For the 6th consecutive year, I am attending FOSDEM!
That’s right, this time I am boarding from Lisbon and I will arrive in Brussels in time for the traditional and epic beer event.
I am not giving any talks this year so I will have plenty of time to enjoy the event and all the nice things the city has to offer.
Of course, I love a good chat about Free Software over a beer so if you want to know more about some of my projects, let me know.
See in Brussels!
Last week, while I was busy in Berlin with an interactive installation, I received some good news: Skeltrack got an award in an innovation contest organized by the KNetworks project.
From its own website, KNetworks “[...] is an open network based in the Atlantic area with main interest in the fields of: e-government, innovation, knowledge transfer, technology, the Internet, collective intelligence, the future and the creation of knowledge.”
Members of KNetworks include several universities and government organizations of the European countries in the Atlantic area.
Being the first Open Source library for skeleton tracking, there are a number of possibilities that Skeltrack makes possible and we developed it in Igalia simply because we wanted to use skeleton tracking and there were no open solutions available. So I am very happy with the recognition, in this case a joint 3rd place.
Oxford, England
and flew to London instead of Coruña. I presented Skeltrack and also mentioned Igalia and the cool things that make us different.I had never been to Oxford before so I stayed an extra night to visit the city. What a nice city it is! It is kind of similar to Évora, where I studied, in the way that it has many university buildings spread across the city but of course, at a different scale.
On my way back to Heathrow, more awesome stuff: I found out that the old man sitting close to me in the bus was in fact Donald Knuth! I presented myself, chitchatted a bit and, feeling like a little boy who met Spiderman, thanked him for everything.
I would like to thank the organization of the KNetworks contest for the award and congratulate the other contest winners.
That’s right, this year GUADEC is taking place in the city I moved to more than 3 years ago in order to become an Igalian: A Coruña. It’s fun to see this event happening just 20 minutes walking from my place when in the previous editions I had to catch several planes in order to attend it
In this year’s GUADEC, I am presenting two projects I have created:
If this sounds interesting, be sure to attend the talks or have a chat about the projects when you see me.
Since I feel pretty much like a local, I can tell you that you must not leave the town without trying “pulpo á feira” (octopus + olive oil + paprika) or, in case you’re not into cephalopods, just go to some traditional Galician bar, have a beer and enjoy the folk music of Celtic origins.
I spent the first half of this week in the beautiful city of Évora, where I was born. The occasion was the Semana da Ciência e Técnologia (Science and Technology Week) of the University of Évora to which I was invited.
I also ended up giving the organization a hand by asking Thomas Perl (the restless mind behind gPodder) and Lucas Rocha (well known GNOME developer now using his powers in Mozilla) who kindly accepted.
Having participated in the organization of events during the University, I’m always happy to see these initiatives taking place.
It was also great to spend a couple of days with the folks at my University and meet with old friends.
About the talks, Thomas gave an overview of gPodder and the infrastructure used to manage the project. Lucas gave a really nice talk about what Mozilla is, what it does and why you should care; because of it, I ended up installing Firefox Mobile nightly build for Android and it has improved a LOT.
My friend Luís Rodrigues (no blog because he’s a badass) talked about CERN, where he works. What an amazing place! He talked about how much CERN uses Python and Django to manage their data. As a Python lover, this makes me really happy.
This was also the first time I presented Skeltrack, my latest creation inside Igalia. Presenting such an algorithm is not an easy job so I took mental notes about what to improve the next time (which will be at LinuxTag) but I was happy that people made good questions about it.
I’d like to thank to the AAUE (Students Association) for the great time we all spent in there.
Most of you might have heard about the sudden “death” of the airline Spanair. I had never known of an airline stopping its planes on the same day it announces it’s rupture.
Several colleagues of mine in Igalia were affected by the events and guess with whom some of us (mostly Igalians based at Coruña) were flying to Brussels? That’s right…
Fortunately yesterday we bought new flights and decided to try to get the reimbursement for the cancelled ones later.
This means that thanks to Igalia:
I had two presentations in each of the last two editions of FOSDEM but I didn’t really have something new to show in this year’s so I’m attending only as a participant which doesn’t make it less exciting for me.
I have already some arrangements planned, as in having a beer with some folks, and you’re invited too if you wanna talk about Igalia or the projects I’m involved in.
See you in Brussels.