Saturday morning I woke up early to get to the airport on time and caught my flight out of San Francisco. The flight was slightly tense since I had to gate check my carry on (argh!) and further ash cloud problems were cancelling several flights out of the US that morning. I landed in Chicago to learn that my flight to Brussels had a 2 hour delay. In the end this didn’t end up being a big deal, I had a really tight connection in O’Hare planned so I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it anyway.
For some reason I couldn’t fall asleep at all on the flight to Brussels, so I got to zone out to terrible on flight movies, listened to some podcasts and played on my Nintendo DS for 8.5 hours. Finally around noon on Sunday Brussels time our plane landed and we were off!
I bought a local prepaid BASE SIM at the airport for 15 euros, 10 of which immediately went to data, the rest I’m saving for the unlikely emergencies when I may need voice. And quickly met up with some other Ubuntu folks, to catch a cab to the Hotel (turns out there was a shuttle we could have taken, oops). Once at the hotel I immediately bumped into Laura Czajkowski and Martin Owens.
Penelope Stowe’s flight arrived a couple hours after mine and Laura and I enjoyed a nice (if pricey!) hotel bar late lunch and enjoyed a couple Belle-Vue Kriek Extras (yum!). After food we headed back to Laura and Pen’s room to watch the latest episode of Doctor who, along with enjoying our Krieks, some gummy penguins and I got to enjoy my first Curly Wurly candy bar. It was around 6:30PM when I left their room to go to my own – and boy was I exhausted from not having slept the night before. I forced myself to stay up until 8PM before finally crashing, but it wasn’t easy!
Monday morning UDS began! The day started off with an Introduction by Jono Bacon.
Then a keynote by Mark Shuttleworth (video), where Mark discussed the “chasm” that Ubuntu still needs to cross to make it to the mainstream and talked a lot about Ubuntu on netbooks and other internet-ready devices where screen real estate, which he posted about in his blog today: Unity, and Ubuntu Light. He also announced that he wants us to shoot for a 10/10/10 release date of Maverick, because 101010 in is binary for 42, and there is a trend among us Ubuntu folks of having read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (guilty here!).
From there we headed off to sessions.
– Community Roundtable –
I started out the session day in the Community Team Roundtable where we reviewed the plans for the week and discussed potential sessions, I’m looking forward to seeing the Community Learning Project Materials workflow session some Ground Control sessions scheduled.
– Configuration management tools and conffiles –
This was a really fascinating look at the current state of config file management via dpkg and the conflicts that come up during upgrades when using a config management tool like Puppet. A couple comments about config file management itself were made (dpkg’s config options leave much to be desired – it might be nice to have a better/smarter tool for merging config file versions between versions), but the core of this discussion focused on how and if a team should work with Debian to look into a way to selectively (you can already have dpkg not prompt for any config file changes, but not per package) take config file management away from dpkg itself for certain packages and tell the system that something like Puppet is handling it. I really do hope this happens.
At lunch I got to hang out with Bert Desmet, a local Fedora Ambassador who is attending the summit for a couple days. And we got a picture! …even if Martin Owens is giving him bunny ears (that’s how we treat Fedora folk. Wait, no it’s not! GUYS!!)
After lunch there was a series of Plenaries, starting with Ivanka Majic presenting for The Design Team (video) where she discussed some of their user testing of Ubuntu 10.04 which they’ll be posting on the design blog soon. Next up was Thiago Macieira presenting on QT Roadmap / Overview (video) and then Rick Spencer on Application Developers and Maverick (video).
– Team Project Planning Workshop –
This session ended up being a really great one that focused on the use of Launchpad blueprints in community projects. I’ll be honest – I don’t really use them. We were able to discuss how to make them better (and boy did I have a lot of ideas based on my own reluctance!). The idea ended up being to mostly do away with our traditional wiki-based RoadMaps and instead go with the launchpad-based blueprints so team members could more easily subscribe and keep up with changes – plus regular burndown charts which track progress can be generated easily from them. The end result of the brainstorming was looking into some launchpad-end changes, and some folks assigned to writing documentation for doing blueprints so it’s easier.
– Heuristic evaluation and bug tagging –
This was a session put on by the design team, and while my interests don’t typically lean toward user experience, after the Plenary by Ivanka Plenary I found myself interested in how the team worked. This session focused on discussions they’d had with the Mozilla team about having a common “language” to discuss usability issues and using similar tags on bugs to describe certain things. One thing I was really pleased to see was discussion about error messages sent to users. While I certainly appreciate the frequently easily Googleable, tech-nature of error messages that programs give, this is certainly not universal, and most of the newcomers to Linux these days will be put off by them. In all, a great session.
After that I decided to take a walk. This Hotel is in the middle of a beautiful Belgian forest and I had quite the nice walk down a couple of the trails on the property.
Last night was spent in the hotel bar enjoying some beers (I ended up with a mug of Stella Artois thanks to Benjamin Humphrey) and good conversation with Amber Graner, and several others throughout the evening. I turned in around midnight, my body still isn’t adjusted to the time zone difference but I am feeling much better this morning than I was yesterday morning!
Now off to grab some breakfast and start day 2 :)
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 at 9:38
Looks like fun! Thanks for the updates!
Saturday, Jan 15th, 2011 at 9:55
Hey, I decided to find the posts that followed the previous one (since I got a direct link to it from Google) to see if you mentioned SIM/Nexus One related stuff in follow-on posts and you did! :) So thanks for that. Just to confirm, is your Nexus One a “T-Mobile” Nexus One? I don’t feel like looking up the frequencies so if it is then I should be safe. :)
Monday, Jan 17th, 2011 at 13:54
Woohoo, thoroughness of my blog entries pays off! Glad it was helpful :)
My Nexus One came direct from Google (it wasn’t via T-Mobile, even though I do use it on the T-Mobile network), but I believe all Nexus Ones are unlocked.
Monday, Jan 17th, 2011 at 13:59
Ah, you are absolutely right. They are direct from the Google but work on T-Mobile’s network. I short-handed that a bit. I’ll be looking for a BASE SIM at the airport. Now, I just need to get approved. :) Thanks again.