Fun time waiting for FUDCon

FUDCon started already, but while listening to speeches and taking some more photos, I still have to talk a bit about yesterday.

After a morning at LinuxTag I joined Mo, Spot, Jesse and Ionut for a sushi lunch

If you know Mo at all, you don't me to tell we stopped and bought a big basket of (very yummy) strawberries


Jesse went for some business and the rest of us got to visit the Berlin Zoo (with seeing pandas as a primary objective and frogs as a secondary one, you must know already who is a panda appreciator and who is a frogs fan). Conclusion: the zoo is amazing.


Then we got for a while back to "serious" Linux stuff, attending the LinuxNacht, which ended sooner than expected, remaining without drinks and food. So I got out with a few Ambassadors to take care of the problems. We had some beers and interesting talks about various stuff, from hiring idiots to Michael Jackson (fun fact: at about 2:00 AM, we had a TV crew asking Cristoph about the "king of pop").


Much to my disappointment, even if we were in the right place, it was too dark to use my camera properly and take revenge for yesterday's hooker incident.

LinuxTag and LinuxNacht

It may needed to remind that the photos posted on my blog are only a thin surface, I do a lot more, from which a selection is available online, but since my photostream is quite volatile the flickr pool is a safer place for archiving (it looks like I am the only putting there photos from this FUDCon, guys and girl, do not forget about it!)

Speaking about the LinuxTag, the first thing to mention should be our ambassadors, who are doing a great work but also seem to have a good time while doing it

Then I have to acknowledge I am not impressed by LinuxTag, in the little time spent here didn't saw something striking, it seems a bit boring. But there are a loot of FOSS projects represented there


Yesterday was also the day for LinuxNacht, a social event around LinuxTag, for which I was lucky to receive a discount voucher (thanks!). It was really dark in there, so the photos are not that great


The next post will probably be about the fun time from yesterday: sushi, zoo and late night beers, stay tuned.

FUDCon -1 morning

Still one more day until FUDCon, here are a few photos from a rainy morning while going to the LinuxTag place:

A first impression of our booth:


And how we are getting things done, both the serious and the cute way:

Berlin arrival

We (me and Ionuț) arrived in Berlin for FUDCon yesterday evening, at about 18:00 (the plane has a small delay)

We decided to walk to the hotel, since it is not far away from the airport, about 30 minutes


And the decision proved to be a good one, near a huge park we had the awesome opportunity to admire the local fauna/wild life, there were a lot of bunnies


At the hotel we meet Mo, Spot and Jesse and got together for a nice Indian dinner


I also tried some local beer and liked it:


As a funny anecdote, on the route to the restaurant we meet a different kind of local fauna, a few working girls and almost got into a fight with then, they were angry about Mo taking photos in the area but somehow didn't have any problems with me doing the same thing - this must be yet another side effect of me having a much bigger camera

Offline...

I have blogged in the past about my dislike for Yahoo, a dislike which from time to time grow to real hate, like right now about the inability to log intro Y!M with Pidgin.

In Romania Instant Messenger (or shortly "mess") is practically all Yahoo, no no matter how geek you are, you have to be on Yahoo Messenger to be able to communicate with the people around you. Which is doable, as Pidgin, while far from perfect, is acceptable as a client. Well... until now, when Yahoo is performing an upgrade to their servers and enforcing a new authentication method, with the direct result of locking-out everything else beside Y!M 9, so no Pidgin and not even Y!M 8.

You can see geeks gathering where they can (IRC, mailing lists, even Jabber) and talking about the futility of a revolution and impossible ways to move the entire country out from the Yahoo Messenger network.

At least it is not all black, the next version of Pidgin, 2.6.0, still under development and with an expected release in a few weeks is supposed to work again, so the Romanian geeks can take a little vacancy from chatting online with their girlfriends and do some useful stuff, like writiing code or drinking beer, right?


PS: after a round of feedback I decided to leave out from this post some explicit imagery about my feelings.

Update: thanks to a tip from Rahul, it seems gyachi still work (but what horrible interface it has...)

going to...

Surely you are familiar with those "I am going to [whatever FOSS event]" buttons we geeks are putting on our blogs when we want to show-off, but I decided 1) those buttons are boring and 2) personalization is key (even search engines are doing it), so this is not a button:

yet another lolcat

This may be a new low for postings on my blog, but I rarely get my cat Zorro in a good posture for photography and here I think his yawning can be easily confused with a manifestation of his essence of evil, so I had to turn it into a lame lolcat.

F11 release parties

Quick follow-up to my post about the Fedora 11 release party in Bucharest: as expected, our friends gathered in a few other cities and had their own event. Not many people, but I think is a good poin to grow on.

Sibiu

Arad

Cluj-Napoca

Targu Mures

Facelift for fedoraproject.ro

A facelift was much needed as we used a quite standard Drupal theme not looking very "Fedora" for the Romanian Fedora community website and we at least found some time for it. Many thanks to our Brazilian friends for sharing their theme (Jayme, your rock!), a bit of effort from Adrian and Alex to customize it and we are sexier than ever! (and the content is better too)

The next step would ideally be making a fitting theme for our (SMF powered) forum... I don't think we have an easy way here.

...and yet another release day passed

A couple of hours after the official launch we used the opportunity and gathered together for some beers and interesting talks about Fedora, Linux, FOSS and more: some Fedora contributors and friends from Ceata, openSUSE and Mozilla (...especially Mozilla, ask the SUSE guy about that :D )

more photos on our gallery
Next in line, Saturday in Cluj-Napoca, Sibiu, Arad and Targu-Mures.

Roses

This is not a rugosa rose, it is a dog rose, but is the closest thing to a rugosa I was able to find in my photos:

Earlier today I did my duty as a conscious member of the community and voted (in the Fedora elections, not past week-end, in the Euro-elections, where all the alternatives sucks and we didn't have at least a Pirate Party in Romania), But after my ballot was submitted, I realized I put to little weight on Rugosa, which, as a type of rose gives good opportunity for theming. So I shamelessly raise he awareness for it here, trying to repair my mistake (you are not able to change a vote once submitted).

Romanian Fedora 11 release parties

We hoped to have a cool event for the Fedora 11 release in Bucharest organized at the Politehnica University with the help of our friends from Ceata, but the release was delayed, the university exams session started, no way to get the students now (and for ourselves the schedule is bad, a few of us had vacancies that ended). Maybe in November for F12 we will do something larger... But we still have good news, with events announced all around the country, this is what I know so far:

• in Bucharest we will gather this evening from 19:30 at "la Berbecu", which became kind of a tradition;
• in Cluj-Napoca Saturday is the day for a formal presentation followed by a beer party;
• beer party in Sibiu, Saturday evening;
• also a beerfest in Arad, Saturday.
• UPDATE: another party is planned for Saturday in Targu Mures

Also worth mentioning is a new experiment which will provide, in addition to the traditional mirrors, a large local seed for Fedora 11 images over BitTorrent, available right from the official release time.