnome” just made me giggle uncontrollably. Curse those webcomics! if there’s anything I’ve caught from GNOMEs this week, it was enthusiasm for cross desktop technologies, and I buried a Mexican. You just can’t get that kind of community building without a big conference, although I do miss a certain sense of “one moment that the entire project is together in a single room” because of the schedule.

Seeing how we (as the Free Software Desktop) are growing a new Pillar of the Free Desktop by moving Strigi analyzers and Tracker and Nepomuk Ontologies and Zeitgeist (really just a visualization of one suitable Nepomuk query) together — this is the Semantic Pillar — is really exciting. Finding this synergy takes a conference. Crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s is part of the work week around Akademy. That’s a good concrete result.

I got some patches for Qt Creator ready, but I’m so totally useless with git that I haven’t managed to push out any merge requests yet. Similarly, I see that the (Open|Nevada) Solaris packages are coming along well too, but haven’t taken the time to sync up these last few days. There are some other bugs I would like to look at in the coming weeks, but there is nothing critical right now.

Finally, I got to send off Akademy and GUADEC with a bang. No additional tools allowed (John Layt, that other photo is also genius). I spent some time going over the major results I could identify, and with Vincent Untz providing the “it was fun” part, we thanked the University, the organizers, and then we moved on to the best part: the Pope on patents.

Something to keep in mind for future conferences is perhaps a wiki page (world-writable) for lost-and-found. I ended up with a Medion brand USB stick, 64MB, with .tex source files on it and a bunch of PDFs and some family pictures. The TeX sources look have this attribution:

\author{Departamento de Matematicas \\ I.E.S. Santa Maria de Guia}
\title{PO. Numeros enteros}

It’s primary school quizzes on whole numbers! Was found in the music hall, but I haven’t had time to notify about it yet. I will take it to the conference at the ULPGC and leave it at the desk there. (Wasn’t there a news item recently about the dangers of plugging in random USB sticks? And if you’re looking for objects, consider this method.)

[[ 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.