it's the third day of fisl and we somehow ended up sharing a cab with stallman on the way to the conference centre. he's staying on the same floor of the hotel as us and as we walked to the elevator to go down to the lobby to catch the next bus he informs us that the last bus trip has been cancelled and that there are no more bus trips scheduled until the evening. ug! so we grab a taxi with another fellow (who kindly paid =) and chatted. i was sandwiched between zack and stallman as we talked about kde, free software, kde-look.org (frank, i need to chat with you =) and graphics hardware. stallman was impressed that we now use the term "free software" on our home page and that we are working more closely with the FSF.eu. he did live up to his hard-line reputation, of course, but it was a pleasant ride in. once we arrived people started asking to take pictures with him, for which we charged 5 real each. ha.
yesterday afternoon went very, very well. both zack and i spoke to packed rooms of 300+ people. there were many questions, tons of interest and a stream of pictures and handshakes. we made some good local contacts as well, including some acedemic researchers, students working on multimedia software, a fellow working on semantic desktop technologies (who i have to hook up with mandriva's efforts) and several local kde-based distributions. i even fixed a bug in kicker for one of the distributions at their booth: they are using a rather obscure feature that allows one to avoid kbfx for a fancy kde button altogether (i added it specifically for that purpose ;) but the text color feature wasn't working properly. it was a 3 liner fix and they were pretty happy and impressed to get that kind of service. i joked about travelling the world just to fix people's bugs ;)
we've met a lot of great people from the local enthusiast community and look forward to partying with them tonight at a bbq.
p.s. if you're vegetarian and visit this area, you may wish to bring some food with you ;)
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4 comments:
So what's up with the semantic desktop? Is this a worthwhile effort while there's no well integrated search functionality in KDE? What does semantic mean here? Talking about indexed meta-data would be a better, more down-to earth way of talking about these matters. It is important that KDE establishes an API to store and retrieve meta-data. Once that's up and running and integrated well into all KDE apps by way of kdelibs, the "semantic value" will emerge easily.
> Is this a worthwhile effort while
> there's no well integrated search
> functionality in KDE?
"is providing searching functionality in KDE a worthwhile effort while there's no well integrated search functionality in KDE?"
that's essentially what you just asked, so the answer is "yes".
> Talking about indexed meta-data
> would be a better, more down-to
> earth way of talking about these
> matters
well, it's broader than that. my goal is to blog about my experience, not blather on in some pablum-like marketspeak much ;)
> It is important that KDE
> establishes an API to store and
> retrieve meta-data.
agreed. which is one of the things this project is trying to bring to kde4.
> Once that's
> up and running and integrated
> well into all KDE apps by way of
> kdelibs, the "semantic value"
> will emerge easily.
well, it's not quite that easy. if it were we would already see a search system for the desktop that does what we need versus several that are largely uninteresting.
It was weird ( in the good way) to read this blog post from inside the conference room during RMS Talk in FISL today. Im from Porto Alegre, and i read your blog for some time. Thanks for your great work in KDE and free software.
Hi Aaron,
great presentation you had for us about Plasma (I liked your sense of humor. I was laughting all the time). It was one of the presentations I *had* to see, altough I was 20 minutes late :(
I saw you leaving the conference and passed near you, but simply could not think of any interesting subject to talk about.
Shame on me!!
Maybe next time, I hope :)
Keep up the great work, and thanks!
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