On Innovation, Free Software, NIH, Geary, Trojita and KDE PIM

I argue that if Free Software wants to get anywhere, it needs a culture of 'collaboration first'. In most areas, we have that. In some, we don't - and that is hurting. The desktop is probably a prime example of that.

Rob Boudreau wrote an opinion piece about Personal Information Management (PIM) and the future. He concludes that 2013 has different requirements from PIM than 1995, and:

"KDE PIM seems to be the only FOSS project working on technology that will eventually go beyond just the PIM itself"

I think reality agrees with him. Mobile devices are cleverly integrating chat, email, social media and phone in one. Contacts have details on all of these and show the latest tweet or Facebook message of that person as status. Why doesn't the desktop do this? Well, it does, but only by putting your data on corporate servers, accessible though web browsers: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, ...

The Linux Desktop has a mission here: help keep user data out of the greedy hands of Google, Facebook and Microsofts! That can only be done by building on the shoulders of giants, not by re-inventing the wheel out of sheer arrogance. Let me explain what I mean.

Collaboration

10 years ago I often presented to people new to Free Software and how we work. I would explain the benefits of Open Source so:

"Imagine you thought of the best New Idea for word processing. From now on, documents will almost write themselves. But you first have to embark on the huge journey to write a full word processor. Three years later, your amazing application does not get anywhere as it can't open MS Word files."

"Imagine instead you added your amazing feature to an existing word processor. The discussion with the experienced word processor developers even resulted in a better result!"

Being able to stand on the shoulders of giants is an important benefit from collaboration in Free Software. We do have competing projects but note that most successful forks and rewrites were started due to a lack of collaboration! A recent example is LibreOffice. Often people from the 'original' project join or even start the fork or rewrite. Wayland is build by the Xorg team and the MySQL fork MariaDB is led by the founder of MySQL!

The Linux kernel is another great example. Google, for example, is putting in enormous resources in getting their technologies back into the kernel. After a period of forking for the benefit of speed and efficiency, they figured out that in the long run, it actually is more efficient to not fork and put in the extra effort in collaboration.

Collaboration-by-default is not a given. Aaron Seigo said about KDE:

"The open nature of the community has purged the “not invented here” syndrome from our ranks"

Yes, the KDE community has a strong tradition of re-using efforts and building on the shoulders of giants. And questioning those who don't! But such a culture took years to build as there is plenty reason to NOT collaborate.

Reasons for not collaborating

Failing forks or duplicating projects are often based on personal conflicts or a dislike for certain toolkits, languages or technical choices. And there is much starting from scratch because developers just focus on their own problem or want to learn something new.. While I would argue that you probably learn more working with experienced, competent people, and you might get more done, too, it is not hard to understand these reasons.

Then, there is psychology. Most people think they are smarter than average and programmers are no different (sometimes expressed as "what others do is easy")... Given the bell-curve followed by the distribution of intelligence, this clearly is one of the many fallacies our brain saddles us with. Even companies are affected. Google, working to get their features into the upstream kernel, discovered that not all the intelligent people in the world work for them and there is lots of room for improvements in what their team came up with.

More than one mail client

I argue that this last reason leads to more duplication of effort than healthy in the area of mail clients. Recently, Yorba pushed to get funding for Geary, another 'new approach to mail'. And there is Trojita, also providing a great IMAP client. Both projects were started in the last couple of years and seem to be re-inventing the wheel -- twice. As you probably saw many prominent developers giving a hard time to a company insisting upon writing another display server, I hope you understand how misguided I think this is. Yorba said they decided to write a new email client to keep things simple and fast and due to the complexity of other mail clients... I described the rationale and wrongness of this "let's write a new mail client" approach in a comment on LWN a while ago. In short, I'm betting that the reasons behind it boil down to the previously mentioned combination of over-estimating oneself and underestimating the problem. In the case of email probably a lack of ambition and forward-thinking as well. Just email doesn't cut it in 2013, certainly not 5 years from now.

