Irregular Verbiage

So my post yesterday was written before a number of the most interesting talks. Similarly this post is also written at lunchtime and things from this afternoon will be in tomorrow’s entry.

In chronological order, first Nokia announced a gecko based browser for the N800. This is obviously cool (and has already been noticed outside GUADEC but doesn’t seem to me to be the most important thing happening here.

Next there was quite a clear talk by the Morpheus-esque James Vasile from the Software Freedom Law Center, there was nothing dramatically new but he did talk about some interesting licensing edge cases – should a pace-maker manufacturer be able to prevent you installing Apache on your own (GPL’d) heart?

The Final talk yesterday was the keynote by Havoc Pennington on the Online Desktop (GUADEC slides available at that link and there are also more thoughts from Havoc on his blog). Technical conversation at the free party afterwards (sponsored by Opened Hand and Collabora – thanks!) was dominated by Havoc’s talk. About 50% of people seem to love it and the remainder hate it – but many of the GNOME “rock-stars” are behind it so I think it’ll become a definite future GNOME direction. Personally I’m really excited by it (though before the talk I hadn’t got it at all).

He’s not just talking about about replacing GNOME with Firefox and a series of book marks but about tightly integrating GNOME and its apps into the web services world. For example logging in on any computer and being giving all your IM buddies, access to your flickr pictures (and those of your friends). There are obviously security concerns; data would have to be able to be black/whitelisted for syncing in this way. There was also a lot of discussion about whether we should be trying to integrate with proprietary web services. It looks like some kind of definition of an “Open Service” will be created and they can be used as defaults but users will be able to connect with any web service.

The Open Service definition will be interesting – presumably containing talk about privacy, export of data and access to the source code but that’s a different blog entry.

Then this morning Mirco Muller gave a talk about Lowfat, a sort of replacement for the desktop paradigm. The code he has already is very impressive but his vision is very, very ambitious with viewer apps for each document type all being integrated into his tacile, natural interface. Without a screencast it’s hard to describe but basically to find documents you search. All the results are deplayed as the documents are display as what look like thumbnails but as well as being able to pick them up and move them around you can also zoom in to see the full document (or a detail of it). That’s how it works for pictures/text, how it’ll work for files like audio is less clear – but I advise you to try and see a demo – it’s definitely worth a look.

Right, off for lunch.

I’m really enjoying things here; seeing/speaking to all the “rockstars” whose blogs I’ve read for ages is really inspiring.

Lessons from today:

Computers are really passé: Embedded is the new black. Firstly Nokia’s Maemo people are here in force and lots of people seem to have an N800. The Maemo platform is fairly mature now, in contrast the other embedded devices are much earlier in their evolution. A few of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) people are here too and John Palmieri has been giving demos in the foyer. It looks very cool but the guys have great ideas and are very passionate but they have much work to do before the device is ready.

Finally on the embedded front, I had a chance to chat to the OpenMoko people (as well as see the talk). They are friendly and passionate, but the software is still in the very, very early stages (as they very clearly explain at any opportunity). I wish all three good luck but I’m only really in the core demographics for one of them – I’ll definitely be buying an OpenMoko

UI Bling: Marco Muller from Fluendo was talking about Pigment. It looks like it might become a neat way to build swish UI into your desktop programs (C or Python at the moment) but the gtk-integration is not done yet. (And the Windows port is also not done yet).

Python vs Java: It’s interesting to talk to geeks from outside IBM for a while. Inside IBM you hear Web 2.0, Java and C, here fewer people are talking about Java and more people talk about Python. Java still beginning its OSS journey, it’ll be interesting to see if it becomes more common once OSS packages come by default in the distributions.

Pronunciation: Most of the hackers here don’t pronounce GNOME as “Nome” or (cool) “genome”, the accepted pronunciation seems to be “guh-NOME”. Similarly GUADEC is not pronounced gar-dec, it’s definitely gwah-dec.

The main lessons I’ve taken from the conference so far:

• Developing a “Hello World” XUL app looks fairly straight forward and we can do swish UI in SVG. From the talk by Ian from Songbird
• For profiling memory usage of an application Exmap is the canine testes. Talk by Tomas Frydrych
• Buying an ATi graphics card is bad if you’re using Linux. There have been a number of example of problems with their drivers on speakers’ laptops. In contrast, Intel have people here explaining the cool stuff they are writing for Linux
• Goocanvas looks like it’s quick and easy to use and I’ve been writing some code with it in the gaps here

What I suspect I’ll remember most though is realising I’d slept through a very important phone call from my pregnant wife. The first thing I knew about it was waking up for a second phone call, hours afterwards. Em had been experiencing horrible pain and an ambulance had been called. The doctor thinks it was a trapped nerve and the baby is safe though so it could have been so much worse.

Although the buzz on the technology blogs I read seems to be quite keen on the iPhone, if you can’t install third party software on it [1,2,3] then it won’t interest me much at all.

There’s a comparison of the OpenMoko and the iPhone but to me it’s all about the software (and the openness).

If the iPhone is not a smart phone, what would you call it? Maybe a closedphone? It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. I guess it doesn’t matter to me much – I’ll be buying something else instead

P.S. I’m not saying that I don’t think the iPhone will sell extremely well – I guess I’m just not it’s target audience – the last portable music player I bought plays oggs as well as mp3s

…download their music these days.” So I was told last night by a friend of mine and it has more than an element of truth to it – iTunes was swamped by the increased demand after Christmas.

DRM doesn’t feature on a lot of people’s radar but maybe it should? I guess the geeks have to be better at promoting the alternatives. The two obvious alternatives are eMusic and Magnatune, I haven’t used either – I haven’t bought much music recently (download or otherwise) but Em’s just got a new PC and it’s wired up to the stereo so I guess now is the time.

I see on the blog of the CEO of Magnatune that the Rhythmbox music player now has the ability to buy Magnatunes tracks – cool, but the new version of Rhythmbox isn’t included in Fedora yet, I guess we might have to wait for Fedora 7? Hope not!

It’s been a good, if uneventful Christmas, still at my parents, done a little coding and last night met up with some old friends (Dave, Paul & Tanya), just before Christmas Adam came to visit. I’ve seen a lot of old faces but not everyone I’d like to have, I’m going to have to make sure I get in contact with everyone

P.S. I’ve heard that if you’re using eMusic on Linux then eMusic-GNOME is the slickest way to do it – will have to have a play