I realise it’s tuesday already, but I haven’t really found the time to write anything. So here’s a small writeup of Fosdem day two…

Woke up (too!) early, left at 9:30, arrived at 10:50. Still early enough to walk into RIFE, we thought. So we did. Very earl-y, as this guy decided to pronounce URL as “Earl” instead of “You are ell” 😉 The presentation wasn’t all that interesting, but I guess that’s what a Java Framework is supposed to be 🙁 Still, I would think it could have been presented more interestingly.

On to Subversion, a very interesting talk, which has opened my eyes even more about how SVN owns CVS in many ways. Also learned the O’Reilly SVN book is available for free (as in speech and beer) at www.svnbook.org.

Valgrind was next on the program, went maybe a bit too “deep” inside the matter, maybe assuming a bit more previous experience with valgrind or memcheck, but all in all not a bad presentation.

Lunchtime, we brought our own food as to not have to queue for 45min like last year 😉

Beagle presentation, by The Guy Who Now Works For Google. Very nice presentation, mostly questions and answers, but very interesting. Also, I was surprised at the quality of the questions asked. Useful and to the point. A total difference from what Rega people would ask, if they even asked anything.

OpenOffice.org, by Michael Meeks (who was preparing his slides right in front of me during the Valgrind presentation). Apparently mr. Valgrind was using a “magic build” of Michael for his presentation, which screwed with the colors somewhat *G*. What was very clear is that Michael was painting a picture of OOo being that it was not good at all, still way behind on what it should actually be, slow, etc. But the presentation was pretty humourous and light, showing new features in 2.0, showing what can and should be done, and ofcourse, a call for developers.

XUL. What can I say about that. The presentation absolutely sucked ass. The original presenter couldn’t come, so someone else came in his place. Assuming everyone knew what XUL was, and that even everyone in the room was developing XUL software day in day out, he enumerated directory structures, which files were in them, and then even the content of each and every file. Very strange presentation. When we left (after 20 minutes of almost falling asleep) , many others were too. We joined in OpenCA, and first thing I heard was “And this is the point of asses.” Must be Italian English for access 😉 10 minutes later, OpenCA presentation was over and noone seemed to have any questions, so we didn’t hear much of it.

Then, luckily we were already in the Janson room, it was Jeff Waugh’s turn. While waiting he put the Xgl demo video on the big screen for everyone to drool on. His talk was quite good. Design vs Megapixel! LAMP: Linux, Apache, Most of our scripting languages start with P, and PostgreSQL. More funny stuff. And very valid points made, iPod vs Zen, … A very interesting and nice talk to end Fosdem with.

Pity for the people manning the booths that everyone had packed up before that, as in my eyes this would be the perfect end of Fosdem, to go home and buy that one Debian T-shirt you first decided not to buy, or that O’Reilly book that you thought you didn’t want… not possible unfortunately.

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