Sunday, February 24, 2008

XMPP Devcon

My main reason to visit Brussels was to meet the XMPP community.



The XMPP devcon was held at the Atlas hotel there.



They turned out to be nice folks and at noon we went to dinner.

At the FOSDEM 2008

The FOSDEM 2008 conference took place at the Solbosch campus of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.


As I wanted to see a bit of the city, I took a cab to the campus. For some reason it took 11€ to get there and later 15€ to get back to the centrum. Maybe the second driver was more experienced ripping of tourists.

The flair inside the buildings was definitely university/grassroot not business.


The XMPP folks had a booth there. Here you see Pedro convincing the crowd.


At the Ubuntu desk I saw my first OLPC laptop. It looks cute, but I was told that even children complained about its slow processor, lack of Flash player etc.


I knew before that the BSD Certification Group would offer the BSDA certification at the conference, but I hesitated to sign up, because I had no time for preparation. The organizers turned out to be friendly people and I decided to join the exam
anyway. At worst this would have been a moderate donation for a good cause.

I expected the exam to take place in front of a computer, via some web application. To my surprise I was led to a plain old university lecture hall. It reminded me of my study times. However Belgish students seem to be thinner than the German ones (or were hundred years ago or however old this room was). So I was reminded twice that I am not 20 anymore: I did not fit in between seat and table (see photo above) and I had trouble reading the small printed numbers on the answer sheet. Boy, and I thought the BSD crowd was 10 years older than the Linux crowd in general.

Before the entrance of the lecture hall, what a funny coincidence, I met Wim from OpenBSD, the guy who sells their great T-shirts (I wore one at this occasion). He helped me settling the late registration.

I had to sign a NDA about the exam, but I think I can reveal that I think they did a good job.

Originally I wanted to listen to some talks at FOSDEM, but it in the end it turned out more interesting to meet and talk with folks face to face.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

FOSDEM 2008

I’m going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting

I will go to FOSDEM 2008 on Saturday and join XMPP DevCon 4 on Sunday.