FOSDEM - Day 0
Posted by George Wright Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:06:00 GMT
Today has been a long day for me. In my ineptitude, I booked a Eurostar from London to Brussels at 6:06 am which meant that I had to get up stupidly early (2:30am) to get to Waterloo on time. The Eurostar was a very good ride though, and it was made more interesting by tracking our route on Maemo Mapper using a GPS. Apparently the top speed we hit was 190.1 miles per hour somewhere in France, and the total journey time from Waterloo to Brussels Midi was 2h37m.
When we got to Brussels we managed to get spectacularly lost on the tram system to the University. Nobody told us there were TWO campuses in south Brussels both called “Universite Libre de Bruxelles”. Luckily the GPS was incredibly useful at this point as I had already added the GPS coordinates of FOSDEM to it and we ended up walking to the conference.
As conferences go, FOSDEM appears to be fairly typical of an open source one. There are LOTS of parallel tracks and it’s impossible to attend even one fifth of the available talks. There are literally thousands of people here and so I’ve been spending most of the day sifting through the crowds and trying to find familiar faces. I’m currently in the OpenMoko talk as it appears to be one of the most interesting projects of the year. They appear to be spot on as to their development model and organisation, but we’ll have to see how well it all goes. I personally am very excited by the prospect of taking the OpenMoko software system and hacking it onto my phone.
I hope to get to more talks tomorrow but for now I think I need to get some sleep and some university work done!
GPS. Portable devices. OpenMoko?
What’s missing here? Openstreetmap.
Nonfree mapping data == “you suck, telex”