Anything to declare?
Yeah. Don't fly British Airways.
My flight out of Munich was delayed slightly because of lack of staffing. My flight out of Heathrow was delayed nearly three hours because of lack of the second engine, which was not noticed until we were on the runway for takeoff. We had to head back to the gate and wait -- without air-conditioning. The food they served was unusually bad. Their in-flight entertainment may have been okay, but I wouldn't know since it kept cutting out every 5 seconds, making it unwatchable.
This all after them losing my luggage only days earlier.
Anyway, I'm back.
LinuxTag and FUDCon2 wrapup
I met with Wolfgang for a bit and we discussed a bit of stuff. I showed him some of my patches going in to rawhide. I will send them over to him as soon as I get something that actually works (right now things seem to work for root only, not sure why). He is actually really cool and I'm glad I got the chance to meet him.
My talks on Saturday went pretty good too, I thought. I managed to get some really good questions from people and managed to make a few contacts with a few people. I ended up spending the entirety of a 3 hour time block speaking to various people about Firefox/Mozilla including a 1 hour talk and a 30 minute one. I gave out some stuff which was fun, and then helped tear down the booth when it was finally time to do so. All in all, I worked my ass off in supporting the networking infrastructure, machines, etc. as well as handling other things thrown at me -- running back and forth between both at both LinuxTag and FUDCon, but had a good time in doing so.
One Down, Two to Go
Note: I am not used to German keeboards so I am going to avoid certain characters such as the last two in the English alphabet.
I just presented at the Red Hat booth. It went well I thought considering I expected to run under time and went right to the end of the half hour segment I was alloted. I gave out some stickers and met Wolfgang Rosenauer after the talk. He went to grab lunch, but will be back after to speak with me. I will attempt to be on the laptop I own instead of this German one so I can feel more comfortable writing text.
Firefox at LinuxTag, FUDCon II
Make sure to drop by the Red Hat booth at LinuxTag tomorrow (13.30 CET). I'm presenting on Firefox for about 20 minutes, with the chance of a few Firefox giveaways. I'm also talking at the Red Hat booth on Saturday. Be sure to drop by and say hello!
Also, please register for FUDCon II. I will be giving another talk there on Saturday.
Willkommen in Karlsruhe
Heard on the train: <j5> Antitrust is the one with Miguel De Incas right?
The room I'm sharing with blizzard is a bit... scary. The beds are smack dab against each other, the air conditioner doesn't really work, and its pretty hot at night, and the bathroom walls are made of glass.
Setting up for LinuxTag was cool. Our booth is pretty awesome.
Our staff is awesome. This is going really smoothly. There were a few very minor bumps that got handled within minutes. We rule.
Had some really good Mexican last night here. Why can't Boston do that? Boston is officially teh suck for Mexican food.
Mein Gepäck ist hier
My luggage was delivered a little before noon today. Things seemed to be there. Woo, clothes.
Afterward, went to Ostpark to hang out with Daniel and Aram from the Munich office, where we had a decent BBQ. I got sunburned, but it was otherwise a good time.
Then, went to a jazz club where they had a Jam Session. I decided what the hell, I'll go up and do Maple Leaf Rag. It was not as good as I'd hoped, but whatever. Maybe sometime I'll do an encore performance.
Just showered, off to bed for an early start at the Munich office tomorrow. Zzzzz.
Ich bin ein Firefox Gott
Danke schoen, Ralf!
I still have no luggage, but I do have clothes thanks to some downtown shops which Alex took me to. I now look pretty European, which is kinda funny in a way, but to be honest, I don't think the clothes look all that bad on me. Not bad for a few hours worth of shopping. I'll try and get a picture or two taken later on. I'll try and get in touch with British Airways again tomorrow, and hope that my luggage finally arrives. I've got receipts for my clothing for them to reimburse me with later.
Spent a bit of the afternoon on my presentations, and general e-mail. Also working on getting Deer Park Alpha 1 into Rawhide. Mostly there, actually. I should have it ready enough to demo at LinuxTag and FUDCon. Will also demo roc's stuff.
Heading to a party later on tonight that Ralf's friend is throwing. Let's see how many Europeans I fool. My personal bet? Not many, as I can't really speak the local language. =P
Willkommen in München
Too bad my luggage is still in London. Argh.
Marketing at 37,000 feet
I'm currently on the plane from BOS to LHR on my way to FUDCon2. I noticed the guy sitting to my left pulled out a laptop and booted it with Fedora Core 3 (he was using the FC3 667 kernel). I made a comment about how he should upgrade to Fedora Core 4 and he was surprised that I knew what Fedora was. I then told him I worked on Fedora, and we had an interesting discussion about it. I ended up showing him some of the cool bits to FC4, and he seemed pretty impressed since some of his issues are now fixed (NetworkManager was perhaps the biggest plus for him). I tried to show him how to set it up on his machine since it exists in FC3, but he didn't have it installed, and getting wifi on the flight was a bit difficult. Nonetheless, he seemed pretty excited about the new Thunderbird and evince as well, since he was complaining about ggv. Better support for the ipw2100 drivers in the kernel was also cool for him. I didn't really have to work too hard to convince him to upgrade since he's been using Red Hat Linux since 1994-ish he said, and he's been upgrading since then, even keeping up with the previous three Fedora releases. But he said he would look at trying it out this weekend. I gave him my business card and asked him to let me know what he thought. Meeting people on planes is cool.
Epiphany 1.7
I attempted to build an Epiphany 1.7.1 RPM on Fedora Core 4 (well, technically rawhide), and failed due to lack of an iso-codes package, which is going to be a requirement of GNOME 2.12. So I built one. Need to get it imported into Core, which I'll do next week. For those interested, I'm temporarily placing the SRPM and spec file at http://people.redhat.com/caillon/RPMS/rawhide/ until it makes it into rawhide, which should be RSN.
After that, I managed to get epiphany working. I checked epiphany into fedora cvs but can't build it into rawhide until the iso-codes package gets built there first. Feel free to play with both iso-codes and the new epiphany if you are so inclined.
LinuxTag
I think I managed to get Wolfgang Rosenauer to commit to heading over to LinuxTag for at least one of the days which is really awesome. I'm looking forward to meeting him. I'm going to be there for all 4 days, working the Fedora booth and presenting about Firefox as well. Others who are in the area are welcome to chat about the web browser on Linux, not necessarily Firefox or Gecko. Epiphany/KHTML etc. devs welcome to drop by.
On a separate but somewhat related note, does anyone know why the LinuxTag site looks like ass in Gecko when scrolling? Artifacts abound!
PyXPCOM
Christian Persch has done some cool stuff getting PyXPCOM to work again. Feel free to play with it -- its pretty sweet.
Open Source in the Bayou
My travel from STR took me via LHR, ORD, and finally to MSY. I arrived at ORD with a 90 minute layover, had to go through customs, and then to baggage check and security check. After going through customs, they noted to me that I already missed my flight, which by that time was taking off in 30 minutes. One of the benefits of taking small luggage is that it can double as a carry-on. So I decided that I'd race to Terminal H, and made it to my flight with literally 2 minutes to spare. They were already in final call for boarding.
Got a few hours of sleep, then woke up, put on my shirt and tie, and gave a talk on Firefox past present and future. After the first few minutes where I stumbled a little, the talk went really well in my opinion, and I've heard comments from several people who went and really enjoyed it. So I feel pretty good about that. I managed to successfully request the placard for my talk which I will be bringing back to Westford as a cube goodie.
