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Announcing the User Observation Hackfest in Orlando
On September 21-23, in Orlando, Florida (USA), we will have a User Observation Hackfest!
The highlight of this hackfest is to go on a one-day trip to the nearby city of Largo, Florida, where Dave Richards runs the technical side of the city's government. He has a few hundred users who use Gnome every day.
On that day trip, we'll look at how Dave's users work, and what things in Gnome work well or badly for them. I would like to use this opportunity to use our findings as a seed for Gnome's Pattern Language for user interfaces.
Are you interested in attending? See the wiki page and mail me if you would like to go!
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I'm back home after GUADEC in A Coruña/Galicia/Spain, and a week's vacation after that.
GUADEC was *fantastic* this year! Everyone is commenting about the excellent organization and it is absolutely true: everything worked properly, the network worked, the coffee breaks with fruit/cookies/coffee were excellently timed.
Many, many thanks to the people who replied to the call for contributors to Gnome's history! Jonathan, Dave, and myself had a great time putting the "History of Gnome" keynote together.
During the conference I enjoyed meeting all the interns from the Summer of Code and the Outreach Program for Women. GUADEC is finally starting to feel like a normal place, with a more balanced male/female ratio than what we used to have. I hope the printed yearbook becomes a tradition during the following years; it's great to have people be able to exchange written signatures.
My favorite project by an intern this year is Beth Hadley's music activity for GCompris. My four-year old daughter just started piano lessons, so this is would be perfect for her!
I met the hackers behind Getting Things Gnome!, which I find indispensable these days, and they have some great ideas for world domination. It's nice to see that we have used similar organizational ideas in the past, in paper, to good effect. GTG is seriously awesome and in need of more users. It's a shame that when implementing the To-Do module in Evolution we were constrained by the iCalendar standard; something like GTG's model is a lot more useful and more direct to implement.
I took my new laptop to GUADEC, an ASUS Zenbook UX31E. This is a replacement for my aging Thinkpad T41P, and so far it has been almost 100% delightful. It's fast, the screen is nice and bright (1600x900), it's super lightweight, and it has an SSD instead of a rotating hard drive. It's the first time I use an SSD on my machine, and it makes an incredible difference — even Evolution feels fast now. The keyboard is not as nice as the Thinkpad's — ungrouped functions keys, need to use the Fn key for PgUp/PgDown/Home/End, and what's with MacBook-like keys with little key travel these days? The power plug is flimsy and makes me worried that it will break. You need an USB dongle to use an Ethernet cable, and an HDMI dongle to plug a VGA monitor/projector. But other than that, I heartily recommend it.
When I first got into Madrid airport, I ran into Yan Sun and David Liang, from the Novell/Suse office in Beijing. We arrived at A Coruña and after dropping our stuff in the hotel, we went to the old part of the city for the last day of the Medieval Faire. Lots of music, interesting shops and raucousness. We got some delicious cured meats, cheeses, bread, and some Galician delicacies. I was very happy to be able to do this for David, who was an excellent host when I visited Beijing some years ago.
In A Coruña, even drain pipes are decorated.
Note the ship on the weather vane!
"You really are pretty. It is the world that does not understand you."
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Is your new Emacs 24 complaining that make-local-hook is not defined for some old modules? This bug email has the magic incantation you need to get things working again:
(define-obsolete-function-alias 'make-local-hook 'ignore "21.1")
This has been a public service announcement. GUADEC report is upcoming; I was stumped by this today.