Bringing conversation-view to email is an awesome idea - and can probably be done through a Google Summer of Code project within an existing client. Writing an entirely new email experience needs a bit more effort of course, but writing the entire underlying infrastructure too - that is just a sodding waste of time, pardon my French. Good to see Trojita at least has joined the KDE community and is working with KDE PIM! How about you, Geary?

More than one conference

I've always been a big proponent of the Desktop Summits and I do indeed think that it shows both arrogance and a lack of big-picture thinking that these don't happen anymore. I'm glad that the KDE board, including Agustin (who organized the first Desktop Summit) managed to kick off a "freedesktop summit" at the SUSE offices. I'm also glad that some people who DO see the benefit of collaboration participated there - even if their communities don't (yet) understand that it is worth the investment.

What we need

We need a culture where we are critical of people who don't try to work together or are unwilling to put in effort to collaborate. Free Software depends on collaboration and not working together is just counterproductive. So I'd like to ask all readers to support collaboration: talk about collaboration, share the tales of success. And if somebody decides to write an app from scratch, or is writing an application doing the same thing another does - question them, ask why they go it alone, why not collaborate. It is totally OK to be critical of forks and anti-collaborative behavior. You don't have to beat anyone up, but at least making them think about it is a good thing. And if you're a developer: integrate technologies, build re-usable libraries. And remember that the shoulders YOU are standing on can be made stronger for future generations of Libre developers! Just dumping disconnected code is NOT a contribution to Free Software, contrary to what some folks seem to think.

I'd also like to ask people to support KDE PIM: if we want to have a shot at keeping our data out of greedy corporate hands and if we want to ever get onto the corporate desktop, Akonadi is the only architecture that really has a shot. Instead of writing new wheels, let's improve this one together! Yes, KDE PIM needs UI work. Then why not do that? Writing a new mail client makes total sense - if you build it on a proper infrastructure. The KDE PIM team is greatly looking forward to help people who want to write new mail, RSS, Facebook or contact management applications. Skills required are mostly related to motivation and the willingness to ask questions and get help - otherwise, javascript coding skills will probably get you pretty far as it makes all the sense in the world to write these new UI's in QML.

Concluding

I'm happy to concede that things are not black and white. I'm sure nobody can fully judge neither Geary nor Trojita or all aspects of the Desktop Summit. Mea culpa for any wrongness. But please take the lesson to heart: there is great value in collaboration. And getting these benefits means putting in 'extra' efforts, yes, it can cost you something in the short run - that is the whole point of long-term vs short-term thinking. So, next time somebody argues that 'we can go faster if we do it alone', tell them that most smart people do NOT work for you and problems are always simple when they're not (yet) yours. Or just remind them that once upon a time, people thought volunteers could never write a encyclopedia. It is the 21st century and collaboration is what sets apart winners from losers.

Take care!

Re:Publica

About two weeks ago I went to Re:Publica, a hipster event (can I say that?) in Berlin. It was an interesting event - related to the stuff I usually visit, yet different. I'll go over the differences, then present what I see as the challenge for Free Software events: get those creative, digital and always-online people closer to us!

Audience

The main audience of the event could probably be best described as people interested in the 'digital lifestyle'. People who use smartphones, are always on-line. They find their places-to-go on foursquare, talk to their friends on facebook, share their opinions on twitter, Whatsapp with their love - but they don't hang out on IRC or visit forums very often and they probably have a Macbook Air and a high-end android phone. Yes, not that different from us.

Subjects

The event featured talks on things like the web, new cloud services like on-line music and creativity like music and video tools, open video etcetera. But that was only about 10-20%. Another 20-30% was about the future - social media, social innovation and more. To my surprise, the remaining 50% of the talks was about Freedom - and I use the capital for a reason. The Occupy movement, Digital Restrictions Management, Net Neutrality, Open Data, Digital influence on revolutions, eco-journalism, (internet) governance. Very close to what we, the Free Software community, hold dear (and find interesting!) Yes, not so different from us.

