Paul's Web Pages

Preparing for GUADEC

Paul van Tilburg — 2008-07-02T00:00:00+02:00

I am in the process of packing my stuff for my holidays. Tomorrow, I will fly to Istanbul to attend GUADEC 2008. Because GUADEC does not start before the 7th, it will give me some time to roam around Istanbul itself and do some sightseeing, probably with some of the Collabora guys.

I’m flying on July 3 at 12:00 (0200) from Schiphol with KLM (flight KL 1615) and arrive at Istanbul Atatürk International Airport at 16:20 (0300). I’ll return on July 13 at 17:15 (0300), again with KLM (flight KL 1616), and land on Schiphol at 19:55 (0200). In Istanbul I will be staying in the Saint Sophia Hotel in Sultanahmet.

I’m looking forward to it, although it doesn’t feel like holidays to me yet. I should have an Internet connection over there, and probably Jaiku via cell phone will work fine too. So I will keep you up-to-date.

It is also clear that I will be skipping DebConf this year. This is unfortunate, because I wanted to work with the Debian/Ruby team to advance some of our goals. However, I’m happy to catch at least one free software conference.

Back Home

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

And before you know it, another week has passed… I arrived back home yesterday, sooner that I had expected. The flight, landing and taxiing went very quickly and smoothly; this is probably to compensate for the enormously slow and dramatic check-in and boarding.

I had a great time meeting all the Debian people, getting to know each developer’s backgrounds, talking, discussing, eating, etc. In my opinion, the people at Debconf and especially the organisation team cannot be thanked enough for making this possible, so here we go: thank you very much everyone, for making Debconf 7 possible and fun. :-) See you in Argentina, I hope!

My own photos containing some general impressions will follow shortly. Though, I left most of the Debconf photographing to people with real cameras and some of these photo have already been published on the Debconf 7 gallery.

Feeding Frenzy! Uploaded

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-20T00:00:00+02:00

There is some effort here at Debconf to improve Debian’s game stuff. I want to contribute to that by announcing my first upload of the game “Feeding Frenzy!” to Debian Sid. The game is about dwarfs (or sheep) that have to collect food to survive which becomes increasingly scarce during the game. Besides collecting food, the dwarfs can also can choose to throw the food at competing dwarfs to temporarily disable them.

Four years ago, a group consisting of some of my friends and myself created this game as an assignment for a project in our bachelor computer science. A few weeks ago, we undusted the game, Bram fixed some compiler warnings and I fixed up the package. It is ready for Debian now and has a pretty good gameplay, though it can probably still be improved graphic- and level-wise. I uploaded it two days ago. So, if our FTP-masters are no longer busy with Debconf, I hope they can get the game through the NEW queue soon.

Debconf Debian/Ruby Extras Meeting

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-19T00:00:00+02:00

The Debian/Ruby Extras team has come to an agreement about a meeting time and date, yay! We’re going to meet today, Tuesday June 19, 2007 and discuss current packaging issues, plans for the future, and the Ruby policy. I’m delighted that half of the members of the team are here and are able to get together.

Invitation If anyone is interested in joining the team or observing what we do, please meet us at 18:00 in front of the cafeteria.

Oh, and could somebody at least bring a computer, because my PowerBook is not as portable anymore as it used to be.

Update: I forgot to mention that most team members usually hide out on IRC in the #debian-ruby channel on OFTC.

DebCamp Update

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-15T00:00:00+02:00

It is time for a DebCamp update, since I’ve been here three days now. I have mainly been working on picking up the slack regarding Debian/Ruby Extras. This meant: getting rid of a CDBS rule that substitutes the entire team in the Uploaders field, cleaning up some package, uploading some packages with new upstream, solving and filing bugs.

During all this, the “picture” of the environment outside is actually only missing yellow/brown trees shedding their leaves.

Ruby D-Bus 0.2.0

In between the Debian/Ruby Extras work I have been able to finish the documentation of our Ruby D-Bus protocol implementation. It is due for release this weekend and I think we’ll make it.

Arrival

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-12T00:00:00+02:00

I have just arrived in Edinburgh. The flight was just fine. The weather is a bit foggy and cold (compared to NL), but it is exactly how I remember it. I was transported to MACS at the Heriot-Watt university. It’s weird to sit on my old working spot again. :-)