Gone from Portland, Arrived in Ottawa...

I got delayed in Portland until two am night before last, missed my connection in Chicago, finally made it to Ottawa around two the following afternoon. Bob Murphy will be presenting on "Eye Candy for Mobile Devices" here at the Linux Symposium this afternoon at 1500 in the "Rockhopper" room.

My OSCON talk got a couple of good write-ups, at Information Week and on the "Wireless Blog". Evidently my "this is your cellphone and this is your desktop" slides were quite popular. It was really good to hang out with Neary and Pippin and Pia and Stormy and Dirk and the rest of the gang, just not long enough.

Things to do in Ottawa: get some poutine; have dinner at Sweetgrass; maybe do the Centennial Walk again... I'm also looking forward to the Whisky BoF here at the Linux Symposium; we're evidently breaking with tradition this year and having it off-site at some former government nuclear war shelter. Should be strange and interesting.

OSCON

I gave my presentation at OSCON's Open Mobile Exchange here in Portland yesterday, right before lunch. A PDF of the slides can be seen/pulled down from here. I'm really pleased that the O'Reilly folks have finally realized that there's some interesting stuff going on in the open source mobile space.

Had a nice dinner at the Rockbottom Brewery on Morrison, with Dave Neary, Paul Cooper and several other folks last night, followed by several games of pool upstairs. If you're in Portland, and hungry, the food at Rockbottom is really good, as is the brewed-on-the-premises beer. The portions are enormous, so be hungry.

I'm off, later this evening, to Ottawa for the Linux Symposium. My colleague, Bob Murphy, is going to be presenting his paper on "Coding Eye Candy for Mobile Devices" Thursday at 3:00 pm in Rockhopper. This is the same paper I presented at GUADEC, but hopefully Bob's dragging along a Zylonite or something for a live demo. So, if you missed it in Istanbul, you can catch it in Ottawa...

Once Bob's presented, I'll post the PDF of the paper itself for folks to download if they like...

Bob's "Eye Candy" Presentation

Last Saturday afternoon, I gave Bob Murphy's presentation on "Eye Candy for Linux-based Mobile Devices". The talk was well-attended and, apparently, well-received, and I thank everyone who came.

I've posted a PDF of the slides as well as the (11.4MB, be forewarned) video I presented on my web server, so feel free to pull them down if you want copies. I'll post a PDF of Bob's paper as soon as the Linux Symposium opens later next week: I think they have the right of first publication here...

On that note, now that I'm back from Istanbul, I'm heading right out again this coming Sunday on a two continent, three city two-week tour. I'll be at OSCON from Sunday morning through Tuesday, then up in Ottawa for the Linux Symposium (Bob will be presenting there) from the 23rd through the 26th, at which point I'm off to Amsterdam for a week for LiMo Foundation meetings. If you're going to be in any of those places any of those times, let me know. I've already made a reservation for dinner at my favorite restaurant in Ottawa, Sweetgrass...

Also, it seems that editing postings, at least on Blogger, moves them up again in the syndication on Planet; sorry for the inconvenience, I'll try to get it right the first time in the future...

Ob. New Pigeon Post

Thanks to jdub, my blog here is now getting love on Planet GNOME, hooray! Karl Lattimer suggested that I should do an intro post for those readers out there with whom I haven't yet managed to meet up, so here we go:

I'm David "Lefty" Schlesinger, and my day job is Director of Open Source Technologies for ACCESS Co., Ltd. ACCESS is a Japan-based mobile software company, probably the largest, and one of our key product offerings is the ACCESS Linux Platform, an operating system stack for cell phones and other mobile devices which is based on open source and free software, including many GNOME technologies such as GTK+, Gstreamer, BlueZ, D-Bus, SQLite and others.

I've been a member of the GNOME Foundation's Advisory Board for the past three years, and am a founding member of the GNOME Mobile Initiative (about which I expect you'll be hearing much more in the coming months). ACCESS has also been a Silver sponsor of GUADEC the past two years.

I'm additionally active in the LiMo Foundation, as ACCESS' represesentative to the Architectural Council and as the chair of the Open Source Committee, which will be working in a variety of areas, internally on open source "best practices" and license compliance, and externally on community engagement and relations. I expect you'll be hearing a good deal more about this in coming months as well.

