As expected, it was nice to be at FOSDEM. Saw a few familiar faces, which was nice. Missed a few, which was unavoidable.

Saturday, due to family occasion (and late out of bed), i only attended two talks.

One was the talk about software patents by Pieter Hintjens, where a new site was launched to killsoftwarepatents. Nothing really new (and a wee bit of advertisement for his company’s product wikidot).

The next talk was about Perl 6. Patrick Michaud was a good speaker, and he could convey his enthousiasm about the (many) novelties of Perl 6 as opposed to 5. He also quickly described what they used for their implementation of Perl 6, Rakudo Perl : the Parrot virtual machine. This seemingly allows you to put together your dynamic language in about 4 hours. Might pick up Perl again sometime.

Sunday was a day with more subjects of interest. Actually, too many: the classic conference situation where you’d like to be able to clone yourself. I started off with Peter Vandenabeele en Koen Van Der Auwera’s talk about their newest Rails app, Time to production 63 days: pretty impressive.

OK, next time i’m tempted to participate to a keysigning party, i put the limit at 50 people. Yes, a signing party with 200 attendants will generate more trust. It’s also mind-numbingly dull, like a weird form of geek speed-dating. And when it’s at lunch-time, i need my calories. But it was an interesting experience. Still is, now i have to sign the keys of the 100 or so people i’ve exchanged ids with (sigh).

After that i went to, coincidentally, another talk about the Tux Droid. Or rather, its processor, and what his maker thinks about the hobby market for microcontrollers. Pretty interesting, but sometimes too in-depth and sometimes too superficial.

We whisked over to Koen’s talk about Shoes, which i’d seen before, though there were new elements. Talks here.

Last talk of the day for us was Mozilla Prism: it’s this project where they would make web apps into desktop apps. A sort of single-purpose browser. Your app would, like a desktop app, be able to run in the background and generate a foreground pop-up, or you could drag and drop files into it for upload. Lots of little ideas that are nothing new apart, but could give a worthwhile result when put together.

Anyway, thanks to the organizers, it was very well done indeed ! Be back next year.

Update: i was dog tired when i wrote this last night. Added some links today

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