• Enough Debian packaging knowledge to hurt yourselves slightly less than you do already (Jo Shields) [ODP]
• Mono – State of the Union (Miguel De Icaza) [PDF]
• Gluon (Federico Di Gregorio) [ZIP]
• Banshee: Past, Present, Future and the Crazy stuff (Olivier Dufour) [PDF]
• IronPython: Bringing the dynamic world to the CLR (Carlos Alberto Cortez Guevara) [PDF]
• MonoGame (Dominique Louis, Dean Ellis & Kenneth Pouncy) [PDF] [Video 1] [Video 2]
• XWT (Lluis Sanchez) [PDF]
• MonoMac (Miguel De Icaza) [PDF]

Thanks for attending everyone, we had a great day!

The Amazon Kindle app for iPad changes its background depending on the hour of the day. It even has some very nice effects, for instance, when switching to the night view, a falling star flies by.

Small details and nice polish shows your users that you care. Don’t be happy when it works, go the extra mile.

• (11:00 – 11:45) Enough Debian packaging knowledge to hurt yourselves slightly less than you do already (Jo Shields)
• (12:00 – 13:00) Mono – State of the Union (Miguel De Icaza)
• (13:00 – 14:00) *** Lunch break ***
• (14:00 – 14:30) Gluon (Federico Di Gregorio)
• (14:40 – 15:25) Banshee: Past, Present, Future and the Crazy stuff (Bertrand Lorentz & Olivier Dufour)
• (15:40 – 16:25) IronPython: Bringing the dynamic world to the CLR (Carlos Alberto Cortez Guevara)
• (16:40 – 17:30) MonoGame (Dominique Louis, Dean Ellis & Kenneth Pouncy)
• (17:45 – 18:15) XWT (Lluis Sanchez)
• (18:30 – 19:00) MonoMac (Miguel De Icaza)

Full details (with talk abstracts) should be available on the FOSDEM website. As always, if you want to see a talk, show up early, once the room is full, you’re out of luck!

Date to put in your agenda: Feb 4, 2012.

With life work getting in the way, it’s been impossible for me to further maintain F-Spot. Fortunately, Stephen Shaw has offered to pick up the task. Expect new stuff soon.

Alternatively, check out Shotwell, which has been making excellent progress lately.

Linux-powered cigarette machine. Looks like they nailed it in terms of user experience.

Also on Twitter

Great news! There will be a third edition of the Mono devroom @ FOSDEM. The event will take place on Feb 4 and Feb 5. We have the devroom the entire afternoon, for 6 hours (from 13:00 till 19:00). As I am not planning to fill up all that stage time on my own, we need your talks and presentations to make this day extra interesting.

Talks on any topic are fine, as long as it’s related to Mono and open-source. These do not need to be life-changing project announcements either: deeply technical things or pet projects that will make us all giggle with hacker joy are just as desired.

Please send your talk proposals using this form: http://bit.ly/vK2WC6

You have until Dec 31 to send in talks. A final schedule will be made available on Jan 10.

Not that we get more talks than we can schedule each year, so we’ll unfortunately have to make a selection.

If you have any more questions, feel free to contact me.

The GNOME file manager makes it trivial to open a terminal at your current location, if you have the nautilus-open-terminal package installed:

Going the other way around, from terminal to GUI is also easy:

• Open current folder in file manager: nautilus .
• Open any file with default application: gnome-open myfile.xyz

If you’ve grown into this habit, you’ll feel lost whenever you need to use a Mac. No such option in the file manager and no gnome-open command (obviously).

Don’t worry though, it’s all possible. Here’s how.

Opening a terminal at the current folder
Opening a terminal at the current folder requires you to make a small change to the preferences. Open the keyboard preferences, go to services (on the keyboard preferences page) and enable the two services shown below:

Once you’ve done that, you can simply right-click any folder and find the option under the services menu:

Opening any file from the file manager
Need to open an image from the command-line? Or a PDF? Or any other document. Simply use open: open myfile.xyz

To open a finder window and show the file in the file manager, use the -R (reveal) flag: open -R .

At least now you can switch back and forth between command-line and GUI quickly. Try Homebrew if you need to install your favorite missing tools.

Zipper, an insanely simple zipfile creator for node.js.

a zipper by sogni_hal, on Flickr

Zipper has an API that consists of one method:

addFile(name, path, callback)

This method simply adds a file to your chosen zipfile, using an asynchronous operation. Full example:

zipper = require('zipper').Zipper;
var zipfile = new zipper('/path/to/my/zipfile.zip');
zipfile.addFile('myfile.txt', '/path/to/myfile.txt', function (err) {
    if (err) throw err;
    // Do stuff
});

Zipper is available on Github: https://github.com/rubenv/zipper
Or through npm: npm install zipper

The main goal of this session is to give our Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women students a forum to show what they’ve been working on in the past few months. Your feedback and support will be very much appreciated by them.

Be there or miss out on the future!