FOSS.IN 2009 is over and I'm sitting on the airport waiting for the first flight on my way home. Time for a small wrap-up.
Both of my talks went ok I think, but its always hard to judge on your own talks. People were asking questions directly after and also over the next days. This kind of interest is all you can ask for as a speaker. :)
It was not only my first FOSS.IN but also my first visit in India at all. A new country, a new culture and a lot of things I need to think about is all I can say about it right now. I like it thats sure.
The format of not only advocating on FOSS, but understanding and embracing it as well as the technology around it is something I could not agree more with. It is this kind of understanding which makes innovation possible. Think about technology and products not only the way the company selling it likes you to. Open up your mind and think how else it can be used for something better.
Let me finish with a big thank you for the complete FOSS.IN team. They did a great job in getting a high-class conference going and bringing people together to collaborate and inspire. Their hospitality and energy needs to be seen somewhere else.
Tomorrow I'm leaving for FOSS.IN, Bengaluru. Oman Air decided to squeeze in another stop between Frankfurt and Muscat means I have a 2.5h longer trip. But back to the topic.
I'm going there to participate. In contrast to other conferences you are not going there to consume a show prepared for you. You are going there to really participate, hack some code in the hackcenter, enrich the workouts with your energy to get something done, give a talk to motivate people and work with them.
This year they are also integrating the hacker mindset a bit more. This always have been near to the FOSS mindset but still different. Personally I welcome this step. The game like nature of the hacker mindset playing with technology in ways they have not been designed for opens up a complete new horizon for the FOSS community.
The only pity is that I won't see much from Bengaluru due to the day and night participation.
Next week I will spent the better part of the week at the LinuxTag. I did not submit a talk this year and I will try to spent my time on hacking and relaxing. :)
There will be a table for linux on smartphone people in the dev center. People from various projects are planning to hang out there and do some hacking. I for my part will bring my phone collection and will hopefully spent most of these four days on getting something more working on them.
As the LinuxTag is an international event a thought jumped into my mind. I'm interested in the new Palm Pre. Especially in the hardware and the lower level parts. Anybody coming to the event who has such a device? If yes, please make sure you grab me and we can have a talk. I would like to see the device and maybe gather some informations on the device itself via a root shell. :)
Due to some money constraints I will not be able to buy one right now. (Yeah, I know it's CDMA and I'm not able to use it here in germany as a phone, still I believe that if we want to work with this device we should do so as early as possible and there is enough to do before the GSM version will get released). Anyway, LinuxTag may be an event where people with such a device are around. :)
Over the last week, directly after LinuxTag, I was in Vachdorf. If you like to know more about this small village take a look at OSM. Of course we mapped the whole village while being there.
The reason for being there was the TechWeek from Pengutronix, a company from my area doing a lot linux embedded projects for the industry. I already known some of the people working there privately. While being there I got known to the other ones. I must admit that it is a nice bunch of smart people loving what they are doing. What I actually appreciate a lot is their work to get their patches into mainline, even if it costs a lot of time and money. This is a not-so-common practice in the industry linux embedded world.
While hanging out there and having good talks about git, patch handling and submission workflows I spend most of my time working on geting some of the EZX patches mainline ready. We now have a svn branchthat contains patches sitting directly on top of the arm git tree pxa branch. While working on this I also started to submit three one-line fixesupstream to get used to the arm-linux workflow. 2 Are already in the git tree, one is acked and waiting in incoming.
I enjoyed the week. Smart people, good food and hacking on stuff you like. Life could be that easy...
While giving a talk and help to manning the OpenMoko booth at the LinuxTag I also got some interesting hardware to play with.
The great guys from the OLPC Deutschland e.V.long-term borrowed up to 70 XO laptops for people which have interesting projects with them.
I asked for one to work on OpenEmbedded integration for it. This divides into two parts:
Machine support. This one should not be to hard as it is a x86 device and the first rootfs it ever booted in the AMD labs was build with OE. :) Still it will help me to understand the deeper internals from OpenEmbedded better.
Writing recipes for the sugar applications and libraries. Having recipes for them in the OE metadata will make it easy for other distros using OE as their buildsystem to use them and put them in their feeds.
I will be busy with EZX the next two weeks. I plan to work on this afterwards.
Next tuesday I'll be on my way to Berlin for the LinuxTag. It will be some busy days between giving a talk, an interviewfor Radio Tux and hanging out at the booth of my ex-employer.
Still I'm looking forward to it. This time I hopefully have some time to attend the technically talks. I look at you kernel track. And let Haraldde-mystify the security of the micro waves around us.
I spent 4,5 nice days in the german capital attending the 24C3. It was the second time i tried my new just-be-relaxed-strategy (First time was at the camp). Mickeyl would say I was throttling again, but I enjoyed it a lot. :)
The relax-strategy also, or better mostly, included to hang out with friends and fellow hackers, chatting, sharing ideas and just having a nice time. The goal was reached.
Some more words about the congress itself. With 4013 it was almost as crowed as last year with 4200 people. Luckily most of the time only the conferences halls were crowed and you were able to get a nice place with power, network and club mate in the rest of the building. That brings me to my last point. The organization of the annual congress has made a hugestep forward over the last years. This was my 5th one and I see improvements all over the time.
Only 3% of the talk needed to be cancled. Talks were on time. Streaming of the talks was often working. Places to hang out were nicely prepared. A wide scope of not only programmers, but eletronic geeks, artist, spies, you name it.
Also nice to see is that people engage itself political again.
Thanks for all the fish and hopefully see you next year.