JLP’s Blog

At around 5:30 I was woken by a sea gull (or something like that) which was banging on our window. I couldn’t go back to sleep so I waited until breakfast, waited some more and then headed to the conference, which started at 9 o’clock.

I’ve been in the Room 1 for the entire day, listening to 2 keynotes and 10 other talks. Let me mention just some of them, the ones which were the most interesting to me. At the Threadweaver talk I found out what this library actually is, where and how it is useful and that it shouldn’t be that hard to use. Definitely something to take a closer look at when I get home. After lunch (where I met Mike from Edinburgh and Matt from Philadelphia) Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical (Ubuntu) presented 13 suggestions to make Linux even better and more widely used. People agreed on most of the stuff, like the importance of the first impression. However, some were not convinced that 6-months release cycle would be beneficial to KDE. It was also nice to see that he recognizes the valuable work translators do. Later in the day Zack Rusin presented a talk about computer graphics and introduced a tool/framework called Quasar, which should make graphical effects easier to create. Another thing to check out later. Aaron Seigo also talked about how important beautiful graphics are for enjoyable experience when using a computer. But the effects must be natural and subtle. At the end, we listened to a talk by Patrick Harvie, who is a member of the Scottish parliament. It was very refreshing to see that there are politicians who actually understand the true meaning of the word free in Free Software and know about the many benefits of Free Software for society.

All in all it was a great first day at aKademy. The only thing we missed a lot was the working wireless internet connection.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland