Jorge, Milosz, Flav, and myself went to Boston this past weekend for the GNOME Summit, held at MIT.
This was my first year going to the summit. I was a little nervous about meeting all of these smart GNOME hackers. I’ve read their blogs, used their work, but I’ve rarely gotten involved and given back. This was my chance to step up to the plate, participate in the parts that interested me and do something.
There are too many people to name, but to everyone I met: you rock! We hacked. We ate. We drank (some more than others). If you were with us, you also rode bus, train, and taxi to get there. Never, ever stay at the Econolodge in Malden, MA. Jorge let Orbitz.com pick it for him. Turns out that was a really bad idea. The rooms were large, which helped to slightly disipate the smell of ferret. Next year we’re going to get a room much closer to the summit, even if we all chip in for a larger room and spread out on the floor.
After Aaron Bockover‘s talk about Banshee, I started hacking on an old plugin idea that I had several months back. I will make an official release in the next day or two but anyone who is brave enough can grab it direct from my bzr repository. I’ve tossed up a page up with all of the gory details. I’m pretty excited about working on Banshee, so expect to see more about it here.
The summit ended with people presenting demos of what they had done that weekend. I was going to sit back and stay quiet but Jorge outed me. My craptastic ATI card didn’t work with the projecter, but jdub rocked it out by showing me how to quickly enable desktop sharing in Ubuntu (a feature I didn’t know it had) and tigert hooked up his laptop to the projector and VNC’d to mine so that I should show off the Lyrics plugin I wrote.
After my demo, Dem showed off drapes, which was a big hit. jdub was aghast that it wasn’t packaged for Ubuntu yet. I expect someone will get that done now pretty quickly. If you haven’t used drapes yet, I highly recommend it. Milosz and I might not always get along, but he’s done a very nice job with drapes. Kudos to him.
I’m back at home now with one good night of sleep under my belt. As soon as I’m caught up with work I’ll make an official release of the lyrics plugin for banshee and get to work on my next banshee eyecandy.