Wow, so yet another FOSDEM lies behind us. As always, it was quite fantastic; those who decided not to come were clearly mistaken

So, other than the obligatory KDE Group Picture, here are some impressions from this year. Let's start with the biggest surprise of all: Boudewijn Rempt was able to make it to FOSDEM!

Here we have Thomas Zander, who was answering a Qt-related question during Jos' talk on KDE4.2:

Apparently, Linus was at FOSDEM too

Some people had printed Wade's KDE 'promotional' pictures on postcards. Fine by me. But seeing the scary dolls 'strongly suggesting to use KDE' (complete with 'KDE is watching' above it) when you need to go to the men's room is quite unsettling .

But, all in all, I think everyone had a lot of fun at FOSDEM:

(Yes, I'm quite mean )

The rest of my FOSDEM 2009 pictures can be found in their usual place. As usual, if you don't like a picture of yourself (or very much do like a picture of yourself), feel free to contact me about it.

Things to remember when going to a next FOSDEM/conference:

• Remember to change whitebalance settings when inside
• Learn how to use a flash. I bought a new one, but using it felt like using black magic, in that I was unable to reliably predict how the end result of a particular set of settings would affect the outcome (usually, this was not good ).

So, of course there's a lot of interesting things going on at FOSDEM here. Just like last year, we had a nice group picture on the grass field next to the KDE devroom. Thanks to all people who could make it. If you look verrry closely, you can even spot the GNOME person in it

As usual, KDE will have a presence at this year's FOSDEM. If you're coming, be sure to check out our KDE devroom schedule for Saturday, and the CrossDesktop devroom schedule for Sunday. I expect that within a few days the whole schedule will be available, instead of only a few devrooms (importantly, there will be a KDE-related talk in the Debian room). If you're around on Saturday, don't forget to come to the group picture!

I'm pretty sure there will be something of interest for everyone, if not in the KDE room, then perhaps in another room. And let's hope that for your range of interests, the scheduling overlaps arent't as painful as for me (the 3-way split between Ext4, Paul Adams, and Gallium is particularly sad to me )

For those few of you interested (is there anyone?): I've started a new blog. If this one is any measure, it will be a pretty dead one, but I think it's the thought that counts =)

As many of you will know, I'm not really keen on travelling. This has much to do with the dislike of leaving my zone of comfort, my fear of flying, etc. However, when I do have to travel, I try to inform myself of issues that might arise from travelling to the specific country I'm supposed to go to. For instance, like a lot of Europeans, I do not look forward to the idea of travelling to the US because of the issues with immigration (like privacy). Issues like these (luckily) still generate some press coverage so that most people know vaguely what to expect. Similarly, it's probably pretty well-known that you better don't start waving around Swastika's when you're visiting Germany.

However, people intending to travel to the first KDE Americas event (which will apparently be in Jamaica next January) might not be aware that Jamaica doesn't sound to be a nice place to go to if you're LGBT (Lesbian/Bi/Gay/Transgender). See for instance the Wikipedia article on Jamaican LGBT rights, Human Rights Watch or this Time article.

Now since I won't go anyway (like I said, I don't like travelling) this doesn't influence me into not going there. Yet I think it's only fair to bring it to the attention of people intending to go, so that they don't have unpleasant surprises when they find out about it after confirming to go...

After a lot of deliberating this, I decided to put online an album with a lot of the pictures I took at Akademy. Since most people at (big) conferences and community gatherings like it when they can have some form of memento (including me!) of themselves and the event, I think this outweighs the (very few) people who didn't seem to like their picture being taken. Especially since most of the people actually tried posing in different positions when I came near them with my camera, which I think means obviously that they would want to see themselves afterwards

To the best of my abilities of remembering those who did not like pictures being taken, I have not put online the pictures of those people, neither have I uploaded the pictures of somewhat embarrassing nature (like people sleeping during the presentations ). I've also not uploaded the worst out-of-focus ones, blurry ones, moved ones, etc. This brings me to a total of 685 pictures currently being available, out of 939 in my local album, which I still think is rather much (This means it's also rather much bandwith that this will suck, so please be kind to my webhost )

If you really don't want to be in one of the pics I put online, give me a sign and I'll try to fix it (to make sure it's not being indexed by the web archive and then you start complaining your pic is being archived over there, I put up a robots.txt over this, which is very very sad, but I really don't want people complaining afterwards). Similarly, if you really like a certain picture of you and want the original-sized one, also don't hesitate to ask for it.

