Paul's Web Pages

Post-FOSDEM 2009

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-02-16T00:00:00+01:00

I have attended FOSDEM again this year. Most of all, it was nice to see everyone again, especially the Collabora crew. Besides having fun while hanging out with them again, I must say FOSDEM was quite a motivation boost too!

I feel motivated again to work on Ruby packaging. The whole RubyGem mess and other less-specific Ruby-related messes keep draining my motivation. This feels very conflicting, since I like the language very much. The upcoming transition to Ruby 1.9.1 will be quite a challenge and I hope that we can finally work out a nice, actual Ruby policy for Squeeze.

A few days ago I have also joined the pkg-gstreamer team, mainly to work on Elisa packaging. Elisa is a nice-looking media center application that I am using on my HTPC. Debian’s experimental suite now contains an up-to-date version of Elisa, try it out if you want.

Elisa 0.5.27

So, why is Elisa not in unstable yet. Well, Elisa has a plugin system which also features auto-updates. While this is very nice on platforms such as Windows, it is not really nice for Debian. I have been working to get this updating disabled by default. Once I am sure (hopefully by the time 0.5.28 gets released) that it is in order, I wil upload it to unstable.

Meanwhile I am planning to work on some Elisa plugins to add some features that I feel are missing. First of all I need webradio a la Rhythmbox in there. Then something to watch TV: a MythTV frontend-plugin, via UPnp, or whatever works. Finally it might be nice to have to have a plugin to setup video-conferencing using Telepathy. I’m quite sure some of these things are lying around somewhere, more about that later.

Arrived in Istanbul

Paul van Tilburg — 2008-07-04T00:00:00+02:00

I safely arrived in Istanbul yesterday. The trip went well, only it took some effort to get into the country. There was a huge queue at the passport checkpoint which was advancing very slowly. Then, when I finally was at the desk, the guy told me to get a visa first. Right, this is not Shengen, there is all this complicated stuff. So, I got in line for a visa. At the visa desk, the lady told me I could only pay in cash, in particular Euros and US dollars, nothing else. For the Netherlands, the Visa is € 10, which I left at home on purpose. So, I was directed to the ATM, where I got Turkish Lires, hoping they would suffice too, and they did. Back in the queue for the passport checkpoint, got through quickly. Next, the baggage. Because everyone is stuck at the passport checkpoint so long, almost nobody removes their baggage from the band. So, when 6 flights are assigned to that band your baggage will be dropped on, it will take a looong time. Also, it seems sometimes suitcases “drop off” in the corners of the band and moved to “some location”. When Amsterdam dropped of the board, I was worried, but I found my suitcase at “the location”. Finally we boarded the shuttle to the hotel and arrived there over 2,5 hour later. We had a nice walk and very good dinner (not for Sjoerd though). Just to prove I’m really here (info):

Now, on to some sight-seeing!

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.

GNOME Bashing & Early Rising

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-02-12T00:00:00+01:00

Early Rising

Simon, I have been following the early riser program for 8 months now. I wrote about my experience some time ago. It still is working well for me, although I had a little trouble with it when I moved to Edinburgh. However, my headaches warn me and make sure I stay in the program.

GNOME

It has been quite a meme to bash GNOME the last few weeks. Since bashing generally doesn’t help the motivation of any hackers and people working hard to accomplish a goal, I want to rebuke it a bit.

Two and a half years ago I got my PowerBook. After five years of using a Pentium-233 with 64MB I suddenly had some CPU power. Since my old environment (WindowMaker) was broken on PPC at the moment, I decided to go with GNOME. Coming from WindowMaker it really felt like things were done quite differently, but being open-minded I tried to let it all go.

The thing is, do I really want to configure everything? I liked configuring a lot back then, it was like an addiction. Now that I have gotten used to GNOME (let’s call it The GNOME way™), it just feels bothersome, getting in my way. When I encounter a GNOME desktop I immediately can work with it and don’t feel the need to redo the complete setup.

When I look back, the only things I really want to change are the programs I use, the information I see and the way I control it all. This basic stuff I easily can do with launchers, applets and keybindings. Also have I been observing and helping some new users. And somehow I still keep reaching the moment that I can hear myself say, “Ow, hehe, yeah… that doesn’t work quite right yet. Just open a terminal (eek!) and edit this and that file.” So, we are not there yet. For me GNOME offers innovation, sufficient configurability, and an efficient do-not-get-in-my-way workspace. The change from WindowMaker to GNOME has been to me as my switch from Windows to Linux, a thing I ventured into open-minded and worked out quite well.

