joe shaw

Right now I am skipping out on GUADEC and relaxing on the couch in our temporary flat in Birmingham, catching up on blogs and email. It’s been a great conference so far, and as always I’ve been quite busy with all the stuff that goes on: attending talks, catching up with old friends, socializing, and of course the occasional beer.

I felt that my talk went quite well. I talked about metadata in general, the problems dealing with it and how all of our desktop components come up short today. I also talked a little bit about the problem we have in GNOME (and really all desktop apps in general, regardless of platform) where applications put their data in silos and don’t make it accessible to others. And finally I sketched out a high-level architecture on how we might solve some of the metadata issues. The ideas aren’t fully formed in my head and I didn’t elaborate enough on them, I’ve been told.

I hope that the video will be up soon, and although I normally don’t like posting slides, these are pretty straightforward and might actually be somewhat useful on their own. You can download them in OpenOffice format or PDF.

XKCD is an excellent comic, and this one reminds me of how I met Colin. Colin and I went to Ohio State together, and we had some mutual friends. Mario Kart 64 was a common get-together game at our place, and our apartment was great because people were always dropping by and hanging out. My introduction to Colin — or rather, his introduction to me — was seeing me taking the Nintendo controller and pounding it against the floor over and over dropping f-bombs like you wouldn’t believe. Probably I was about to win and I got blue shelled. Or I was winning in Wario Stadium and someone lightning bolted me just as I was jumping the gap on the third lap on my way to victory. Although I’m fairly foul-mouthed in general, the comic pretty accurately represents my cursing breakdown as well.

Joel talks about blog comments, and does a pretty good job of representing why I don’t allow comments. When people ask me why I jokingly answer, “because I don’t care what you think,” but the reason really is because I don’t feel that my blog should be a bulletin board for other people’s opinions. I do allow (but moderate) trackbacks to my posts, and I make my email address very prominent on all posts and pages, so I do invite feedback on my posts. By not allowing comments, I am raising the bar to contacting me and I miss out on things like “nice work”, “way to go”, “your an idiot” and “you should check out foo” comments, but all-in-all I think it raises the quality of the conversation.

I flew out here early to hit up LugRadio Live and then take a week to wander around London. LRL was a blast and very different from most other conferences I go to. There was a wide range of experience there, but just about everyone was foul mouthed and drinking beer while giving presentations. I did a quick, unprepared, spastic 10-minute demo of the Banshee Media Server and talked a little bit about Novell Hack Week.

In London I met up with Larry, and we walked around and saw all the sights. I really like walking around and museums, so we did a lot of that. The downside is that once you’ve been walking for several miles, you don’t have much stamina to wander around a three floor museum. Maybe I should get new shoes…