Marketing and artwork

You can imagine - an event organized by hipsters creative people looks good. It does! Team t-shirts were sponsored by spreadshirt and had the title 'actionist'. There was a big wall with the program, using pictures of the speakers, QR codes and more weird stuff. A twitter stream on a screen is old, people. Here, if you tweet a hash-tag you get your face as part of a logo shape or you get a gift if you check in with foursquare. That's more like it. Oh, and they had a 'carry your own chair' program - not unlike we did at the last openSUSE conference at the end of each day, except that it was 'cool', not 'please help us out with moving chairs'!

There were other things, too. Interesting or just plain weird stickers - with just a QR code or a shortened link, or only a slogan. There was stuff like a live steaming camera so you could interact with people on-line (easy to do: a laptop with a webcam connected to a google hangout?!?) and plenty of other good ideas. Surely different from what we usually do!

Challenge for us?

I lately have been feeling that Free Software is loosing the battle for the hearts. Privacy and security are not important, internet is just a tool. We've been trying to educate people about Freedom but they don't care.

I was wrong. Collaboration and Freedom DO matter and people know it. We just don't reach the most of those who care about these things. This is where our challenge lies!

After talking with others and thinking about this, I conclude that there are two things we have to do better:

Positivism. We have a tendency to 'lecture' about the dangers of DRM, closed standards, government control and other things. Wake up! Look around you! Online Collaboration has given us Wikipedia. Online Communication has supported revolutions in the Middle East. Social Media gave us the Occupy Movement. And everyone's using Android phones. Yes, there are challenges, but let's celebrate our successes too! Relevance. We often are perfectionists. Build alternatives instead of interfacing with what's out there. But most people don't care that much for a slightly more secure system if it makes getting the latest stuff harder. People don't care about a perfectly free Cloud solution if it's more difficult or doesn't work with what they have. We must realize that a Can do attitude gets us far further than a Can't do way of thinking. And we have to make sure that what people care about is what we care about. Talking to others, sharing data, working with what's out there and checking if what we do has real-world value!

Concrete

At least at the conference's I'm involved in I'll be trying to broaden the audience a bit and attract people outside of our usual circle. By changes to the program (workshops on Krita, Gimp, Blender, Kdenlive and Inkscape? ownCloud? web stuff? Talks about Wikimedia, the EFF, net neutrality, copyright?) and by advertising/spreading the word in less usual places (maybe an Apple fan magazine or a design paper). Let's see if we can get more people to see what we do, get involved, care!

Awesome images by Renehamburg on flickr

CLS, DS, COSCUP... Plasma Active, ARM, ...

It's been quite a while since I wrote a decent blog and it might be a while longer until I really get to it. I do have a lot to write about, however. First about the Community Leadership Summit - the notes of which I'd like to turn into a few blogs. Second, the Desktop Summit, which was awesome. And third my trip to Taiwan. Finally the upcoming openSUSE conference which is going to be awesome. But let me get the most important stuff out of the way first.

Desktop Summit Awesomeness

At the Desktop Summit (which imho was a great success) I organized 3 food cooking parties where we made some Asian-inspired curries. I've put the recipes on-line for those who asked for it. Find them on the Desktop Summit Food page.

At those cooking evenings we had between 25 and 30 people join us each night. It was big fun, we had good food (and beer and more) and I really intend to do it again next time. As a matter of fact, I hope to do the cooking again at the openSUSE Conference. And remember - if you don't use openSUSE that doesn't mean you can't come and enjoy the company, food and discussions about all kinds of things. See for yourself in the detailed program. You can also learn how IO travels in the kernel, how to use the mtux console multiplexer, the sessions about GIT, cross-cultural communication, GCC and Kernel stuff and more. And that's just stuff from day one, we have about 100 sessions in 4 days.

