I just arrived in Boston in time for the Boston Gnome Summit.  The trip down to Boston with Greyhound was less than wonderful, and to think I was complaining about Orléans Express’ service between Montréal and Québec city!  Comparing Greyhound to German trains would be comparing chaos to order.  We only had a lunch pause because we were offered one when we changed driver and we were not supposed to change driver… That would have been a very long 8 hours bus ride!

At least the hotel we are staying at this year is in a more lively part of the city See you tomorrow!

During the last 2 years, I travelled… A LOT.  According to the table flags on my bookshelf, I visited more than 15 different countries.  During those trips I discovered new flavours and new ways to prepare meals.  The funny thing is that I don’t necessarily brought back a local meal from each country.  Let me demonstrate.

Stockholm, Sweden

Swedish Meat Balls, (cc) CurryPuffy

• Meat balls

As server onboard Viking Line boats or at that very good restaurant Daf, Gabriel, Alban and I visited in Gamla Stan.

Sankt-Peterburg, Russia

Boeuf Stogranoff pour souper, (cc) pierlux.com

• Beef Strogonoff

Istanbul, Turkey

Marché égyptien, (cc) pierlux.com

• Curry sauce chicken
• Lamb dishes

Why curry sauce in Turkey? There was a very good curry sauce rice and chicken plate served at the University’s cafeteria during GUADEC 2008.

Berlin, Germany

Basil, Spinach & Pesto Spaghetti with Pine nuts, (cc) gordonflood.com

• Pine Nut and Pesto Pastas
• Pomodoro Fresco Pastas

Why pastas in Berlin, the answer is simple: Va Piano. It is a nice restaurant chain where you can see you pastas getting prepared for you. I liked so much my first visit (on Postdamer Platz) that I quickly found another one closer to my hotel and ate not less than 3 times in the 5 days I was in Berlin at these restaurants.

Oh I did try the curry würst on my first trip to Berlin, but not my favourite

Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain

Papas arrugadas con mojo, (cc) Fer..

Nouriture végétarienne, (cc) pierlux.com

• Tapas style potatoes with Mojo sauce
• Rice Burgers

The rice burgers are from the very good Naturalis vegetarian restaurant close to the conference center.

Cambridge, UK

Penne speck e rucola, (cc) paPisc

• Champignon and Speck pastas

Why pastas in Cambridge, that would be because of Marco Barisione. He was my host and he cooked delicious Italian style pastas for me. He clearly introduced me to the fact that you don’t need to buy pre-prepared pasta sauce.

Helsinki, Finland

good pizza, (cc) tonx

• Blue Cheese, Chicken and Peach Pizza
• Crème Fraiche and Champignon pastas
• Stews
• Mango Lassi

Barisione is this inspiration combined with Alban Crequy love for crème fraîche that explains the pastas for Helsinki. We also weekly made a nice stew. After 14 weeks, I think I got to master them hehe

The rest of the meals come from a well known cafeteria down in Ruoholahti I admit I wasn’t very fond of all the meals, but some I quite liked!

Generally, while travelling I got in touch with vegetarians. I hadn’t met many before leaving Québec. Discussing with people at SOTM 09, we identified that vegetarianisms is quite uncommon in French speaking nations. I am not quite convinced by the ethical “don’t eat animals”, but I can understand the health and environmental reasons. Therefore I now try to eat 25% of my meals vegetarian. That’s better than none at all!

I hope I didn’t open your appetite too much.

I am in beautiful Amsterdam since Thursday attending the State of the Map 2009.

It is a nice conference, but having attended only free software conferences so far I was up for some cultural shocks.  First of all, everyone here has an iPhone, a Mac and a twitter account.  I signed up for one to be able to catch up with the virtual side of the conf.

There are a lot of very short nice talks about what people are doing with the data or how they contributing data. So far, the most interesting one has been how JumpStart paid people to go to Palestine and the Gaza stripe to map the place as no maps were available. This is an exciting idea where they sent people on site to hire mappers and make this data available. They did encounter problems but the result is great! (and is in the process of being imported into OpenStreetMap).

I’ve been lucky to be able to fit a last minute lightning talk about libchamplain.  I think libchamplain will bring knowledge about OpenStreetMap to the GNOME desktop users and could be benefictal to the first, while we get nice maps for the latter.   As for technology, libchamplain seemed to be on par featurewize with commercial solutions presented here.  Let’s hope its usage picks up (already 5 applications and counting!)

