Tag Archives: Gnome

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Back from Istanbul, headed to Helsinki

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Last week was the GUADEC Conference in Istanbul. Overall it felt like one of the best GUADECs, just because I like Istanbul so much. It’s a proper city.

That’s despite the organization of the registration, accommodation, travel instructions (to the venue) being a near disaster (as they usually are). For people who made it to the venue, the University was a perfect location – efficient and clean and well equipped, with many helpful volunteers keeping things organized.

It was great to have all the Openismus employees together in one place for the first time, sharing apartments in a building near the Galata tower in that wonderful maze of narrow streets. It turns out these are great people to hang out with, particularly when you have a rooftop terrace looking over the city and a fridge full of beer on a summer night.

On Thursday morning I fly out to Helsinki with Sigi and baby Liam. I have a day of meetings on Friday, also with Jan Arne from Openismus, and then some touristing until Tuesday, including a night in Tallinn. I’m looking forward to seeing our Helsinki friends.

The Case of the Disappearing Emails

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Over the last two years, a couple of people have had problems sending email to my openismus email address. They never received any failure message, but the mails never arrived. This was annoying and mysterious, but the problem was obviously with the senders’ systems so there wasn’t much I could do.

This week one more person had the problem. All three people were German, which made me suspicious. We discovered that all three people were using bytecamp‘s email servers. For instance, gnome-de.org email addresses are hosted at bytecamp (for free, I believe). Major clue.

openismus.com was hosted at bytecamp a couple of years ago, but I moved it away because I found their services limited and rather ad-hoc, though it seems to have improved since then. It turns out that they forgot to update their MX records, so they were just swallowing any email to openismus.com from their remaining customers. Some emails to bytecamp solved the problem, so bytecamp customers can now send email to us again.

I do hope that several German GNOME developers (with gnome-de.org email addresses, for instance) have been trying to email me about working for Openismus. If you didn’t get a reply before, please try again.

Openismus 2008 T-Shirts

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The Openismus T-shirts for the GUADEC Istanbul conference are ready.

I wanted to do something different again, so I persuaded the people at Brandt to do a kind of Rolf Harris punk thing. It’s a little bit funky. I don’t think it will please everyone but it will be noticed. Each one is different.

PunkPunk

There was a shortage of T-shirts in these colours, so we did a small batch of classic retro-style dark green T-shirts too, with white banding and stripes with white flock-print. They are quite nice but less challenging.

Classic Retro
Classic Retro

Like last time, I chose to do a small number of expensive T-shirts rather than lots of cheap ones. Scarcity adds value.

Running and Turkish

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After six months I started running again, trying to lose my 5Kg of paternity weight. I’m up to four bridges again, out of a usual eight.

This gives me the chance to listen to my Pimsleur Turkish course again while running. Hopefully I’ll be able to say very few things well, so I’ll be looking for opportunities to use my small collection of nouns and verbs at GUADEC in Istanbul next week.

Thinkpad X61: Everything just works in Ubuntu

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Yesterday I received my new Lenovo Thinkpad X61. It’s the UX29DGE model, with Intel GMA X3100 graphics (gnome-device-manager says GM965/GL960), and 2.20 GHz Core Duo T7500. It shows up as Model 76739DG in gnome-device-manager.

After fighting with Windows Vista to reduce its partition size enough, I installed Ubuntu Hardy easily. I wanted to keep Vista around so I can look at it sometimes, but that short experience of it is enough to help me understand why people hate it so much. It’s as if they went out of their way to break all the basic principles of UI design, as if the managers had a running feud with the human interface department and wanted to outrage them. People who hate computers (most people), and who think that computers hate them, will not be surprised.

But it’s great to have a new laptop on which everything works. Even hibernation. I’ve never seen that work before and it’s truly useful. I wish my desktop could do it, in the absence of working session management.

I am a little disappointed that it’s almost as hot as my Acer. I guess this is just how all laptops are. How do people manage to use these things on their laps? Do we need a control panel to limit the CPU speeds, together with the internal temperature sensor, with options for “cosy”, “slow grilling” and “burning trousers”?

