That’s right, once again I could count on Igalia‘s kind support to be able to go to this great conference one more year.
Just like last year, I’m giving two presentations:
* Making the printed world accessible: A11y in OCRFeeder, in the Accessibility DevRoom on Saturday at 11:00;
* Grilo: Integration of Multimedia Contents in Applications Made Easy, in the CrossDesktop DevRoom on Sunday at 13:45.

This will be my fourth time attending FOSDEM and every year I love it more. In what other conference can you attend presentations about: GNOME, MeeGo, Django, Accessibility and much, much more. And let’s not forget about the Friday Beer Event, that allow us hackers to socialize while sipping on the finest beers on earth. And of course, to some of you, I don’t need to tell again how much I like Brussels, and Belgium in general.

By the way, this year there is a new, more Maemo-ish, FOSDEM Maemo app called Sojourner which will help you schedule the talks you wanna attend, so, be sure to install it in your N900. (I’ve contributed with a couple of patches last Friday, which are pending integration )

Other news from my part is that since last week I am a member of GNOME Foundation. It’s been a year since I started developing OCRFeeder under GNOME’s infrastructure and I finally decided to apply for membership. The process was really easy and I thank the folks involved. It’s good to be around such good hackers.

Hope to see you all FOSDEM next weekend!

Last week was a busy one with more than one day and a half devoted to meetings besides the usual hacking in MeeGo and SeriesFinale (yeah, I could still devote a couple of hours to keep the work on the GNOME port) but a great weekend was waiting us.

On Friday, after work, we went to Brión (close to Santiago de Compostela) for another Igalia Winter Summit. The trip was quite interesting with me sharing the car with Victor, Claudio and Guillaume, which is a funny thing because in a company with a majority of Spanish members, none of us is Spanish

The first night was composed of hard, philosophical discussions, card games, general get-together and, for some of us, 4 hours of sleep.
On Saturday, Piñeiro (AKA A.P.I.) and Martin Robinson gave a talk about how they got to Igalia, that is, where they come from and how they got into this life of a Free Software hacker.

After lunch, I had a brainstorming with a few other Igalians about Grilo and SeriesFinale’s (unrelated) world domination plans.
This year is also Igalia’s 9th anniversary and some of us were having our companions joining in for the anniversary dinner on Saturday night, so, we had a magician performing impressive card tricks and a Queimada.

For this summit, a few of us had a new challenge, to give the first concert of the Igalia Blues Band as kind of a spin-off of the concert given in last year’s GUADEC (or GCDS). So, Andrés, Claudio, Piñeiro and myself practiced, when we could, the five songs we selected for this after-dinner show. After the concert, we continued with a “less official” setlist where I performed an disastrous alternative version of Bad Things (opening song of the True Blood TV show).
It was quite nice. I think we entertained the people and everybody seemed happy.

Igalia Blues Band (Claudio is not present because I couldn't find any picture with the four of us)

The next morning, Juanjo gave a presentation about the history of Igalia. It is impressive how the company evolved in these 9 years, from a group of Computer Science graduates from Galicia, into having 40 people across 8 different countries, always considering people as its main value and Free Software as a philosophy. I’m proud to be part of it.

The traditional group photo

Last week I posted about the first Grilo developers IRC meeting and how we had this week for people to send suggestions; some ideas were sent to Grilo’s mailing list and we’ve been talking about when should the meeting take place.

So, this first Grilo developers meeting is taking place in September 14th (next Tuesday) around 15 PM UTC.

Hope to meet you there!

Like Iago announced in Grilo’s mailing list:

“Now that we want the basics of Grilo working reasonably well, I think it is time that we get together and share our ideas as to what we want Grilo to be in the close future and define some kind of roadmap for,
let’s say, the next year or something like that. The idea would be to define a set of specific tasks that we can add to our TODO and Wiki and keep that up-to-date (we can review this roadmap when needed and make updates any time we see fit, but we should have something to start with)

I think most of us may very well have some ideas as to what we think
would be cool/important to have in Grilo already, but let’s have some
time to think about it and then arrange an IRC meeting to discuss the
ideas.”

This brainstorming period will be until next Friday, September 10th.

If you’re not subscribed to Grilo’s mailing list, consider doing so and share your ideas there. If mailing lists are not your thing, you can always leave your ideas as comments to this post and I’ll make sure they reach the mailing list and the meeting itself.

We’ll later announce the date and time of the meeting.

I’ve spent last week in Den Haag, attending GUADEC 2010, with many other fellow Igalians.

Although last year I also attended GUADEC, this year was like a first time to me as last year’s GUADEC was co-located with aKademy forming Gran Canaria Desktop summit and it felt different.

What do I think of this year’s? Javascript, web, introspection and shell, that’s what I think.
This is GNOME’s new route, making desktop development more webbish and it is seems like a smart one too. Now, I don’t really fall for Javascript, I think it’s ugly and not really the best choice (imho) for large projects but anyway that’s the beauty of GObject Introspection, in the future it should be easy to use whatever language one prefers.

As for the talks, I really enjoyed Luis Villa’s keynote. Xan and Fernando did a great job getting the tragedy that some times the Foundation’s mailing list is and turning it into a comedy.
Iago gave a good talk about Grilo and Juan complemented it in a lightning talk about the plugins we did using Rygel-grilo.

This year I gave again a lightening talk, this time about the Predictor Input Method which you might one day use in a mobile device or on the desktop itself if you need assisted typing. There must be a GUADEC’s rule saying that the laptop where people present the lightening talks must be a crappy netbook that takes 2 seconds before it changes a slide…

For an overall feeling of GUADEC, you can check out Victor’s post covering GUADEC, I agree totally with him.

I could also meet and chat with nice people like Eitan Isaacson, Patricia and others.

So let’s see how the projects presented in GUADEC evolve and wait GUADEC 2011 in Berlin.

And what this week? This week I’m on vacation doing an InterRail across a bunch of European countries together with my girlfriend. I visited Paris already, where I found out my french is good enough for basic stuff. Today we’re in Brussels, it’s my third time here but the first one as a turist. I’m sure the beers will taste as marvellous as always.

I’m also doing a new thing: travelling without my laptop, the N900 seems to be a perfect replacement, I (still?) love this gadget and it surelly spares some space in my backpack.

See you in some European city, I’m likely to be wearing a GNOME/Linux/Metal t-shirt… what else is new…?