After getting my presentation out of the way, I was finally able to relax
and really enjoy LinuxTag. I hadn't realised quite how stressed I was about
the talk. I'm really happy now that I agreed to come.
Watched an amazing demo in the LinuxMCE booth. I always though it was
some kind of a media center app for watching movies, but it turns out to be a
complete home automation system where you can control the lights, security
cameras and, of course, multimedia, with a large variety of devices (remote
controls, mobile phones, VoIP hardware phones, Nokia Internet tablets).
Still, I'd have to get a house first.
After the conference I went out for a beer (or, rather, a cup of Earl
Grey) in the city with Gary "lcuk" Birkett and Malgorzata Ciesielska, who is
doing her PhD on Nokia/Maemo community organisation/collaboration. Had a
really nice evening.
The day just flew by. We had all the Maemo community talks. Some people
have asked me to put my LinuxTag presentation online, so here it is: What do I want from
Maemo?.
In the evening we went to a nice outdoors cafe in a large and beautiful park
(Tiergaten) and talked about various things until 1 AM.
My email is piling up, and Google Reader is overflowing.
Nokia kindly invited me to speak about Maemo at LinuxTag 2008.
WiFi is a bit problematic here. At the hotel there's no free wifi, you
can buy some kind of access from Swisscom at silly prices (8 EUR for 1 hour,
with a 100 MB download limit) with silly limitations, and besides my laptop
refuses to associate with the AP and doesn't even get to the login page.
WiFi works at LinuxTag itself (at least in the conference rooms; the expo
hall was spotty), but you have to visit a pointless and slow web page and press
a button labeled 'Go' before they let you ssh around. I fail to see the point,
but at least I can get my email now.
Everyone is very nice here. I only attended one talk by now (Cristoph
Hellwig's interesting talk about xfs), but I hardly saw any open laptops in
the audience.
The Berlin public transport system is not difficult to figure out. The
N810's built-in GPS is not useful in practice. I got a fix exactly once after
standing for about 10 minutes outside of the hotel. Maemo Mapper is useful for
figuring out your actual location on the map, as you're listening to station
names on the bus.
Met some people (hi, Dave!). My memory for names is still atrocious. My
bad eyesight doesn't let me read badges easily, either. By the way, if you're
designing badges that will hang from a lanyard, please print them with the same
text on both sides.
