{August 18, 2011} Desktop Summit 2011

A big thanks to Basyskom for the last-minute sponsorship – I’m really glad I made it to the desktop summit. It was awesome. :)

The talks, the bofs, the parties – pretty much everything went well. Even the weather did give us a day or two of sun before going back to the scheduled rain and wind. ;) I was happy to visit Berlin again too – I only had time to get to one of my favourite restaurants, but I came back with lots of delicious things in my suitcase.

There were lots of good talks – which was not entirely a good thing, because I had to make some hard choices at times. I ended up in more community than tech talks – good stuff about how to do outreach to get more contributors and more diversity of contributors (which means not just more women, but more cultural diversity too). I learnt more about wayland and accessibility too (yay qt-at-spi!), and discovered that “session” is an ambiguous word – there are all sorts of lowlevel sessiony things that have nothing to do with documents or windows or tabs, and systemd is trying to clean them up. Some of the keynotes were fascinating – my favourites were the design talk and the toaster talk. :) Oh, and did you know you can use nepomuk to search within movies? OMGWTFBBQ.

Oh yeah, and I did a lightning talk too, explaining why we need to replace XSMP and advertising the bof session. When I asked how many people hated XSMP, there were far more hands than I’d expected. I didn’t know so many people knew what it was!

At sunday’s party I was surprised to discover how many geeks love karaoke. There was a great crowd, and about a one-hour wait for songs! Despite that, there was also dancing in the other room. :) I hear there was dancing tuesday night too – sadly I had a stomach ache that night. Later in the week I dragged a few people out for a smaller karaoke session with some local friends. I love having a private karaoke room; there’s no strangers taking up mic time, you get to sing lots, and it’s much easier to be completely silly about it. :)

The bof sessions started on wednesday – and I started it off with wonderful, wonderful sleep. After getting caught up on that, my stomach was a lot less mad at me, and I spent the afternoon in the intel appup session. Yay, tablet! :) My new exopc is sitting on my desk waiting for me to start hacking on it.

Thursday afternoon was my sessions bof. Unfortunately some people got lost on the way back from the daytrip and didn’t make it, but it turned out pretty well anyways. I knew there was far too much material to cover in one bof session, even a two-hour session, so I tried to keep the conversation on core matters… after a while, we discovered that there really is a lot of overlap between zeitgeist and session management – the apps that are starting to use it are sending it a lot of the info we need – and zeitgeist is gaining traction, so we may team up and just make some zeitgeist extensions to collect the session info. This would make it easier on app devs – instead of giving similar information to two systems, they’d just report it once and be done. :) When I get some free time I’ll go over the meeting notes properly and start looking into this more.

There were lots of other fun things going on – football, Jos’ cooking, amusing attempts to get rid of the excess summit stickers – but I don’t have much time to write, because I’m at LinuxCon right now. :) It’s nice when a conference is only 20 minutes from my apartment. Maybe I’ll blog about it next week – it’s been pretty good so far. :)