Sunday, June 25, 2006

Spying a bit on GUADEC

Today i went to Vilanova to assist to a few talks of GUADEC to see how our gnome friends where doing.

Today and tomorrow are the "warmup weekend" and most/all the talks where in spanish or catalan and directed towards the local people. I went to a dbus talk, 5 mins of GTK programming (where i thanked $DEITY that we do not use C for doing OOP), a talk about l10n of gnome to catalan (they seem to be doing a bit better in terms of number of translators than ca l10n team of kde) and a talk about the new distribution that will go into all catalan schools next year, based on Suse, using gnome desktop as default but also shipping KDE.

Some things worth mentioning:

  • They had rather big posters hanging on the outside of the buildings where GUADEC takes place, that is a GOOD THING and we should do something similar, AFAIK it was not done in málaga last year.

  • They seem a bit more concerned about us that we about them, at least all talks i went mentioned KDE in some way or other, i don't remember that happening in Málaga (although maybe it happened)

  • It is much nicer having the conference center in the center of the village, like GUADEC in Vilanova or this year's aKademy in Dublin, than in the outside like happened in Málafa

  • Gnomies are normal people! WTF i thought gnomes where small people with a large beard!

  • They had a nice o'Reilly stand in the main hall selling books, although some of there were not really ON TOPIC there (think JavaBeans)

  • There was WIFI hotspots for all around, first time i listed available networks i thought "i'll go home with some hundreds of neurons less"

  • There were very few power plugs

  • Warmup weekend is free, but the core sessions are 30€, i think making contributors pay is not a good thing

  • freenode IRC network was not working (probably due to too many people trying to connect from the same IP)



All i all, is nice meeting/hearing people that have different preferences so you don't end up in self indulgence

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