KLEPAS.ORG

This marks the first journal entry from Istan­bul! I’ve been here in Turkey for the past week attend­ing GUADEC, which for the whole part has been a blast. It’s as community-​focused as LCA—the largest free soft­ware con­fer­ence in the south­ern hemisphere—and thus a whole heap of fun.

GUADEC is the premier GNOME con­fer­ence, held in a dif­fer­ent Euro­pean city every year, where devel­op­ers and users alike chat about GNOME and gen­er­ally party a lot. GNOME is a free desktop envi­ron­ment built on the GTK+ toolkit.

Some high­lights include:

• meeting Hylke Bons (hbons), Andreas Nilson (andreasn) and Kalle Persson (kallepers­son) for the first time face-to-face—we’ve known each other for a good year through the Tango Desktop Project—it’s great putting a face to an IRC nick;
• catch­ing up and having dinner with a dif­fer­ent group of like-​minded, awesome and friendly people every night at various restau­rants on the Bospho­rus;
• the three-​hour boat party spon­sored by Col­lab­ora on Thurs­day evening;
• Fed­erico Mena-Quintero’s talk on document-​centric GNOME where he pro­posed a journal-​based history application—although I dis­agree with the imple­men­ta­tion it caused quite a buzz and got the ideas flowing;
• Catch­ing up with Lennart Poet­ter­ing and watch­ing him hag­gling and forcing taxi drivers to bid each other down;
• post-​GUADEC dinner under Lefty’s guid­ance at a Japan­ese restau­rant fol­lowed by a water-​pipe smoking session whilst sipping apple tea in a back-​alley café in Taxim.

I fly out on Monday before heading to London for LugRa­dio Live with a day in between back in Frank­furt to rest and recover. Between doors until the 24^th—should be fun!

On a final note, the Tango Desktop Project icons have been re-​licensed into the public domain. I’ll do a proper writeup in the coming days on the impli­ca­tions and what this means for devel­op­ers and artists.