begeistert

Düsseldorf

Preceding the BeGeistert 023 weekend was the usual weeklong Code Sprint (18.-22. of October 2010). Present to this year's coding sprint were (from left to right on the photo below):

Colin Günther (bosii)
Oliver Tappe (zooey)
Clemens Zeidler (czeidler)
Rene Gollent (anevilyak)
Alexandre Deckner (aldeck)

On behalf of the Haiku Support Association (HSA), we'd like to invite you to our 23rd BeGeistert meeting on the weekend of 23./24. of October 2010. It will be held as usual in the nice conference rooms of the youth hostel in Düsseldorf, Germany.

BeGeistert is an excellent opportunity to mingle with and learn from other users and developers from all over Europe (and beyond: this year we're happy to be joined by Rene Gollent, flying over from the US, and Christof Lutteroth and Clemens Zeidler from New Zealand!). Hear about other people's projects or present your own, meet many of Haiku's core developers and discuss the future of Haiku. Or present your favorite KDL and see if our gurus can successfully debug it...

Preceding the BeGeistert weekend, there will be the usual weeklong Code Sprint (18.-22. of October 2010). The additional rent for the needed room is partly financed by Haiku Inc., so many thanks for that!

If you want to join the gang and help bring Haiku another big step forward, contact Stephan Aßmus as soon as possible.

As last BeGeistert, we'll have a separate workshop day on Monday, 25. of October 2010. This time Axel Dörfler will host the tutorial. It's planned to program a simple game, showing off multi-threading, messaging and queries; all tailored to the participants' coding skills of course. A perfect opportunity to pick the brains of one of Haiku's major architects.

The workshop has to be booked separately from the BeGeistert weekend and since places are limited, it's recommended to do so quickly!

Register now on the BeGeistert website!

Prices:

It was a few months ago that on a lazy Sunday afternoon I found myself to be in Brussels at the FOSDEM conference, where François organized a very successful Alt-OS development room, filled with all sorts of presentations on the world of the alternative operating systems. As probably the only non-computer science person, I got a slot as well and I decided to give a presentation with this same title. Now just imagine, I was scheduled on the last day, nearing the end of the conference (around four or five in the afternoon) and knowing the visitor group, I did not expect much. As such, I decided to prepare a discussion session for the ten or so people to show up. Now about five minutes before I was scheduled to go, people started trickling in. And to my pleasant dismay – if ever such a thing is possible – I ended up having a full house. Now why would a large number of computer geeks or – more nicely put – Open Source fanatics be interested in what a silly humanities guy has to say? I started to think about that, and I realize that this is in fact a very central question to everybody that donates time or money to these projects: what will be its future? Or put in another way, how can we, as actors in the always changing, always new information technology sector determine a path? That is the problem I would like to give a stab at in the coming twenty minutes.

This contains the text and the slides of a presentation I gave on the 11th of April 2010, at BeGeistert 022 in Düsseldorf. Attached you can find the slides and a printer-friendly version of this text.

I'm in the TGV back to Valence on wednesday, which luckily has many power plugs, unlike the Thalys which has wifi but no plug for those battery-drained guys like me. It's 21:30 as I start writing this. Will take some more days to finish though...

Not there yet

But first things first, after attending a meeting on Friday in Grenoble, I headed back to Valence to leave some stuff there, then back to the train station, where my train got delayed by an hour or so. But the other frenchies I was to share a car with were also a bit late, so they didn't have to wait for me too much. We then took the road to Düsseldorf and started to talk about each others work, and GSoC since we had two of the students on board.