As always, I took some pictures at FOSDEM 2010. Disappointingly I took less than last year: only 55 instead of 132 (and even that is cheating, because that includes a picture *of* me taken by xvello). Still, better than nothing, I guess... In any case, as always at FOSDEM, I had lots of fun, and that's what counts!

As always, we had the KDE Group Picture taken at FOSDEM. It went pretty smooth this year, apart from not immediately hearing when the autotimer of the camera clicked

[Edit: Hmmm why does this not show up in the feeds?]

It's been a while, but I'd just like to bring the following 2 upcoming events in to your attention:

• FOSDEM. As always, the yearly free/open source software is being organized in Brussels again. I think there's something interesting for most of you, so be sure to have a look at the schedule (even though it is not finalized yet) Of course, for all the KDE people among us: don't forget the KDE Group Picture! As for people wanting to know which talks I'll probably attend, I put a tentative list on my website.
• Vlaamse Programmeerwedstrijd (Flemish Programming Contest). This is a programming contest, open to almost everybody: senior high school students, 'hogeschool'/university students (bachelor, master and PhD), and other people that have graduated from one of those options. This year, it's being organized at Ghent University, which happens to be where I'm working. That means I'm obviously attending it (using Haskell and/or C++). So if you ever wanted to make fun of me or humiliate me (and my teammate, of course) in a kinda-official setting: this is your chance

Wow, so yet another FOSDEM lies behind us. As always, it was quite fantastic; those who decided not to come were clearly mistaken

So, other than the obligatory KDE Group Picture, here are some impressions from this year. Let's start with the biggest surprise of all: Boudewijn Rempt was able to make it to FOSDEM!

Here we have Thomas Zander, who was answering a Qt-related question during Jos' talk on KDE4.2:

Apparently, Linus was at FOSDEM too

Some people had printed Wade's KDE 'promotional' pictures on postcards. Fine by me. But seeing the scary dolls 'strongly suggesting to use KDE' (complete with 'KDE is watching' above it) when you need to go to the men's room is quite unsettling .

But, all in all, I think everyone had a lot of fun at FOSDEM:

(Yes, I'm quite mean )

The rest of my FOSDEM 2009 pictures can be found in their usual place. As usual, if you don't like a picture of yourself (or very much do like a picture of yourself), feel free to contact me about it.

Things to remember when going to a next FOSDEM/conference:

• Remember to change whitebalance settings when inside
• Learn how to use a flash. I bought a new one, but using it felt like using black magic, in that I was unable to reliably predict how the end result of a particular set of settings would affect the outcome (usually, this was not good ).

So, of course there's a lot of interesting things going on at FOSDEM here. Just like last year, we had a nice group picture on the grass field next to the KDE devroom. Thanks to all people who could make it. If you look verrry closely, you can even spot the GNOME person in it

As usual, KDE will have a presence at this year's FOSDEM. If you're coming, be sure to check out our KDE devroom schedule for Saturday, and the CrossDesktop devroom schedule for Sunday. I expect that within a few days the whole schedule will be available, instead of only a few devrooms (importantly, there will be a KDE-related talk in the Debian room). If you're around on Saturday, don't forget to come to the group picture!

I'm pretty sure there will be something of interest for everyone, if not in the KDE room, then perhaps in another room. And let's hope that for your range of interests, the scheduling overlaps arent't as painful as for me (the 3-way split between Ext4, Paul Adams, and Gallium is particularly sad to me )

For those few of you interested (is there anyone?): I've started a new blog. If this one is any measure, it will be a pretty dead one, but I think it's the thought that counts =)

As many of you will know, I'm not really keen on travelling. This has much to do with the dislike of leaving my zone of comfort, my fear of flying, etc. However, when I do have to travel, I try to inform myself of issues that might arise from travelling to the specific country I'm supposed to go to. For instance, like a lot of Europeans, I do not look forward to the idea of travelling to the US because of the issues with immigration (like privacy). Issues like these (luckily) still generate some press coverage so that most people know vaguely what to expect. Similarly, it's probably pretty well-known that you better don't start waving around Swastika's when you're visiting Germany.