So, after all that, here are my photos of Akademy 2008

PS: The weird ordering of the pictures (seemingly not chronological or alphabetically sorted by filename) is not my fault: I blame digiKam

Update 17/08/08: Removed 5 photos but added a few more, bringing us to a total of 690 pictures. Also added an explicit license: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

So, 3.5 days of Akademy apparently means a lot of pictures being taken, I'm pretty sure everyone around has noticed this Now I personally took a lot of pictures (again, most of you will have noticed that), which means that I also have a lot of data. Since I'm not really in the mood to upload 2.1G of data (at least, that's the current count), I'm not going to upload all of that somewhere (especially since a lot of those are actually out of focus, moved, generally blurry, bad, etc). If any of you think I made a nice picture of you, though, feel free to contact me and I'll see if I can actually find any such picture to mail you

Now a some of pictures of me actually already online by virtue of being used in other people's blogposts and dot stories.

Still, here's some more (some of them slightly cropped) pictures, hopefully somewhat complementary to the ones already on the web.
Dot hero Danny promoting his favourite drink:

Here we see Matthew herding the people back to the talks using Adriaan's whip/riding crop:

Obviously Cliff did not think Matthew intimidated his audience enough, so he had to borrow Adriaan's riding crop as well to do this himself.

Here's an intense Amarok debugging session:

It's amazing how much more sportive Akademy seems to be, compared to last year. Not only do people regularly play table tennis, but they even made good use of the lunch break in the KDE e.V. meeting to play some frisbee. Here's Leo and Seb playing frisbee:


And here's Aaron and Chani playing table tennis against 2 other people during the eV break (apparently tennis can be very funny indeed!):

Lydia looking at me suspiciously:

And we finish with the renewed El Presidente who is using the stylus of his new N810 as a baton to conduct the KDE Orchestra:

It's too bad I don't think I'll be able to take much more pictures, since I unfortunately can't be there on Wednesday (I agreed to go somewhere else, in retrospect that was not the brightest idea ever), on Thursday I'm not on the boat trip, and on Friday most people will either be leaving or will already have left.

Today, the BIPT (Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunication) released a draft of the implementation of the EU directive regarding data retention in Belgian Law at the request of the minster for Enterprising and Simplification (dunno how else to translate 'minister voor Ondernemen en Vereenvoudigen') (downloadable in Dutch and French). It seems the idea is to introduce some form of public scrutiny (instead of just making the law and be done with it), so that people can comment on it. I'm of course completely pessimistic about real chances of influencing it for the better, but one never knows.

Even though that text seems to have some very minor redeeming parts on the surface, when I read it, I wasn't happy. Seems like they want ISPs and other services providers (email, webmail, VoIP, etc) to keep a lot of information, for the maximum extent permissible by the directive (that is, 2 years). Of course, no modern law would be complete without having a clause in it that makes it permissible to extend that term indefinitely in case of 'extraordinary circumstances'. Sigh.

I can't make too much comments on it since I'm just a computer scientist, not a lawyer. It is rather hard for me to grasp the intricate details of some formulations (usually because I interpret terms differently). The fact that part of it changes and references the gigantic (at least for me) telecommunications law, isn't helping much either.

In any case, Belgians that have an interest in law and data retention might find the text an interesting (if not happy) read.

So, after Saturday's FOSDEM KDE Group Picture, perhaps it's now time to give a slightly fuller account of FOSDEM 2008 (with pictures). Since most of my pictures from the main tracks were too blurry anyway, I'll just focus on some of my pictures related to the KDE FOSDEM 2008 presence (leaving out some pics of individual persons and overview shots). Photos have only been resized and cropped where somewhat appropriate. Perhaps to do for next year: buy a lens which captures more light, or a bigger flashlight (Shooting at ISO 1600 is rather noisy )

Let's start with a picture of the KDE stand, featuring Adriaan and his fancy box (btw Adriaan, another piece of consumer electronics that people willingly pose with would be the OLPC).

The first KDE talk was by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen about Amarok 2, and introduced a live mascote for Amarok. I noted that Amarok 2 really should try to get the ability to download and manage live performances and other music available from the Internet Archive. Let's hope they try that again (given that he actually looked into it already).

The following talk was by me about KOffice 2, but since I did that talk myself, I don't have pictures of that I was followed by Sebastian Trüg talking about Nepomuk. I could really have used his proposed feature of using FOSDEM speaker information to find mails from them

Knut Yrvin then talked about Free Software in telecom. Not only did he pass around a Greenphone (unfortunately no decent pics of that), but he also gave away a free book to the first person in the audience that could answer a tough question about what code TT GPLed at some point last year. It was so hard that he had to ask an easier question to be able to give away the book

Unfortunately I had to miss most of Holger Schröder's KDE on Windows in order to meet someone, but I was still able to snap some pictures of him in action (actually I made more decent pictures of him than of most other speakers, intriguingly enough).

