22 March 2000

Got back from GUADEC yesterday at 4pm. 17 hour flights are way too long. Good thing they had a SNES at every seat. They also had a phone at every seat, and it looked like you might have been able to plug in a modem. If there was somewhere to plug in a laptop, Singapore Airlines would be almost perfect for hackers :).

Here are some notes on what I did in paris:

Wednesday, 15 March:

Got through customs at about 6am. It was still a bit dark, so it took a while to realise that I was 2 floors up from the ground. I dedided to take the train, as from the instructions on the GUADEC web site, it seemed the simplest. It took me a while to get to the train station, as I didn't realise that aerogare meant airport terminal rather than a train station at the airport :(. After getting off at Denfer Rocherau. The 300m walk down Boulevard St Jaques to get to Rue Barrault turned out to be closer to 1km, and passed a few metro stations.

After getting to the hotel, I dropped off my bags and went sight seeing. I went to the Eiffel Tower, which is a great place to go first, as you can see a lot of Paris from there. They have a lot of boards up about the history of the Eiffel tower, which is really interesting. The french complained about it as an eyesore, then agreed to put the same advertising on three sides of it for over a decade. Go figure.

I also went to see the Arc d'Triumph. Tried not to look australian while standing next to the eternal flame :). You get a great view of the traffic from the top of the arc. You will probably never see anything like that round about anywhere else in the world. After that, I was starting to feel a bit tired (a 7 hour time difference does that to you), so went back to the hotel, where I fell asleep from 6pm to 7am.

Thursday, 16 March

Got up, feeling a bit shaky as I hadn't had a proper meal since yesterday breakfast. It was good that the hotel had a buffet. Around that time I found Miguel and met a lot of the other HelixCode guys in the dining room. I forgot to ask for one of their cool T shirts, which I am regretting now (if there is a second screening, I would love to get a copy). Had a bit of a conversation with Michael Meeks about whether the ideas of the canvas needs to be rethought to make it easier to use in a model/view type application (currently it is easiest for a single view apps, and I think there is a lot of code duplication in doing up multi view support which should go in the canvas).

Went to the ENST after that and met up with some more hackers. Commented on how brain damaged the french keyboard layout was. Tried bringing up my presentations in netscape on the computers, only to find they displayed in scaled bitmap fonts (this seems to be because Mandrake installs the URW scalable fonts under the urw foundry rather than adobe). Luckily we had an X guru (Keith Packard) who helped fix the problem. I also talked with Alex a bit about dia. Then Miguel gave his openning talk, where he introduced just about everyone, which was good, since most people had no clue what the others looked like :). After that, the workshops were scheduled. I did my talks at the workshop sessions -- the dia one went better than the pygtk one, as I had prepared for it a bit better. I would have loved to go to some of the ones upstairs, but its a bit difficult when you are supposed to be speaking somewhere else.

After that, there were drinks and nibbles. I met a lot of people there (if I try to name them, I will miss someone, and get them upset). About twelve of us (including the conglomerate guys, John Trowbridge the guppi guy, Alex, Telsa and a few others) at a small restraunt near the ENST. It was fairly good food, and we had fun deciphering the french menu.

Friday, 17 March

Woke up at 9:30, and went down for breakfast and found Damon and a few others. Got to the ENST at about 10am, which seemed to be just in time for the 8am "coding party" (apparently Iain managed to get there at 8am, but no one else did). I had thought they would hold something like this in one of the computer labs where there are lots of computers. Instead, it was in one of the lecture rooms with only about three computers for those without laptops.

The afternoon had the GNOME 2.0, Nautilus, bonobo components and GTK+ talks. They were all pretty interesting. Got me thinking about scrapping all the libwww stuff in gnorpm and switching it over to gnome-vfs and have it as a nautilus component. Just another idea I don't have time to implement for a while.

We had dinner at the ENST. After that a big group of us went to find a pub. About 20 of us stopped off at an Irish pub, and found that it was St Patrick's day. As part of the celebrations, they had loud music, including scottish bag pipe songs. This didn't help the conversation much. From there, about half the people went back to the hotel. The rest of us tried to find another place to go. We ended up at an Internet Cafe called Sputnick. We chose the place because it had a GUADEC poster up, but the computers were all unprotected win98 machines. Some of us started checking mail and others tried to install linux and gnome on the machines without success. When we found out that you were meant to pay to use the computers, we just had to be a bit more discreet. George stuck a lot of stickers on things, but when the staff came over to investigate, he stopped saying "I take full responsibility" to "James takes full responsibility". I am surprised they didn't kick us out.

Saturday, 18 March

Got up around 9:30 again. Had a talk with Raph at breakfast. He told me a bit about his CSS3 and SVG gripes, and he talked about adding SVG icon support to Nautilus. It doesn't sound like we will have full XSL styling of icons any time soon :). and went to the coding party. Not as many people there that time. Signed a lot of posters though. In the afternoon, there was a docs talk, an evolution talk by Miguel. I was sitting next to one of the Achtung guys who was commenting on the bad points of Magic Point. He shut up when I asked why we couldn't do that in Achtung yet :).

We went to the HelixCode Evolution Boat Party in the evening. Stopped off at a nice Veitnamese restraunt on the way. The party was OK, but the choice of music wasn't that great. Had a bit of a talk with Michael and Damon about adding a serial number to glade files to try and detect broken installations better (and reduce bug reports). I also signed a lot of GGAD books (if my signature looks a little messy, it was because I was drunk). On the way out from the party I picked up a handful of GUADEC CDs.

A group of us went to a club in the north of Paris after that. I put a few CDs under the windscreen wipers of parked cars on the way. Frisbee'd a CD to the woman selling Metro tickets. Handed out a few CDs to people on the Metro. At the club, I gave one CD to the woman at the bar, and another we frisbee'd into the croud. Apparently Jacob doesn't dance.

Me, Dave Camp, Robert Wittams and Robert Brady decided to leave a little early (around 1:30am I think). The metro was closed at this time of night, but instead of taking a cab, we decided to walk. Passed by the Louvre and Notre Dame on the way back. We could also see the Eiffel tower nicely lit up. We got back at about 4:30am, by which time most of the people who had stayed on at the club had got home. Iain was still up, as he had left his bag (which contained his passport) somewhere.

Sunday, 19 March

Got up at about 11am, which was too late for breakfast at the hotel. I went to Macdonalds and ordered a royal with cheese. They put even less effort into them than in Australia, and come in a foam box still. On the way back, ran into Miguel who thought walking home was stupid.

Ran into JP Rosevear and went sight seeing with him. Went to see some of the places that were closed at 3am. First went to Notre Dame, then looked at the Pompidou centre (aka inside out building) and finally went to the Louvre. Saw a lot of nice artworks including the Mona Lisa. Unfortunately the section containing Gnome with a Snail was closed on Sundays.

Went to a crepe restraunt with JP. It was good food, and the people at the next table had brought their dog. Went to a pub where we had a couple of pints of Guiness.

Monday, 20 March

The next morning I got packed to go. Talked with jrb at breakfast. Recommended that he go see the Gnome with a Snail while at the Louvre. Caught the Metro and RER to the airport in half the time it took going in the other direction.

The plane flight back was fairly uneventful.

A few final notes on GUADEC and Paris:

• people smoke everywhere. You probably won't find many smoke free places.
• nautilus and evolution will be really cool.
• it would have been nice if elliot could have come.
• there are a lot of cool people working on gnome
• I need a laptop. I like Michael Meeks idea of getting a computer company to give you a laptop, so I might try that one.