For those who noticed my sudden disappearance from the web late last week, I was attending FossCamp in Boston as a Foresight Linux representative as well as representing my own interests in the localization arena. Unfortunately Ken could not make it and I was left with the daunting task of talking to people about conary.
My flight was pretty peaceful with a quick stop in NYC where I met up with my older sister. After grabbing a bite to eat and a couple of cold ones, we boarded the plane to Boston where we arrived shortly after 17:00. The weather was pretty nasty with the temperature dropping to the low 40s as we checked in the hotel.
My plan was to grab dinner and then lock myself in the hotel room so I could work on my presentations (I also wanted to talk about localization work besides conary). To much of my surprise, the entire area of Revere lost power for approximately 2 hours and we had no means to stay in the room or eat at the local restaurant. The solution was order for a pizza which arrived around 21:00 just as we gained power back at the hotel. Needless to say, after all the traveling and boredom without power, I completely collapsed in my bed and woke up the next morning.
The trip to the Hilton @ MIT where FossCamp was being held took longer than we expected, as our cab driver got lost for a good 20 minutos. We would probably have spent more time driving aimlessly around Cambridge if it wasn’t for my quick phone call to my friend Vinny who bailed us out by giving is directions to the hotel where he awaited for me. A few minutes later I was upstairs in the third floor staring at an already booked grid of events. With no presentation ready and a single empty slot at 14:30, I quickly signed myself up for a presentation on how to better integrate upstream translations with Rosetta. At the lobby I also met up with a bunch of guys I had met before like Jorge and Mirco among others.
I attended a very interesting session about community building led by Jono where I brought up a few of my ideas on how to better integrate translations teams and avoid the duplication of efforts. Something the also came up quite often was the potential that PackageKit has to integrate the look and feel of package management across distributions. As a matter of fact, I pretty much heard PackageKit being tossed around in almost every session I attended. :)
Between sessions I managed to get 9 slides together just in time for my session. Initially I only had 4 people sitting in the room but that quickly changed and more people joined in. I was really glad to see Troy Unrau (from the KDE team) and Mark Shuttleworth (do you know this guy? hehehe) among the attendees, for Troy was very receptive about my ideas on how to bring upstream translation teams together and Mark was fairly interested in my ideas on how to improve Rosetta (and the relationship with upstream). There is an initial thread here and I’ll be talking more about this once Halloween is over. I also managed to talk to Jorge about the creation of a Localization team to help orient and organize the many translation teams currently working on Ubuntu translations. My idea is for the creation of a series of documents and road maps for anyone doing translations and how to make sure there is an open channel of communication with upstream groups.
The rest of the day was spent between attending sessions and meeting new and interesting people, like Leo Franchi, Jeff Mitchell, and Robert Knight from the KDE gang. We talked for a while and I was very pleased when they invited me to attend the KDE 4.0 Release Event to be held at Google’s head quarter in Mountain View, CA next January. I want to take the opportunity to thank you guys for your attention and invitation, and I am looking forward to working together with you! It was also a pleasure to finally meet Adilson Oliveira in person (since we had only known each other via irc)!
The second day was much quieter and I spent most of my time talking to people and trying to decide whether to give a session about conary or not. But shortly after the PackageKit session led by Jorge and Troy, I came to the conclusion that I still needed a bit more preparation to properly present the material on this great technology. Since I had my flight back to NC scheduled for 18:35, I took a cab to the airport around 15:30 and grabbed one last meal before getting on the plane. Another quick stop at NYC and a 1 hour delay brought me back home around midnight. Another hour was spent trying to figure out where my luggage was but by then I was too tired and sleepy to care. I got on my car and drove home finally falling asleep at around 2:00.
The trip was definitely worth every minute and it was nice to represent Foresight in the middle of the big heavy weights. If anything, a lot of people heard of Foresight for the first time over this weekend and some of them were curious about this ‘conary thing’. I very much look forward to doing this kind of event again in the near future… and next time I will be ready for the conary talk! :)