However, people intending to travel to the first KDE Americas event (which will apparently be in Jamaica next January) might not be aware that Jamaica doesn't sound to be a nice place to go to if you're LGBT (Lesbian/Bi/Gay/Transgender). See for instance the Wikipedia article on Jamaican LGBT rights, Human Rights Watch or this Time article.

Now since I won't go anyway (like I said, I don't like travelling) this doesn't influence me into not going there. Yet I think it's only fair to bring it to the attention of people intending to go, so that they don't have unpleasant surprises when they find out about it after confirming to go...

After a lot of deliberating this, I decided to put online an album with a lot of the pictures I took at Akademy. Since most people at (big) conferences and community gatherings like it when they can have some form of memento (including me!) of themselves and the event, I think this outweighs the (very few) people who didn't seem to like their picture being taken. Especially since most of the people actually tried posing in different positions when I came near them with my camera, which I think means obviously that they would want to see themselves afterwards

To the best of my abilities of remembering those who did not like pictures being taken, I have not put online the pictures of those people, neither have I uploaded the pictures of somewhat embarrassing nature (like people sleeping during the presentations ). I've also not uploaded the worst out-of-focus ones, blurry ones, moved ones, etc. This brings me to a total of 685 pictures currently being available, out of 939 in my local album, which I still think is rather much (This means it's also rather much bandwith that this will suck, so please be kind to my webhost )

If you really don't want to be in one of the pics I put online, give me a sign and I'll try to fix it (to make sure it's not being indexed by the web archive and then you start complaining your pic is being archived over there, I put up a robots.txt over this, which is very very sad, but I really don't want people complaining afterwards). Similarly, if you really like a certain picture of you and want the original-sized one, also don't hesitate to ask for it.

So, after all that, here are my photos of Akademy 2008

PS: The weird ordering of the pictures (seemingly not chronological or alphabetically sorted by filename) is not my fault: I blame digiKam

Update 17/08/08: Removed 5 photos but added a few more, bringing us to a total of 690 pictures. Also added an explicit license: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

So, 3.5 days of Akademy apparently means a lot of pictures being taken, I'm pretty sure everyone around has noticed this Now I personally took a lot of pictures (again, most of you will have noticed that), which means that I also have a lot of data. Since I'm not really in the mood to upload 2.1G of data (at least, that's the current count), I'm not going to upload all of that somewhere (especially since a lot of those are actually out of focus, moved, generally blurry, bad, etc). If any of you think I made a nice picture of you, though, feel free to contact me and I'll see if I can actually find any such picture to mail you

Now a some of pictures of me actually already online by virtue of being used in other people's blogposts and dot stories.

Still, here's some more (some of them slightly cropped) pictures, hopefully somewhat complementary to the ones already on the web.
Dot hero Danny promoting his favourite drink:

Here we see Matthew herding the people back to the talks using Adriaan's whip/riding crop:

Obviously Cliff did not think Matthew intimidated his audience enough, so he had to borrow Adriaan's riding crop as well to do this himself.

Here's an intense Amarok debugging session:

It's amazing how much more sportive Akademy seems to be, compared to last year. Not only do people regularly play table tennis, but they even made good use of the lunch break in the KDE e.V. meeting to play some frisbee. Here's Leo and Seb playing frisbee:


And here's Aaron and Chani playing table tennis against 2 other people during the eV break (apparently tennis can be very funny indeed!):

Lydia looking at me suspiciously:

And we finish with the renewed El Presidente who is using the stylus of his new N810 as a baton to conduct the KDE Orchestra:

It's too bad I don't think I'll be able to take much more pictures, since I unfortunately can't be there on Wednesday (I agreed to go somewhere else, in retrospect that was not the brightest idea ever), on Thursday I'm not on the boat trip, and on Friday most people will either be leaving or will already have left.