MaW’s Blog

So day two of GUADEC6. The talks are over for the day, everyone’s trying to get food before they go to the GUADEC Party which is at what appears to be a well-regarded (at least by the local culture journalists) yet rather odd club in Stuttgart called Suite 212. Located conveniently close to the Haus der Wirtschaft, which is the GUADEC venue (and very impressive too — I need to get some proper pictures tomorrow, or at least dig up everyone else’s and link to them so you can see what it’s like). It may not be my kind of thing (most of you probably know what I’m referring to when I say that) but I’m going along anyway because thanks to the intervention of Novell, the party is now free upon waving of GUADEC name badge. Yes mine’s got my name spelt wrong on it (I have two ‘t’s in my first name, not one), I doubt they’re going to want to compare it to my passport and get all nitpicky. Almost everything about the administration of GUADEC seems to happen in a condition of relaxation and it’s extremely easy-going. Everyone’s very friendly and helpful and just great stuff going on here.

Tomorrow may not be as good though, it’s GNOME User and Business day, and as far as I can tell there’s nothing happening before lunch that I’m really interested in. While on the bright side this means that I can actually have breakfast at the hotel tomorrow, it also means nothing to do…

I shall probably have breakfast then come in and use the wi-fi, do some hacking or some writing or something, and talk to people. I’ve not really done enough of that — I want to talk to Davyd Madely about his panel applets ideas, although I doubt I can add anything he hasn’t already thought of I may at least be able to get a clearer idea of what he’s after and how it’s all going to work.

Someone next to me just asked Keith Packard for his signature to, if I heard this right, stick on a mainframe somewhere. Cool and weird — that’s GUADEC. People are saying it’s the best one yet, which might just be nostalgic warm fuzziness, but may also have something to do with the fact that this has been a very good conference so far. I haven’t of course been to one before, so I don’t have a basis for comparison.

Well it’s actually day two of GUADEC and the third day I’ve been in Germany, but I haven’t written about yesterday yet. Anybody who’s seriously interested in GUADEC can of course get all the information from the GUADEC site but I thought I’d talk about what I got up to. The welcome keynote was interesting, as it had an unexpected contribution from Seth Nickell who was eloquent, funny and also a little scathing of some things he sees that improvement is necessary. But that’s okay, because he’s right. Not to say that the other speakers weren’t also good of course.

Went to Keith Packard’s talk, then to Owen Taylor’s. Both very interesting. Chatted to Murray Cumming. Had a bit of a panic about battery power of the Powerbook (see yesterday’s entry). Located an Apple Store — today I went there and got myself a PSU. Woohoo! Now I have a spare, although it’s got a German plug on it so I’ll have to get an adaptor at the airport to use it at home. Of course, at home is the proper one… I think I’ll keep this spare one in my laptop bag at all times to help prevent this sort of thing happening again.

Much kudos and many thanks to the people who helped me find the shop and lent me power in the mean time.

Am now in Davyd Madeley’s talk on panel applets and it’s interesting so I’m going to start paying attention. More later.

Am at GUADEC 6 in Stuttgart. Despite the best efforts of the airline and the people at London Stansted airport, I managed to get on the plane and it left late, but thankfully we weren’t actually all that late into Stuttgart.

Did a very stupid thing though - left PowerBook charger at home. Bah. Have hijacked stacato’s computer to do this, but it’s going to severely diminish the time I was hoping to have hacking on Growl while I’m here. Which is a shame, because I was feeling all enthusiastic. Hopefully I can borrow someone’s charger, there seem to be a few people around GUADEC with Apple laptop and I hope that by using other people’s chargers for a bit of time here and there I can acquire enough charge for a bit of hacking or writing.

Writing would be good actually. Best thing about it? Doesn’t use much power. Muahahahahaha. Good thing I brought with me a couple of good books.

Byee!

Last night was the 50th Eurovision Song Contest. Most of you probably knew that. Many of you won’t care, some actively hate it. I found it rather enjoyable, although the voting was as bizarre as always.

Still, my worst fears were not realised: Moldova didn’t come close to winning, despite some worrying votes from various countries. They were by far the worst song, although Turkey put in the worst performance I think — the number of obvious mistakes in their set was shocking.

I’m not going to comment on the United Kingdom’s final score, because I have no idea why we garnered so few votes. Greece did, however, have a reasonable song — one of the best, possibly. Well done to them and hopefully they can afford to host the contest next year after their expenditure on the Olympics.

Yesterday I bought myself a Nintendo Gamecube. Nice little thing, purple with a groovy orange light on the top. Not sure orange exactly matches, but… got a Wavebird wireless controller which is very nice. Three games as well, which should keep me occupied for a while. They are:

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker — cel-shaded Zelda excellence. Looking forward to The Twilight Princess which is due out late this year I think. I might even have finished Wind Waker by then.

Mario Power Tennis — very silly, very fun.

Super Monkey Ball — if Mario Power Tennis is silly, Super Monkey Ball is absolutely insane. Roll on!

Well woke up early, checked the election results. Still about 40 seats to go, but Labour have won again… what still staggers me entirely is that they can, with 38% of the vote, still maintain a considerable majority of seats in Parliament (currently they have 60 more seats than the Conservatives). We seem to suffer from a similar problem to the US states when choosing the President — a close call or barely-held majority in a particular constituency counts for nothing, except perhaps causing some concern about the result there in the next election. We need a better system.