Before coming to Palm in 2001, getting spun off with Palmsource in 2003, and getting acquired by ACCESS in 2005, I was at Apple for ten years (both pre- and post-Steve), and served as the manager of the Networking Technologies team there. One of the engineers I hired while I was there was Stuart Cheshire, the architect of the Bonjour zero-configuration networking scheme, a very useful open source component (licensed under Apache v2) that's seeing increasingly wide use.

I'm a big fan of horror movies, Talking Heads, photography, and attempting to learn Japanese. I travel a lot (close to 70,000 miles so far this year), and am attempting to become the guy who knows his way around the subway system of almost any major city that has a subway system.

PS: I can has hackergotchi:

GUADEC 2008

I'm just back from Istanbul, where I participated in GUADEC 2008. Terrific conference, as always, and it's so nice to see so many of my farflung friends in one place. Some interesting points:

• Istanbul is a neat city, but has a bit of a tendency to take advantage of out-of-towners. Always haggle on price for anything that isn't fast food and which doesn't have a price tag on it. If it has a price tag on it, consider haggling anyway.
• Traffic in Istanbul is insane. Things like traffic lights, crosswalks, lane markers, medians, speed limits, etc., are considered to be completely advisory. Istanbul has replaced Amsterdam on my list as "the European city you're most likely to get run over in".
• Our Turkish hosts, and Turks in general, are beautiful people. They're helpful and generous and very proud of their history and culture. They very much appreciate it when you appreciate it. I got asked to say a few words about this at the closing of the conference by Behdad.
  
  This conference really brought home for me just how much our community--beyond fostering the development of the technologies which we all use and love--actually bridges cultures and brings people together. As I said, we're a lot like the UN, except that we're more effective and we get along better.
  
• Most of the parties rocked. We had some good music from the Screaming Macaques at the roof party, and some incredible Turkish music from Serdar and Volkan. Volkan is one of the best drummers I've ever had the pleasure to hear.
  
  
  
  
  
• Best of all was the boat ride on the Bosphorus sponsored by our good friends at Collabora. It was a beautiful evening, the views were remarkable, and anything is better when you do it out on the water. We had the brilliant inspiration of making the boat ride the venue for our annual Single Malt Appreciation Society for Hackers, Engineers and Developers meeting, and a brilliant time was had by all, see below. Some fell over, but none fell over the side, yay!
  
• On the other hand, the closing party, sponsored by Google, was very lame. The music was too loud to think, much less converse, and we were limited to three free "beers" (there was considerable discussion at the conference as to whether Efes Pilsen actually consititutes "beer"; general opinion says, "no"). Lamer still was the apparent fact that not only was the no one from Google at the party, there seemed to be no one from Google at the entire conference. The place really is a black hole. Lots of stuff goes in and nothing (other than an occasional check) seems to come out again.
• Lots of useful developments, chief among them being the hiring of Stormy Peters as Executive Director of the Foundation. Stony did a great job running the Advisory Board meeting, and spent most of the week chatting up people to hear their ideas on what was going well and what needed to be improved. She's off to an excellent start and is going to bring a lot to our efforts.
  
  Also, the Board has set a goal (thank heavens!) of getting the GNOME Mobile effort back on track. Most of us have been valiantly trying to make this happen anyway, in the face of some internal obstacles, but is seems as though those are going to be bulldozed out of the way, and hurray for that.
• As mentioned, we had our regular meeting of SMASHED (the Single Malt Appreciation Society for Hackers, Engineers and Developers), and had an excellent selection of bottles again this year. Most people voted for Rob Taylor's Ardbeg as the bottle of the year, but I personally preferred the Glengoyne cask-strength which was contributed by Dave Neary. I brought a 12yo Burnfoot (also a Glengoyne), which was very good, too.
  
  
  
• I'd list all the folks whom I was very happy to see, or equally happy to meet, but I fear I'd offend someone by leaving them out.

It was a terrific conference, I got to wander around a city I'd never been in before, and got some nice pictures as well. Thanks to Baris, and to all the volunteers for doing such a great job, and thanks to everyone who took part in it. See you in Gran Canaria next year!