Won’t this result into a dull monoculture of desktop setups? Maybe so, but I don’t have to be different in every way just to make the statement that I am different. OK guys, bash away now… oh, and thanks GNOME people!

Trip To GUADEC (Tuesday)

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-06-01T00:00:00+02:00

So, this is already the last GUADEC day, the time went so incredibly fast. This day is the GNOME User/Business day. We were up early again (which did hurt a little after the late night session the night before) since there was a small confusion regarding the schedule, but that went okay.

I visited the following talks:

Keynote speech by Dan Kusnetzky—Analysis of the growth, revenues, thoughts and trends around Open Source software.
GNOME Meeting VoIP by Damien Sandras—Talk about the history, current status and future of this great VoIP application.

Keynote talk about Nathan Wilson—Insights into Dreamworks Animations switch to Linux and then the “GNOME desktop” bringing you nowadays Shrek 2, the just released Madagascar, etc. fully done using Linux and GNOME!
Nokia and Open Source by Yannick Pellet—Talk about Nokia’s first experiences with Open Source software, the problems, the benefits, the plans (for more openness) and the maEmo platform used on the new Nokia 770.
Beagle by Jon Trowbridge—Talk about the “Desktop Search” technology/infrastructure for the GNOME desktop, current status and future plans.
101 Things to Know about GNOME by Glynn Foster—Wonderful and kinda different presentation of slideshows with music, some talking, GNOME’s history, culture and people.

After these talks, there was a closing talk giving the credits to everyone involved and thanking everyone for this great conference, but also giving away Ubuntu CDs, Nokia 770s, Dreamworks’ stuff. I want to take the opportunity to thank the GUADEC team, Stuttgart region people who helped, all the others that have made this possible and all the people who were there creating the great atmosphere.

Walking back though the Youth Hostel we noticed that they had actually pulled the plug of the big pond in the “Schloss garten”!

We left by car around 18:30, stopped near Pforzheim for a bite and got home around 1:30. I had a great mini vacation… on to GUADEC 7!

Trip To GUADEC (Sunday)

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-05-30T00:00:00+02:00

The third day of our trip started really early, getting up at 7:00 is not really something I am used to. We had a nice breakfast on the balcony of the Youth Hostel with a beautiful sight over the Stuttgart center laying in the valley.

This day was the first really conference day. With a really full schedule, it is sometimes hard to choose which talk to visit. The GUADEC guys did a really great job at creating such a full and solid schedule, so thanks for that.

Talks that I have visited:

Welcome talk by Timothy Ney, Dr. Walter Rogg, Owen Taylor and Seth Nickell—A nice kickoff.

Cairo by Owen Taylor—Cool library, nice to see how easy it is to use, produces results and integrates in GTK+.
Keynote talk by Miguel de Icaza.
GStreamer 0.10 by Wim Taymans—Great stuff, can’t wait for 0.10 and see the improvements reflect in Rhythmbox’s behaviour.
Annodex by Conrad Parker—Cool system, freedom for all, fuck TV!

Optimal GNOME Programming by Robert Love—Disc IO sucks, makes you rethink putting all that time into algorithm optimizations.

Afterwards we walked around the city center, my feet hurt (blisters! pain!) but we had a nice meal, especially the dessert. Then back to the university park for some gaming and playing cards until our last Spacelabs group member arrived.

We closed the day with some hacking and playing cards, and went sleeping far too late due to the warmth of the night and rooms.

Trip To GUADEC (Saturday)

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-05-30T00:00:00+02:00

Today we had some free time to stroll through Stuttgart until the second part of our Spacelabs group arrived. After a short night of sleep we went down to the city center to see what we had wandered through in the night before.

It’s amazing to see how much park there is in the city center; games, fountains, people sleeping, etc. We tried to find a fast way from the hostel to the GUADEC building (Haus der Wirtschaft). Afterwards we went back into the parks to explore the rest (mainly of the university campus).

At 18:00 we met up with the rest of group that has just arrived in Stuttgart and also completely missed the Youth Hostel because it is not housed at its own address.