Talking about cool stuff, on Tuesday we'll have an 8-bit music workshop... Seriously, I look forward to that. If you want to join, hurry up, the conf takes place September 11-14!

!Fail

Taipei and Plasma Active

Last week I made a trip to Taiwan to meet the openSUSE community there. There's quite a bunch and they did awesome at the booth at COSCUP. Really cool. We had lots of interesting stuff there, flyers, geeko's, stickers, USB sticks and Aaron left his Plasma Active tablet (runs openSUSE, of course) at the booth a few times. That thing drew quite a crowd - and rightly so. I hadn't seen that much of it but Plasma Active is really something very interesting. It's a unique touch tablet UI, yet easy to use and intuitive. Build in just a few months it's amazing to see how well it works already. The team aims to stabilize it in the next few months and I'm absolutely certain it will result in a pretty darn impressive product.

Aaron spoke quite a bit about how well the Open Build Service works for them during development. The team works closely with an interaction designer and obviously she's not such a hugely technical person. With a traditional development process someone would have to do packages for her - or she'd have to learn how to check out a repository and then compile and install stuff herself. Thanks to OBS, packages are build continuously and very easy - a dev checks some code in and the next day the designer can give feedback! Continuous build services are not unique of course but they usually don't come easily, don't produce packages, etc. build.opensuse.org has an easy web interface, can build for all major Linux distro's and architectures (yes, including ARM) and is of course entirely free.run it in-house,

I'm quite proud that openSUSE proves to be so successful for the Plasma Active team. They also build packages for MeeGo, as they want to support ARM systems. I know several openSUSE contributors want to have ARM in openSUSE, well, Plasma Active is at the openSUSE conference so we can meet and talk about it there...

Anyhow. So Taiwan was fun. You can find some pics of COSCUP on flickr and I have an image of two of my hosts as well as fellow visitor Aaron below :D

You'll probably find all three of them at the openSUSE conference too, btw.

DesktopSummit about to start!

I'm already late to be at Humbolt and help the team to prepare for the arrival of many hundreds of Free Software desktop* contributors.

For those who missed the mail by Claudia with some last minute information, let me include the most important stuff:

• Pre-regisration starts at 16:00 at C-base, coolest place in Berlin. Be there for a badge and beer! If you can't make it you can register on Saturday but you'll have to enter the building via the back ;-)
• Lunch vouchers for food at the uni cost 17 euro
• Yes, bad weather here, lots of rain. Get Umbrella's...

For more info, see the the desktop summit wiki and here. Contact info can be found here.

Have a good trip if you're not there, and if you've arrived already, enjoy your stay!!!


*I'm unsure what to say these days - "desktop" doesn't cut it, but "UI" or user interface is too vague, user experience too fancy, "desktop/mobile" too long etc etc etc...

Harmony 1.0 is out

Well, well. Almost nobody noticed as they didn't make much noise about it, but Harmony 1.0 is out. I made my opinions quite clear in my blog and column about Harmony and said we'd have to judge once something came out. Well, let me just quote Richard Fontana from Red Hat, who's saying what I think (but more politely):

(...) I say to Mr. Shuttleworth, with all respect, that I cannot join him in any support of the Harmony initiative.

I surely don't support it anymore than he does and agree that as far as I can tell, Harmony has much more potential to do damage than good in the world of Free Software. But let's see how the discussion goes at the Desktop Summit Panel on Copyright Assignment, who knows, Mark might convince us...

Edit: read this blog by Bradley Kuhn if you want to know why Harmony is harmful... Long but good.

Time to register!

The Desktop Summit is getting closer. That means you really need to start planning travel and hotel and of course - register!

We need to plan our event properly, and for that we need the visitors to register in time. We might not be able to get you network access or have room for you in the social events like parties or trips if you don't register in time, so it's in everybody's interest if you do :D

If you're still wondering if you should go, remember this: if you are interested in the Linux Desktop, this is THE place to be. All key players are there! You can get to know them, learn, share thoughts and ideas.

