So I'm just back from Nürmberg, German where I was fortunate enough to be invited to the speak at the OpenSuse Developer Summit. It has to be said, everything went really well. The first thing that struck me about this event is that it was quite inclusive. Although, obviously, the point was to discuss, promote and develop Suse there were folk there from other distros including Debian, Fedora and, of course Mandriva/Mageia (well, me!). This was very nice to see.

I was fortunate enough to be invited by Scott Reeves to speak about PulseAudio and specifically the KDE Integration work recently undertook. Scott works mostly on the SLED side of things (Enterprise Desktop) and PulseAudio falls within his remit. I'm pleased to say that the next version of OpenSuse's KDE flavour will follow the lead of Mandriva, Fedora and, most recently Kubuntu, and default to use PulseAudio under KDE. This is IMO a great step forward and will help continue the acceptance and appreciation of PulseAudio and I'm very happy to have played a part in making that possible.

Our talk itself went very well and seemed to be well received. It was also a pleasant surprise to finally meet both Takashi Iwai and Lennart Poettering who attended my talk and generally milled around. I've managed to miss meeting Lennart at various events over the years and while we've worked quite closely on PulseAudio in the past (to the extent he trusts me enough with managing the PA project while he works on the systemd project), it was nice to actually "talk" about PulseAudio! The subsequent BoF (Birds of a Feather) session on systemd was also very interesting (even if there was a little bit of a sticking point on defining preload vs. readahead which IMO was really labouring semantics to a degree and prevented getting to the more interesting stuff!). Takashi is another one of the few people who work on Linux Audio and it was nice to chat to him after exchanging several emails over the years on the ALSA mailing list.

The rest of the conference was also interesting. As someone who sits rather on the fence between KDE and Gnome it was interesting to see the developments in Gnome 3 demonstrated. There were various other titbits of interesting things too, but I wont bore the world with the details!

On the Saturday, I took the tram to the south of Nürmberg and visited their New Museum of Art and Design. It was very enjoyable. Almost deserted, which made it a rather nice experience, but also sad to see such a place under appreciated. Still it was quite early when I went, so maybe it hots up in the afternoon! My favourite photographs were by Gabriele Basilico and depicted a series of chairs with interesting seats: lattice, round holes, metal bars etc. and then accompanying photographs of a bottom that had clearly been sitting in said chair for a while. That quite tickled me 🙂 An installation peace by Jeppe Hein was also very smart. Using light, mirrors and sensors to create interactive "rooms", including and empty one that just set off an alarm when you stepped into it (no doubt just to make people jump!). I then walked up through the centre checking out the churches (which would be a lot more interesting if they didn't have all that religious stuff inside them!) and the castle. A thoroughly pleasant day out!

When it was time to return home, my only regret was that I didn't get a chance to say goodbye to Scott, so as luck would have it I bumped into him at the airport in the queue going through security. It turned out he was on my flight to Amsterdam anyway so we were able to have a little blether on the way there.

What came as even more of a coincidence was the fact that I bumped into my mate Dom who happened to sit in front of me on the connecting flight to Edinburgh! He'd just been off climbing Kilimanjaro, which is arguably slightly more interesting than my week but he got his phone stolen at the "security" check in the airport (and the subsequent delay that it caused actually meant he was on my flight rather than an earlier one) so that evened things up!

But all in all, thanks to Novell, OpenSuse and Scott for inviting me along!