Then it was time for some German food in the cafe and restaurant part of the city center. The food was good, and we ended the day with a “digestive” walk through the parks. If this day doesn’t stimulate the holiday feeling, then I don’t know what will!

Trip To GUADEC (Monday)

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-05-30T00:00:00+02:00

It is the second GUADEC day meant for GUADEC developers. Fortunately this day started an hour later than the day before, so… that allowed for catching up some sleep.

We visited the following talks:

Keynote talk by Mark Shuttleworth—Great inspirational talk about his experiences and views on the GNOME desktop and FOSS concerning the now and the future.
Panel Applets by David Madeley—Some new ideas posed by David and discussion around the panel applet’s future, great stuff.
Lightning talks governed by Nat Friedman—Some fast & short talks about gDesklets, Glom, GScore, Evince, Xgl, Caster, Epiphany, and more.
Project Topaz, planning for 3.0 by Jeff Waugh—GNOME’s future, what to do and what not to do… 10×10!

(really good presentation and slides there, Jeff!)

Then it was time for lunch. Actually it is a bit rainy this day, but I tried to hide that on the photos. :) We bumped into a small Italian lunchroom near the Haus der Wirtschaft and had some tasty sandwiches.

After the talks and lunch most of us engaged in a small hacking/fixing session. I (finally) met up with Martyn Russell and resolved some problems in Gossip and thought/discussed about/pondered some new UI things.

I accidently missed the conclusion talk(s) of Freeform sessions, but I hope I can find it to be recorded in the GUADEC 2005 (kudos to Fluendo for streaming most of GUADEC) archive soon.

We ate at the Hacienda (Tübinger Straße 8, Stuttgart), a Mexican restaurant. The food was very good, great atmosphere inside and even almost non-stop small shows and entertainment. Then it was time for the GUADEC party. I didn’t bring my camera with me, so I have no photos of the C64 style bar where it was held in.

Trip To GUADEC (Friday)

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-05-29T00:00:00+02:00

And quite a trip it was! Everything went fine until we arrived in Duisburg. There SIXT informed us that our reserved car was not available and they only had a SMART ForFour for us within the hour.

We waited and had some curry Bratwurst (hmmm) and at 16:00 we were informed that our car was in Essen, not Duisburg and that we had to be transported there with one of the company’s student employees.

The driver had some trouble locating company building but we finally got there by 5 o’clock. In the Essen office of SIXT we were unable to pay, the lady behind the counter would only accept EC cards and credit cards (of which we had none with us) and would not accept Cash and the more modern Maestro system. Next to that, she was very unwilling to help us in any way, so we were kinda thrown out and stuck in the outskirts of Essen where we had never planned to be. We called back to the helpful lady in the Duisburg office, but she was unable to help us as well (but at least tried to!).

We took the bus to Essen Central Station after figuring out the ticket system and left with no options, we booked the (expensive and luxurious) ICE train to Stuttgart. Begin 19:00, we originally already should have been Stuttgart but still had to travel 3 hours by train. We arrived at Stuttgart Central Station at 22:12 with only one task left… get to the Youth Hostel and sleep. We used the GPS receiver, iPAQ and detailed maps to find our way to the Youth Hostel. This meant taking many many stairs and steep slopes up and down with heavy bags. We finally got there at 23:30, almost 5 hours overdue.

We dropped our bags, refreshed ourselves and went for a walk in Stuttgart@night. We had some nice Yufka’s in the City Center, returned and let our tired weary feet rest…

GNOME Journal

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-17T00:00:00+02:00

I discovered the GNOME Journal yesterday. It’s got some good/nice articles. The \"Debian article [removed link, article has been deleted, Paul] is rather outdated though, this one is better. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to install it yet, because not all PPC debs of GNOME 2.8 have arrived in experimental yet.

GNOME 2.8

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-13T00:00:00+02:00

GNOME 2.8 tarballs are due today. It’s also arriving in Debian experimental at the moment. The timelyness of the GNOME project still amazes me. I’m looking forward to this release; not many changes but still some interesting ones. Michiel’s TrashApplet is noted on the front page of Planet GNOME so sphere is getting a lot more hits than it is used too (2500+ as we speak, but it has no troubles at all handling it).

This Monday was a real improvement over last week’s Monday, which was completely filled with lectures, meetings and work. Now I had the time to do almost nothing productive in the afternoon, nice!

I noticed Damog noted me in his journal. Hereby, I return the favour. :)