In Barcelona for GPLv3 and GUADEC
Last week was the GPLv3 conference, and right now I’m at GUADEC, both of which were in the provence of Barcelona.
The GPLv3 conference, in Barcelona city, went really well and the whole thing was recorded on video by Sean Daly. Raw audio should be ready by Friday, so some of us will start working on transcripts and summaries while Sean is generating the Ogg theora video and vorbis audio files. On Wednesday July 5th, or the 7th at the latest, we’ll put online whatever we’ve managed to make.
I enjoyed Barcelona city. I didn’t get to see any of the city’s famous architecture, but Barcelona has weather I could get used to, and it has the largest Filipino community I’ve seen. I found about eight Filipino food stores, three restaurants, and two video libraries.
I still couldn’t find any books other than the usual series of short romance novels, but I did manage to pick up some Tagalog karaoke CDs, ate dinuguan (blood stew), and had plenty of conversations in Tagalog without them or me switching to English.
The karaoke CDs are both for educational value, and for practicing my party piece. There’s almost always karaoke at Filipino parties, and I’m not much of a singer, but a Caucasian singing in their language is pretty rare, and my Dublin-accented Tagalog gets some laughs. I have some recordings which I’ll put online when I get around to it.
I went back to Brussels after the GPLv3 conference, and am now back to Barcelona provence, a week later, for GUADEC in Vilanova. I had a speaking slot to talk about GPLv3 and it went better than planned. I got positive feedback about the content afterward, and in a rare feat, I managed to speak slowly and clearly.
My slides are online now. The presentation software I use is something I really like called S5. It’s css and javascript based and you just make one HTML file. One nice feature is that it changes the font size depending on your window size – so when a projecor can’t display my non-standard resolution, I can resize the window to fit the part of the screen that is being displayed, and my slides resize to suit.
I was introduced to it by Gareth Bowker when font problems broke the software I had been using 30 minutes before I had to give a talk. S5 presentations are simple and quick to make, and they just need a working installation of Firefox (other webbrowsers probably work too).