# (2) 24 Jan 2010, 11:06AM: Upcoming FOSDEM & UK Travel:
I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, the first weekend in February. (Something like twenty of my Collabora colleagues will be there, including some I've never met before.) I've been to England & to Russia, but you can waffle around as to whether those are really Europe. But FOSDEM is in Brussels, Belgium! Very European, and makes its own waffles. I'll be arriving in Brussels a day or two before the conference proper. After it ends, I'll ride the Eurostar train (!) to England and see my Cambridge colleagues for about a week.
This is a management discussion trip and a seeing-people trip; as helpful as occasional facetime is for developers, it's essential for a manager like me. So, if you live in a bit of Europe or England such that it's easy for you to visit Brussels or Cambridge, I'd love to see you. And if you're giving a FOSDEM talk I absolutely must see, let me know! I'm interested in checking out:
- the Mozilla folks - I've mentioned the work Collabora's doing on Firefox for Mobile, and I'd like to learn more about WoMoz
- the Jabber/XMPP developers' room, including talks like "The Extraordinary, Magical Powers and Possibilities of XMPP", "PubSub Gone Wild", and of course "Multi-User Jingle: Voice and Video Conferencing with XMPP" by my colleagues Dafydd Harries & Sjoerd Simons
- Introduction to the GNOME Bugsquad
- My colleague Daniel Stone's "Polishing X11 and making it shiny"
- A variety of talks on optimizing performance -- MySQL (my previous notes on the subject), sysadmin tools Flapjack & cucumber-nagios, identi.ca, and Cassandra, Hive, Haystack, memcached, Scribe, and Thrift. I like learning about systematic performance monitoring and optimization.
- "Promoting Open Source Methods at a Large Company"
- Smuxi, "an advanced IRC client that solves the 'always available' problem in a graphical environment"
- "Hidden Pearls": "uniquely useful" code OpenOffice has that other projects should consider reusing
- "Tor: Building, Growing, and Extending Online Anonymity"
- Defending the development of no-future alternative OSes using insights drawn from queer theory
- Lightning talks on GNU Savannah (sort of a Launchpad competitor?), OpenERP, and the Kaizendo customizable schoolbooks project. I'm also oddly compelled by the mysterious "Open-source software: Blaming the unknown, or a constructive approach to technology".
- The Linux distributions developer room: "How to be a good upstream", "Mobile distributions and upstream challenges", a study of how Nokia and community folk govern the Maemo project together, and most excitingly, personnel management within Linux distributions
(I'll have to put together a list of all the Collabora talks soon.)
Family continuity note: Seven years ago, Leonard went to Belgium for the European Python conference. I helped him brush up on his French, he hung out with Jarno Virtanen & Taina Prusti, etc., etc., etc.
# (1) 24 Jan 2010, 01:07PM: Like The Producers Even Care What I Think:
New season of Project Runway is happening. Last week's challenge (make a nice party look OUT OF BURLAP SACKS) provoked decent innovation, which pleases me. But I predict that no more than 20% of the challenges this time round will make the designers make clothes for real men and women with healthy normal bodies. As I've said before, that's just dumb.
I find the majority of clothes created on the show unwearable and ridiculous. Zillions of overly revealing skirts and dresses, nearly no pants, forget about pockets, and evidently menswear is some dark continent. On the rare occasions that designers serve as models, and therefore must create clothes for men, they and the judges commiserate over how rare and difficult it is. That sounds like utter crap. Please e-mail me if it isn't.
Here's an idea: just learn to make pants, and menswear. Then you'll learn a skill that no one else evidently thinks is as important as frippery for like 3% of the women in the US (much less the world), and you can carve out a niche as the magical wizard who can make clothes for the majority of humanity!
