Today, DHL delivered a very nice early birthday present: the nokia 770 I won last week! It’s a really nice linux based PDA. This message is, of course, written on the 770 - in a rather tiny, yet well readable font. The 770’s screen is amazing!
ps: my birthday is september 30
The first part of ubuntu-nl.org has now been completely converted to django! The often used pastebin now has a much cleaner look and should be much faster. This at the expense of the image upload function, which simply cost too much bandwidth and server load.
It can actually be summarized in 2 words: f*ing awesome!
A slightly longer (and in no way chronological summary):
Travel
To get to EuroOscon, I had to get up at 3:30 in the morning, which you may guess is not my prefered time to wake up. The trip to Brussels was fairly uneventful, I slept through a substantial part of it. Going back home on thursday however, was a real pain in the ass. The international train was canceled, so I had to take a local train to Antwerp, which was of course a very busy train becuase the international train was canceled. After a short sprint in Antwerp, I reached an also crowded international train and sat down next to a girl from Holland, with whom I had a nice talk until she had to leave at Rotterdam. Some sleeping and reading Make magazine later I arrived at Lelystad. Home sweet home 
The venue & organization
Apart from the sometimes flaky wifi, no complaints here. Very well organized and a nice hotel. The lunches were great 
.
The sessions
Apart from on or two talks which I wish I never had gone too, the talks were very interesting. Great keynote speakers and a nice diverse set of talks (although the web 2.0 crowd was very visible). A few highlights (for me) were
The people
There were lots of interesting people at the conference, it’s been a great pleasure to meet all of them. It’s too hard to remember all the names, so I won’t name anyone in particular, but the people playing werewolves and the lightning talks people were especially interesting to meet. Thanks all of you for the great times!
Django
I also briefly met Adrian Holovaty of Django fame, who is a happy Ubuntu user and offered personal support for my endeavours in transforming the Ubuntu NL site into a django powered beast. I hope he knows what h got himself into 
Ubuntu & meeting Mark Shuttleworth
There were three slots featuring Ubuntu in the original program. However, Jeff Waugh canceled, reducing this number to two. When the Ubuntu BOF on wednesday started, Mark however was nowhere to be found. A short chat with mdz and elmo (thanks again guys!) revealed that Mark was not even supposed to show up. So I gave the attendees 2 simple choices: leave, because Mark is not coming, or stay and I’ll answer questions. To my surprise almost everyone chose to stay, the BOF actually was rather succesful
On thursday, Mark gave the final keynote and afterwards we had a short talk. This was undoubtedly the best part of the conference, not everyone in the Ubuntu community gets the opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation with the (in)famous sabdfl
So all in all: it was an unbelievable experience and I’m so thankful for O’Reilly allowing me to attend the conference basically for free.
Thank you for all the interesting conversations, all the support for the Ubuntu project and the insightful comments. Thanks for all your work on Freenode, you’ve made our stay much more pleasant.
Have a good time in the hereafter buddy, you’ll be missed here.
Rob ‘lilo’ Levin passed away on Sept. 16 my condolences go out to his family, friends and his colleagues from the PDPC.
For Software Freedom Day I prepared a rather long presentation. OpenOffice.org impress is perfectly fine for this kind of thing, except that the version in Edgy is rather unstable. So as an added bonus, I had to do the last 4 slides without the actual slides, after giving a demonstration of apport in action
Mark,
One thing I always enjoy while ‘on the road’ is the various puzzles in sgt-puzzles, and of course totem for a DVD, I usually have one or 2 movies in my laptop bag. And trusty vim for some hacking of course
Usplash themes are nothing more than png images, translated to C code and a few functions for drawing progress bars, animation etc. The actual drawing primitives are defined in the usplash binary (well, actually in libusplash). So in theory one could use these themes from other applications as well, as long as the required drawing primitives are available.
One of the annoying things of usplash themes is that it’s non-intuitive how you should switch between them, it needs both update-alternatives and update-initramfs. “Magic un-userfriendly incantations” some would say, and I agree.
Combine those two things and add a night of GTK hacking. Never having programmed with GTK in C before, I needed the manual quite often (the manual is great!). But the PyGTK experience helped
Main window: Overview of all installed themes:
Preview window: slightly larger image and show which resolutions are supported:
Click on the switch button and it will perform the magic incantations for you
And a minute later, you have switched!
Too bad it’s already past Feature Freeze for Ubuntu Edgy, but I hope to get this included for Edgy +1 (Will it be Fuzzy Ferret, Frisky Firefly or Foxy Fish?)
Update: Here’s the source
Looks like that bzr trick actually worked, I’m appearing on the surface of the Ubuntu planet! So let me introduce myself:
I’m Dennis Kaarsemaker, which you probably already understood. I am from Holland, now 23 years and 344 days old, and I am a computer science student. By day I should be finishing my MSc thesis in grid computing, by night I am leader of the dutch Ubuntu team, do much work on the #ubuntu IRC channel and related ones (some of you will know me as Seveas) and try to make myself useful in other parts of the Ubuntu project.
Right before feature freeze, mjg59 and I had a few fun days hacking at usplash. It now supports higher resolutions, 256 colors, animation, themes with multiple resolutions, text input and is quite bling-compatible.
Now let’s hope the Ubuntu artists can use the new features for some kick-ass startup themes!
Completely unrelated to this: I’m indeed going to EuroOscon this year. I have my conference pass, hotel is booked and I’ll buy my traintickets next week. Anyone wanting to meet up, let me know!
So today I threw out my old own php blog-like code and installed wordpress-mu on a new vhost. I’m also switching to english so I can be aggregated on Planet Ubuntu. Since this is a multiuser blog system, I am hereby offering blog hosting to Ubuntu NL members
Now for the next steps in the death of my own php code: finish the new django based Ubuntu NL site, fix the forum database and integrate it. And fix up planet.
