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FOSDEM wrap-up

By Bjarni RĂșnar 2011-02-06, 20:30

Today was the 2nd and last day of FOSDEM 2011.

Ewelina and I arrived in Belgium on Thursday, but spent the night and Friday morning in Brugge, which was lovely. We stayed at a really nice B&B named the Royal Stewart, which we are happy to recommend. Just down the street from the Stewart we had some really amazing Egyptian food (such a topical meal), at a place whose name I have forgotten.

Friday evening we arrived in Brussels and that evening we attended the FOSDEM beer event, at a bar named Delirium. We had many different interesting beers, watched hundreds (1500 or so) of free software geeks drink and talk and laugh. We met some people and had some conversations... and the next morning we had quite the hangover.

Largely thanks to said hangover, we got lost in a large park instead of being on-time for Eben Moglen's talk about the importance of software freedom. But we saw the second half, which was good, and I chatted briefly with him afterwards. The rest of the day was spent in the Lightning Talks room, where I spoke about PageKite at 4pm. Sometime soon there will be a video, which I look forward to seeing with some trepidation.

Update: here is the video. It's not bad!

That evening we went to another pub, for what was somewhat ironically called a "l33tm33t" organized by Jan Wildeboer, but carefully didn't stay long enough to provoke another nasty hangover. We did have some good conversations though.

Today there were more talks to attend, but during the early afternoon Michiel of Unhosted and myself sat down in one of the hacker rooms and began work on a proof-of-concept Android implementation of an Unhosted Wallet (private keystore), which would connect to the Web using PageKite. We had really only just gotten started though, when we had some visitors who wanted to chat with us about our projects. But that was good too. :-)

Here are links to some of my FOSDEM 2011 discoveries:

Lots of excellent stuff!

We'd like to thank the organizers of FOSDEM and all the people we chatted with for an excellent week-end. Hopefully we'll be back next year!

Comments

  1. Paul Makepeace said on 2011-02-07, 10:51
    Cool stuff. So how did the talk go? Received well? Etc :-)
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  2. Bjarni R. Einarsson said on 2011-02-07, 12:21
    Pretty well I think! Nobody threw rotten produce and I could see at least a few people in the audience nodding along in agreement.

    On the other hand, I didn't get any questions, which I wasn't quite sure what to make of. A few people followed on Twitter or signed up as a direct result... but only a few. I got some compliments after, but again, it's hard to tell if people are just being nice... :-)

    So I dunno, but I'm going to remain pleased until I have a good reason not to be. Hopefully at least some of them will remember PageKite next time a firewall gets in their way...
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  3. julian said on 2011-02-08, 12:30
    Hi Bjarni,

    You gave good talk at the fosdem, congratulation for this project... I will try to find the time to play with pagekit.py and learn how it works. I can't test it now, I think the system team won't be happy to heard about this kind of project at the university where I work.

    Best regards
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  4. Bjarni R. Einarsson said on 2011-02-08, 13:12
    Thanks Julian! Glad you liked it!

    I suspect many systems administrators will get an uneasy feeling when the realize how easy PageKite makes it to get around policies they may have about running servers. It's always been possible, but never this easily.

    OTOH, as a sys-admin myself, I love using PageKite to put new things on-line without having to muck around with my router's default-deny policy. :-) It's used extensively within the service itself, both for testing and production systems. We're eating our own dog food.
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  5. Bjarni RĂșnar said on 2011-02-16, 12:37
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  6. JonTheNiceGuy said on 2011-02-16, 13:56
    Hi, I just wanted to say that some of us didn't need to be at FOSDEM to feel the ripple effect of you being there. Jan posted some notes about "technologies to keep an eye on", and I've followed it up from there!

    I've already started to suggest using PageKite (either using your front-end, or one's own) in CampFireManager, a talk scheduling tool I've written to help organise Unconferences!
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