The last talk on Saturday was done by Josef Spillner. He talked about multiplayer gaming for KDE4 games, which apparently exists already even though the functionality is hidden somewhat. I can't really check that because I don't actually compile KDE4 games, but it's still interesting to know about.

The first talk on Sunday morning (way too early for my taste ) in the Crossdesktop room was done by the dynamic duo Simon Peter and Kurt Pfeifle (Simon doing the talking, and Kurt demonstrating Klik on his laptop/the projector while Simon discussed it, very nice interaction). They talked about Klik (2). I guess their target audience was me, because they showed a Klik error dialog about Krita not working

Unfortunately I had to leave early during their Q&A session, because I wanted to see part of the Xen main track talk. I arrived late, and the room was completely packed and rather hot. So instead of staying in that room for the next talk about VirtualBox, I left in the break to go to the other main track about build tools, just in time for the SCons talk. (I was planning to meet a friend of mine during the CMake talk anyway, so now I just met him slightly earlier.) It was a lot less crowded there, and even a bit too cold (but that might've been because there was a draught). While I moved rooms, I was still able to quickly make a picture of the questions section of Jos Poortvliet and Sebastian Kuegler's talk on KDE4.

After the CMake talk I had to leave early again (and miss the next devroom talk), because we had a small meeting on the grass field next to the devroom about the upcoming aKademy 2008 in Belgium. That meeting finished just in time to catch another talk by Knut Yrvin, this time on Free Software in Education (he gave a total of 3 devroom talks, but his other talk about Free Software and phones was scheduled at the same time as the Klik one). No free books this time, but he did tell us about how teaching young kids how to use an office suite is a bad idea. I guess Inge won't like the sound of that

After the main track CMake talk by Bill Hoffman, we also had our own version of a CMake talk, this time by Alexander Neundorf. I guess I should really try if that excluding of unit tests also works with the Krita unit tests, since that does sound like a nice feature to use. Bill attended the talk as well, and gave a free CMake book to a happily surprised Peter Rockai (mornfall) during the questions section, after Peter asked a question about integrating Java in CMake projects.

After that, we first had Øyvind Kolås (pippin) talking a bit about GEGL (we had to switch his talk and the Deb Packaging Jam, unfortunately). It seems that the current development version of Gimp has a checkbox in the main GUI to 'Enable GEGL', which is rather interesting (amongst other things, it provides them with live previewing of filters, a feature the current Krita development version has as well, and which I also demonstrated the day before). As seems to be typical with talks by pippin, he used a custom presentation interface to do his presentation (this time it appeared to be a graphically 'enhanced' file system browser )

Following that I had another scheduling conflict: there was both the Deb talk, and another Klik talk (this time as a main track). I resolved it by quickly visiting Simon and Kurt to take a picture, and then go back to the Crossdesktop room where Jonathan Riddell explained us all about making Debian Packages. He did this by using the rather amusing example of packaging the GNU Hello World program.

Unfortunately, due to circumstances, we had to cancel the last devroom talk, so no pictures from that. After that, I hung around a bit with mornfall and Pino Toscano (who doesn't like me taking pictures of him, yet is on the group picture ). After Holger talked a bit with us, FOSDEM 2008 was unfortunately over already. Let's hope next year's FOSDEM will be at least as good as this one

PS: I bought a Debian T-Shirt at FOSDEM, I guess that makes up for my rant about them I actually wanted to buy one last year already, but they were sold out then. I made sure to buy one on Saturday this year, and indeed they still had some (FYI: like said in the comments there, that issue has been temporarily fixed in their kernels now. I tested it, and it indeed works, yay ) (And generally speaking, I really like Debian, and that's mainly why I get angry at it sometimes: I care about it)

Edit/PS 2: Seems like Jonathan Riddell put up all of my KDE related FOSDEM pictures on his Flickr account, so now you can have a more extensive view of them

So, not only is it FOSDEM this weekend, I also organized a group photo for the KDE related people who are here. We went to the small field of grass in front of the KDE devroom. Luckily, the sun just started breaking through the clouds, so there was nice lighting (unfortunately I forgot to switch my ISO back from 1600, so it's a bit noisy nonetheless).
Here's a very small version (WiFi is a bit slow here, so no big version yet)