And not to forget, we have a STUNNING line-up of talks, awesome keynote speakers and of course much much more.

So go, register today!

DS call for participation: BoF's and Workshops

The Desktop Summit schedule for the talks and presentations has been published a couple of weeks ago. Now Jon announced that it's time to start sending in sessions for workshops, BOF's and hack/teaching sessions! The dot has a more extensive announcement.

The important points:

All forms of hands-on activities that aim to further the Free Desktop are welcomed. Examples of such sessions include BoF, project and cross-project meetings, workshops, hacking sessions and training/teaching sessions. Each session is self-organized and it is up to the hosts and participants to decide if the session is to be loosely oriented around a set of topics, or have a well-defined agenda.

Each session is meant to be open to anyone who is interested, if you want to organize a closed session on a subject, contact the organisation (details below). We encourage participants to make use of the fact that the Desktop Summit will bring together people from several different communities, and the unique opportunities this creates.

And:

The deadline for pre-registered sessions is July 3rd. Sessions registered before this time will be scheduled by the organization team between July 3rd and July 10th.

For sessions registered after this date, attendees themselves are responsible for finding a time and location for the session. Rooms will be available for this for the duration of the Workshop & BoF days, and the wiki can be used to coordinate.

This means that if you schedule in advance we can make sure there is no overlap between these sessions or talks and that the order makes sense. For example, first a talk introducing QML, then a workshop on QML & Plasma, then a hack session to write some applets. If you don't schedule now, you run the risk of having a BoF at 9 in the morning the day after a party, too :D

Note that obviously, you can't be sure yet about the topic of some sessions. Especially BoF's are supposed to be about relevant, recent things. So you're not expected to have a perfect topic yet, a rough outline is enough!

Now, go forth and shoot in a BoF, workshop or similar Read-Write session!

about akademy 2009

-> some ramblings from short after Akademy I still hadn't published ;-)
----------------------------------

Yesterday we put the impression article online, and I have to get something of my chest about that one.

Don't mis-understand me, this meeting has been great. There sure are things which could have been better, but hey, can you expect to put 800 ppl to work in one place and expect everything to be perfect?

It's just that I (we) had to be a bit politically correct in the article, so I want to clarify a few sentences for those who did stay home. Note that this is ENTIRELY personal, my opinion, and probably mean towards some people.

"Negative voices are few and far between, at least on the KDE side, and even those who do not value the cross-desktop cooperation see advantages in this larger meeting."

In other words, many KDE people have really been appreciative of the joint meeting. They were interested in joint and GNOME technology. The things said during the KDE e.V. meeting were very positive and all except like 3 ppl voted for a joint meeting next year.

But apparently at least some (important/influencial) ppl on the GNOME side think different. A big issue seems money: the joint conference means sharing revenue. This is even mentioned in the poll about a joint conference on the GNOME site. Personally I don't see the relevance in light of the great things we accomplished... But knowing the financial situation at their side I guess it's to be expected.

Another thing was the organisation - way too much ended up on the shoulders of our people like Kenny and Claudia. I think that's unfair. Now they apologized for that, but it is something we'd have to do better if we do this joint meeting thing again. BTW Stormy did a lot for the event, esp in the sponsors area. And I'm sure there is enough blame for everyone, not just on the Gnome side (actually I myself should've gotten involved in an earlier stage, the PR would've been better if I had).

But the above is not black and white. I was pleasantly surprised by the attitude Collabora people, the Tracker and Zeitgeist developers and many more. There might also have been KDE people unfriendly towards our gnomy friends (I hope not, and have not seen any such behaviour).

"There are tensions too admittedly, not everyone was appreciative of our primary sponsor, but the conference has acted as a real focus to break down such attitudes."

