If you would like to know what our future rockstars are doing, this is where you should be heading! The session takes place on the first day, Saturday August 6, between 5:15PM and 6:00PM in the Audimax room.

Each student maintains a wiki page with information about their projects. You can find these on the GNOME wiki.

The main hall at GUADEC 2010

This also means that I will be available for hiring starting on October 1. If you are looking for a great GNOME hacker and have something exciting to offer [1]: I’m willing to talk and I will be at GUADEC next week. You can find my CV here.

[1] Note that this should not strictly be a GNOME hacking job: I’m interested if the job poses a good technical challenge and occasionally gives me the chance to fly around and meet interesting people. Bonus points if it allows me to work on GNOME-related technologies (desktop or mobile).

Leuven at night.

I will also be doing a short lightning talk about the state/future of F-Spot at GUADEC. Five minutes, so it’ll be extremely fast, but I’m around all week to discuss it in greater detail. Hope to see you all there!

• The whole conference appeared to be nicely organized, kudos to the organizers for that.
• Having GUADEC and Akademy at the same location was quite interesting. What struck me the most was how differently both communities experience their conference. I was under the impression that KDE hackers prefer to hack at the conferences, while we GNOME people prefer to talk.
• Related to that point: GNOME people tend to spend longer hours at the parties. KDE people are nice chaps, but they go home awfully early. Other GNOME hackers observed this fact as well.
• The amount of friendship and open-minded unconstrained communication between everybody in our community is amazing, especially given the fact that most of the people there worked at competing companies. This is something that might be very hard to find in any other corporate environment
• Spending time in the presence of all this people is extremely motivating. We should especially invite summer of code students to come to GUADEC.
• Massive thanks to all the sponsors organizing the parties, Codethink sponsoring the pre-SMASHED dinner and OpenSuse (and Guy Lunardi in particular) to sponsor the big dinner at the beach on Thursday.
• And an enormous thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring part of my travel and stay.

Am already looking forward to the next edition, be it with or without Akademy.

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

We were already aware of it, but hadn’t fixed it yet: the F-Spot preferences dialog is totally netbook unsuited. And it is extremely ugly. Behold:

The old preferences dialog (Larger version)

During GCDS, I was approached by Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt). He wanted to redesign our preferences dialog and fix it. We had a good chat and ran over the current preferences dialog, what it does and why. Two or three hours of sketching and drawing later, he presented this:

Preferences dialog mockup (Larger version)

It’s a simple paper mockup, describing the current dialog, what’s wrong and how we can improve it. This was then followed by a proposal for a new design. For a hacker, this is gold. We generally aren’t the best user interfaces designers (let’s just admit it), but we do like good design. When given a spec, we can make things happen quickly. This mockup made sense and it was sound: it follows the HIG.

I handed it over to Stephane Delcroix and an hour of hacking later, we had a new preferences dialog:

The new preferences dialog (Larger version)

Much nicer!

The moral of the story
The moral of this story is twofold:

• For hackers it’s important to realize that our artwork team isn’t just a bunch of guys with an obsession for pretty icons. They also do our visual styling and help us design great interfaces (one of the things that made GNOME to be a success). If your interface sucks, turn to them.
• For designers: we love you and even if you don’t feel like coding, a simpel well thought-out mockup can have a huge effect. If you feel stuff is suboptimal, go to the maintainers and talk to them, usually it’s not a big change, but with a large result. And generally maintainers love UI suggestions, if they make sense. And as a shameless plug: we at F-Spot really love UI designers, we know it isn’t what it should be and if anyone wants to help with these kind of things, do get in touch.

It’s this kind of cooperation that makes the GNOME community such a nice place to be in.

The master thesis: 85 pages of fun

What’s next? After much indecision as to whether I’d like to find a job in the open-source (GNOME) world or do something else, I’ve accepted a PhD offer at the Distrinet Research Group of K.U.Leuven. GNOME hacking will stay a spare-time activity for now, though I might change that decision in a few years. Exciting times ahead!

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit
Tomorrow I’ll be flying out to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. I’ll be spending 11 days in Gran Canaria. I will be arriving in the late afternoon, so that shouldn’t stop me from dropping by at the Canonical hosted opening party. Really looking forward to another GUADEC, Istanbul 2008 was really great. Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring part of this trip, without them, this would not have been possible.

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GUADEC)

I won’t be giving a talk, but if anyone wants to have a chat about F-Spot (or any other subject), come and find me!

Pulseaudio + Bluetooth: trivial

Getting Pulseaudio to work over Bluetooth was simply a matter of connecting and moving the stream. Trivial you might say.

A big congratulations to Lennart Poettering and Bastien Nocera for getting the two to work together (and probably others involved as well, credits to them as well). Guys, remind me to buy you a drink at GUADEC!

• It was my first GUADEC, so I cannot compare, but this one was awesome!
• Kudos to the local team, very friendly and helpful people.
• Kudos to Baris for organizing it all, must have been an insane task, but it was executed well.
• Istanbul is a wonderful city, that never sleeps. Jackhammering at night is the most normal thing in the world.
• Meeting all these wonderful people is an enormous source of motivation and inspiration
• Oh btw, did somebody mention we hired Stormy Peters as our new CEO? Stand up Stormy! *applause* Meeting Stormy and talking to her was very pleasant and gave me great confidence on her suitability for the task, as well as the future of GNOME.
• Parties on boats rock. Totally.
• Lots of people stayed for a few days of tourism after the conference, leading to pleasant meetups in the evenings
• Swimming near ferry terminals is a good way to lose your sandals. These boats, even from a large distance, create huge waves. Good thing I managed to recover them, saving us from a barefoot walk home
• Turkish people are very friendly, apart from some crooked taxi drivers (which you recognize quite easily).

In all, I’m very satisfied, hope to see all of you back soon.

Istanbul by night, as seen from the roof of our hotel.

The Bosporus, as seen from the conference site.

A spinning dervish

Spending a few more days in Istanbul for tourism. Anyone who feels like joining, let me know.