Openismus Will Euch Haben

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Our new hires (André, Karsten, Jan Arne) are nicely settled in now, so it’s time to find some more. There’s exciting development work to be done at Openismus using GTK+ and GNOME code. I think our employees like how we work. I try to keep them happy and not too stressed but you can probably track them down and ask them yourself.

As usual, we prefer people who live in Germany, or EU citizens who want to move to Germany. Please tell me about yourself in an email or grab me for a chat at GUADEC.

Booked our GUADEC Accommodation

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It wasn’t easy, but I found some accommodation for the 7 Openismus employees who are going to GUADEC in Istanbul. The recommended accommodation (The 2 Hotel Golden Horn hotels) was booked out and I guess it has been for some time. You’ll be lucky to even get a reply from those hotels.

We booked two apartments (Glorya Penthouse Terrace and Glorya Tower View, in BeyoÄŸlu near the Galata tower on the east side of the river.) from Istanbul Holiday Apartments, who are not cheap, but who speak (email) perfect English and are very straightforward.

I seem to have been completely wrong about the cost of accommodation in Istanbul, though it might be easier for individuals. I guess the city has boomed since my last visit. But over the last few years I have noticed that hotels everywhere have become increasingly unlike the places surrounding them. Most people who work in hotels could never afford to stay in them.

On holiday, laptop down

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I’m currently on holiday in North Berwick. It’s been fun but not quite as relaxing as hoped. Liam has started waking at night again after two months of sleeping through the night.

I’ve been getting up early to do a couple of hours work each morning, but this laptop’s hard drive has started hard crashing after a few minutes. Hard drives fail too often. Hopefully it will give me time to finish this blog entry and hit Publish. I guess I’ll be offline until I get back on Monday.

Brussels and Prague

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I’ve been travelling more than usual in May and I’m not finished.

I spent a couple of days in Brussels at Thomas Vander Stichele‘s place, getting a crash course in the Flumotion streaming media server because I’ll be writing Flumotion‘s user documentation.

I’m writing quite a lot of documentation these days, and enjoying it as a holiday from writing code. It’s stress free in comparison. I’d like to make Openismus known for creating documentation along with our development and QA work. There’s always a need for it.

After Brussels I spent a few days with Liam’s grandparents in Karlsruhe before heading to Prague for FOSSCamp. Being away from him for so long was not easy.

Things I read on the train to Prague:

  • The GStreamer Application Development Manual: This is a truly useful document. I now feel like I understand how to use gstreamer. That has allowed me to make sense of the surprisingly mature gstreamer C++ bindings and should help my understanding of Flumotion. I now want to read the GStreamer Plugin Writer’s Guide too.
  • The GNOME Documentation Style Guide: This was better than expected, written by true strunkandwhiteistas who show real experience of writing technical documentation. I didn’t learn much new but was glad to see the advice presented for others. Many points are repeated, but that’s maybe to allow each audience to get the whole message without reading the other sections. Still, the text is sometimes long winded, suggesting a rogue extra author.

FOSSCamp was not quite the dull unstructured talk-fest that I feared, just because of the quality of the attendees, each of whom had something fascinating to explain. It was indeed mostly just talk, with little chance of any resulting action, but it was at least interesting talk.

I quickly introduced Glom to a small group of people who seemed positive and led a larger discussion about updates of stable upstream releases in stable versions of distros, mostly focusing on Ubuntu because only the Ubuntu people seemed to have opinions. Maybe the other distros’ processes are not so easily influenced. I think we already have a result, which I can hopefully mention soon.

I stayed an extra day to meet André Klapper, who is attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit, so we could talk about his bugmaster work for Openismus. We fight entropy. I attended the Ubuntu Mobile sessions in the morning before taking the train home to Munich, but it was impenetrable to anyone not already involved. But that’s UDS – it’s for people already working on stuff.

Both FOSSCamp and the overlap with UDS allowed me to meet many of my favourite people and I am guilty of enjoying their company when I should have been meeting more new people instead.

On Saturday we fly to Scotland (North Berwick) for two weeks so Liam can meet his other grandfather and aunt. I’ve tried to plan the pain out of flying with a five-month old baby for the first time, but it’s sure to be a challenge.