What happened is that at the first Gnome keynote someone introducing the speaker basically told the audience to put a GNOME foot sticker over the logo of the biggest sponsor, Nokia's Qt. An act I described initially as 'childish'. I do however understand it - imagine that a few minutes before that Quim Gil told the conference audience Maemo would move to Qt. And imagine you work professionally on GTK, getting your business from Nokia... I do however think it was very unprofessional by the person introducing the speakers to say such a thing.

Ok, enough complaining. I can think of other things I was unhappy/disappointed about but that'll have to wait for another time. Besides, there was enough good stuff there as well. And things to improve (also for myself). I hope I managed to keep this reasonable (I tried) and not too offending. And I'm open to input - as always.

GCDS day whatever

GCDS is continuing. The party Monday night was very quiet for me, and I noticed many other people being rather quiet as well. Guess we should have at least one day between parties so people can gain their strength back.

Anyway. Lots of stuff going on here. We've moved to the university. It's hot here, no airco. But power and a cable for every chair - very good network. I'm now listening to Gokmen who's talking about Pardus and KDE integration. On my left there is Jonathan with a beach pic of him and our BUGSQUAD mistress (we all know who she is...).

Yesterday the two PR ppl (Thomas Keup, GNOME and me) planned a cross-desktop marketing meeting. Well, it was initially planned for Thursday morning, then moved to Tuesday. Me being slightly off on Monday, I failed to notice there was the KDE e.V. meeting. No cross-desktop meeting after all.

We did have some interesting discussions while we planned the bof, and I'll try to put some of the ideas we had here (or rather, MY interpretation, don't go and kick Thomas for what I say).

The goal we have is to get a bottom-up approach in marketing for the Free Desktop. As both KDE and GNOME can do this, we wanted to discuss this together. This is not about technical plans or roadmaps - it is about getting people enthusiastic and get them to spread the word about what they love.

That's basically the point - love. Why do we love KDE or GNOME? Those reasons are different for everyone, but often emotional rather than rational. This is a well known fact - how do you get people to believe you? Focus on emotion rather than ration. So we need to know what emotions we feel and convey them to others.

According to research there are 5 important areas people are sensitive to these days:
- Persionalisation
- Emotionalisation
- Simplicity
- Eco-awareness
- Austerity (less is more)

To keep things simple, I'll group this into three, cuz personally that's how I feel about these:
Personal
Simple
Good

So how does KDE make you happy in these area's?

For me, one of the strongest points of KDE is how personal it is - you can make it look and work any way you want. Especially plasma is very good in this department. It makes me feel like my laptop is really mine - compare it to putting a sticker on something that's yours, or painting your room, or even picking your own clothes. Wouldn't it be boring if we all were wearing the same grey clothes?

And of course a second part of this is the community - all the great people here are so cool. The new Social Desktop initiative is already bringing the KDE community to your desktop - in KDE 4.3 there is the social desktop widget showing KDE users in your neighborhood! You'd be surprised how many people within 5 kilometers of my home already are testing KDE 4.3 and run this applet.

Simplicity is there in many area's - take network management, it is far easier with the networkmanager plasmoid in KDE than on windows or mac. The same goes for many other things, and I like that a lot.

Finally, I truly believe contributing to Free Software (and just USING is contributing already and makes you a real member of the KDE community) is very important to the world. Thanks to what we do, children in Brazil and other countries all over the world have access to good education. Thanks to what we do the reliance of governments around the world on a small number of large corporations is decreased. Thanks to Free Software computers don't need to be replaced as often and use less power, helping our environment. We spread freedom in China and other countries were freedom is limited. We allow computer users around the world to take back control over their own hardware. After all, in a world where speech depends on software, Free Speech depends on Free Software*.

So. Think about this. Why do you love KDE? What is it that makes you happy? Then go and tell people about it. Tell your boyfriend, tell your girlfriend. Tell your friends, family. Boss, colleagues, competitors. The pizza boy, the cleaning lady. Everyone!

