The last day. Saw a bunch of interesting talks about freedesktop.org, Ekiga, GNOME and Ubuntu. Jono Bacon's talk was very interesting. I think if Nokia is interested in building a healthy developer community, they would do well to talk to Jono about it.

Got a USB gender-bender from Kees Jongenburger -- now I can plug in USB devices to my N810, provided that they don't require too much power (extra software required: usbcontrol from Maemo Extras). I owe you one Kees!

Discovered that the GNOME booth does in fact have T-shirts for sale, they're just not out on display like in other booths. Sadly, since I discovered that during the last hour of the last day of the conference, only extra large T-shirts were left. Spent my last 10 EUR in cash on the T-shirt anyway. ;-)

Met MaryBeth Panagos from OpenMediaNow, learned about interesting happenings with Gnash, open media codecs and Ubuntu Mobile. Raised my hopes for a brighter future. Showed off my N810 and expressed my hopes for Gnash replacing the closed Adobe Flash player on it. It won't happen any time soon -- everyone wants it now!, but there are few developers actually working on it.

Went to a very geeky cafe/computer club c-base for the Ubuntu BBQ. Almost didn't find the place, but one of the LinuxTag guys happened to be going back at just the right moment to show me the path hidden behind the bushes.

Feeling content now. Well, missing free (or at least paid, but working -- boo, Swisscom, boo!) WiFi at the hotel, but other than that I've had a wonderful time.

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.

Couldn't resist the meme that has resurfaced lately.

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
14780 cd
3010 svn
2366 ls
1957 ssh
1563 svnst
1285 ml
1048 bin/test
957 vi
952 sudo
837 offlineimap

'svnst' is an alias for 'svn status'. 'ml' is a little wrapper around mailcheck that reformats the output to fit on two lines.

The numbers are rather high because I added a couple of lines to my ~/.bashrc to have more history:

export HISTFILESIZE=
export HISTSIZE=50000

What's sudo doing in the top 10?

$ history|awk '$2=="sudo" {a[$3]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
99 vi
68 apt-get
67 -s
45 ifup
40 rmmod
37 umount
37 iwconfig
35 modprobe
31 iwlist
26 powertop