So I arrived with the Montréal Collabora cabal on Friday after quite long flights (Montréal -> Paris -> Matrid -> Gran Canaria).  I was completely dead afterwards, it seems that sleep deprevation gives me flu symptomes and it is not enjoyable.  Good thing napping solves it quickly.

The place is great and even thought quite warm, it is very windy so you don’t feel it much.  Has anyone been able to add Las Palmas (and get weather) to the Gnome Clock? It seems to be in the location.xml, but not showing up when typing.

I’d like to kudos the swchag selection: useful stuff that can have multiple reuse! Not to point fingers at LCA, but I didn’t need 2 rubik cube of different sizes conference branded (but it came in a linen bag!).

Any how, I am giving a talk tomorrow (Sunday the 5th) with Henri Bergius about the Location aware desktop. Don’t miss it 11:30, Room 2 “Cámara”.  The slot is quite short so don’t really expect demos Who needs demos when you can try it by yourself!

You shouldn’t miss either of the 9 talks Collaborans will be giving during GCDS: Sumana (our project manager) prepared an extensive list.

I am currently having a nice week working remotely from the Collabora’s Cambridge office.  They are enjoying a vast and cozy work place (compared to Montréal’s office), which makes me jealous.  Never the less, things should improve in the next months. :)  Cambridge is really nice, I am a big fans of pedestrian only cities.

Last night, we had dinner at Guillaume, Géraldine, Will and Sjoerd’s.  Marco was the actual cook.  We had wine, camembert, salame sotto grasso, salame d’asino, bread and Risotto flans (pictured above).  Quite a nice evening.

So far, life in Cambridge seems really nice but I’ll have to devote a post to English oddities.

It is quite easy to find out if you are a frequent flyer.

1. You wonder if the movie selection will have been updated because you already have seen all the movies from your previous flights;
   • Just to find out that you also saw the new selection at home…
2. You know exactly what to remove and how to speed up security checks*
3. You have flown with 4 different carrier, some more than once.
   • And you obviously know which one have the best (Air France) and the worst (Air Transat) food.
4. Flying 5,5 hours to Heatrow seems short.
5. You arrive just on time at the airport.
6. And finally, you can recite the security procedures video by heart.

* Speaking of which, they should really make a newbies lane

Update: apparently the past of fly is flown.

As it has already been pointed out, there are only 10 days left before the opening of Maemo Summit 2008. I’ll be attending this first summit with Marco Barisione, one of my colleagues from Collabora. We’ll both be presenting.

On Saturday September 20th at 15:30 for half an hour, Marco will introduce you to Telepathy, the framework used in the maemo platform for instant messaging and audio/video conferencing.

On Saturday September 20th at 16:30 for half an hour, I will introduce you to WebKit, the open source web engine. I’ll be explaining part of the internals and demonstrate how to use it in your Gtk or Qt application today (therefore this talk is oriented towards Gtk+ and Qt, which are toolkits  you can use to build applications for the maemo platform).

The summit is right after OSiM World, at headquarter of c-base in Berlin, Germany.  I hope to see you in great numbers at both our talks!

Schedule subject to changes, see the official wiki page for times and details.

I am complete back in sync with my time zone now, I can write about GUADEC :)  It was my first GUADEC ever, and my second conf ever (the first being the excellent FOSDEM).  It was wonderful, I met lots of nice people and learned a lot.  The most promising projects I’ve seen were libcanberra (new sound library), Soylent and Banshee (I hadn’t tried the 1.0 release yet).

I seem to always be a bit depressed the first week after a conf.  As one of my fellow traveler said, it is as if we were in a summer camp for a week: living close, eating, traveling, doing all together… no wonder I feel a little depressed back home!

Istanbul was unbelievable.  It holds so much history, more than I even expected.  The food was exquisite, in all the restaurants I’ve been.   The language was too bad, given that I had a small handbook and barely left the tourist neighbourhood. I certainly plan to visit more of Turkey someday.  You can see my pictures here.

This week end I’ll be attending and participating to FOSDEM. I am looking forward to meet the people I’ve been working for in the last months. There are many interesting talks, I hope to have time to watch them all.

I am very excited about this, not only because it is my first conference, but also because it’ll my first step into Europe. While being there, I’ll take a week off to visit Bonn and Köln in Germany.