I'd love to hear some blogs about what makes you love KDE!

Another piece of Cool Stuff from GCDS:
Will Stephenson just said he was green (SUSE green, of course) with envy about the work Pardus has done on KDE integration, and he said we, as KDE community, should applaud them for it. And so we did ;-)
(their tools are integrated in plasma and systemsettings, they use KDE things like Solid and Phonon etc etc - really makes for a unique and smooth experience).

There is more talk going on about cross-distro collaboration, getting (more) tools upstream and such. I'd love that ;-)

I' working on two articles for those not here to give an impression of this conference and to tell ya'all about the cross-desktop collaboration, sit tight!


* by Don Marti jr.

GCDS day 3

I'm very surprised that the party we had last night has not been blogged about yet. It was really a great party - my head and stomach remind me of that continuously... Maybe I shouldn't have had that last beer. Or a few of the ones before. But I agree with Troy that our community rocks, and I think we did prove ourselves yesterday. Lots of KDE ppl dancing (I'm most proud of getting Praedeepto to dance). Most of the KDE Board members did their duty, only Cornelius Schumacher disappointed me and refused to dance. I tried talking to his conscience ("you have to set an example!") and his sense of honor ("look, even Sven is dancing and as Amarok dude he knows how sucky the music is") but no dice. Tried bribing him with beer (he's german... How the heck could he refuse?!?), tried to involve some others (thanks to those who tried). In the end I had to give up. So I offer 5 beer to the person who gets Cornelius to dance at one of the next parties here in GC. I do want to see it, however.

There will be another party tonight and I promise I'll be a lot nicer. I won't go around, sneaking up behind ppl and giving them a surprise hug, I won't annoy ppl by 'accidentally' bumping into them, or explain to Gnomes why KDE is a happy community using a very outdated term. As long as you guys & girls don't scream at me today, I'm in a sensitive state. Deal?

Yeah, about that state.It took me until about 15:00 to feel reasonably human again. I just started breakfast. And I wanted to do soo much today... Ah no problem, there will be more days.

Currently listening to Sebas who is trying to get some input from the community on the direction we will be taking in the future. Seems the party has afflicted a lot of damage, everyone is quiet ;-)

same day - twice!

Whoaaah, two blogentries in one day. I'm on a stroll. And it's such a bad day. Imagine. This poor sod is sitting on his balcony (view on the sea) - no shirt, it's too hot for that. Then sudden disaster - I spill some of that icecream I'm eating on my belly. COLD! Oh boy. Luckily I brought some cold beer so this day isn't completely bad.

Ahem. I'm sure you all feel for me. Meanwhile, I had a stroll through the area around the hotel, had a chinese salad (?!?) with a beer and followed it up with a swim in the sea. That's still the Jamaican spirit, by the way, I wouldn't even have thought about swimming if I didn't enjoy it that much in Jamaica.

Here you see where it all happened...

During the evening I got a call from Holger Schroder who told me there were already people at the conference location, working on the preparation. It was quite a long walk along the beach (lot's of distractions there, beautiful nature for sure). So that's where I am right now. We've just folded a few hundred papers which are going to be put into plastic now. All the while there are various discussions going on - it seems I have some writing to do before the press conference on friday morning...

Las Palmas!

So, I've arrived at the hotel. Most of the journey went smooth. Aside from my brand new laptop suddenly scaring me with weird harddrive-related errors and a busdriver letting me wait for another bus for nothing, it was fine.

So how is it here? A bit windy, which is good considering the temperature. It's a nice island. Not very green - actually it can look surprisingly 'desert' in some area's. Very nice people, lots of ocean. And I have wifi in the hotel so what more can I ask for?

Just two days and Akademy will start. Several ppl are supposed to be here already, I'll meet a few of them for dinner tonight. Looking forward to it, didn't have time to catch up much at Linuxtag in Berlin last week.