Enough stalling already. Found a few spare moments to provide a summary report on akademy 2008 and fedora.

First day was a blast, primarily because I had a chance to finally meet in person many other fedora/kde folk, including Than, Lukas, Chitlesh, so fedora was fairly well represented. Following a similar talk, mine was last, so I was a bit nervous about overlap.

Turned out my concerns were largely unfounded, but that didn't stop me from starting out a bit nervous. Fortunately for me, I can blather on about fedora with the best, so didn't have any trouble using up the time. I kept it a little short on purpose, as I wanted to ensure ample time at the end for questions and audience-inspired topics and discussion. Sadly, no one took the bait to discuss the Cubs' chances at the World Series.

You can peruse what I have so far at
http://rdieter.fedorapeople.org/akademy2008/
Should have some video of the talk soon too, stay tuned.

On day 2, I was focused on meeting people and enjoying the days' talks. Got to hang out with Bero and fedora folk.

Day 3 was filled with the KDE e.V. business. Long, but very productive. The evening was the highlight, as Chitlesh had been kind to extend an invitation to come to Brusells. Bero and I procrastinated enough at dinner to miss the train, so braved driving from Mechelen. Despite my having no directional sense or multilingual ability, we eventually found Chitlesh, and he did not disappoint. We started off with some fries, walked and did the tourist thing, pointing and taking pictures, and found our way to the Delirium cafe for a beverage. It was getting late, so Bero drove back to Mechelen, while I stayed in Brussels.

Chitlesh was merciless in subjecting me to quite a few more beers at his place, while continuing various discussions on fedora, life, and the universe. We eventually had to choose to continue talking or get at least some sleep. Sleep won. The following morning, my host was gracious enough to feed me and shepard me to the train station.

Before my flight home, I saw this at the Brussels airport,


which gave me a good chuckle, but didn't exactly inspire me to buy a soda.

I've got some good akademy photos to share, highlights include:

Many thanks go to Chitlesh for his beer recommendations. I've still got quite a lot of work to even scratch his list...

When I've got more time and energy, I'll provide something more substantive, but one word of advice: if you're planning on attending a conference for which you are planning to speak, it's of great value to actually register for said conference. :)

Mark Shuttleworth keynote after lunch..

"Are We There Yet?"
The opensource community is good at achieving goals, provided they are clearly defined

#13 pretty is a feature
#12 consistent packaging.  interacting with downstream.  "bazaar" tool/project
#11 simplified licensing
#10 pervasive presence
#9 pervasive support.  more a social problem
#8 govaritye pa russki.  what about the next billion computer users... more languages the better.  make translations easy.  "rosetta"
#007 great gadgets.  new categories of device. devs = US, Europe. gadgets = China, Korea, Japan.  bridge the gap.
#6 sensory immersion.  second life, world of warcraft.  how do we use sound?
#5 real time collaboration.  wiki, gobby
#4 more organized community.  collaborative bugtracking. trusted time-based releases.  no single feature is as important as the release.
#3 the extra dimention.  2 1/2 D interfaces.
#2 granny's new camera.  pnp. peripherals should "just work"
#1 keeping it free.  both libre and gratis.

real good stuff. 

2007-06-30 1:00 pm
After 15 hours of sitting in airports and flying, we eventually landed in Glasgow about an hour late this morning.  We found the hostel and akademy site all ok.  The wife is out shopping now, and I attended a couple sessions this morning about application/embedded scripting, KJSEmbed and QtScript.  Looks like a lot of overlap, and QtScript has the most promise for the future.

Met a lot of new people already, found asiego.  He was already hacking on on kdegames to help fix someones bug.  What a saint.  He mentioned there's supposed to be some sort of upstream/downstream bird's of a feather session somewhere, somehow.  News to me, but it sounds like a great idea, so I'll see if we can pull together some of the other distro maintainers together, folks from other distros... kubuntu, opensuse (+ whoever else we can find).

Looking forward to hearing Mark Shuttleworth's keynote after lunch...