Re: Meeting Notes - Gerold Rupprecht

[Riccardo]

Hi,

On 2007-09-03 19:35:33 +0200 Gerold Rupprecht <geroldr@bluewin.ch> wrote:

> Alpenstep 07 was held this weekend, with the first arrivals on Friday evening.
> 
> Senguin Gürkan and his girlfriend Katia were the first to arrive at Les 
actually the first to arrive was me and since I had no contacts and had no 
recent updates and Miss Barman had only your email.. there was a small moment 
of confusion, especially since she was pretty concerned about dinner time. So I 
just decided to take a walk in the woods.

> Marecottes, travelling by train from Zurich. Unfortunately he was looking 
> rather pale and was not feeling well. He did make it up for breakfast on 
> Saturday, but he decided to head home afterwards. We hope he is feeling 
> better by now and that he makes it for next time.
I hope too he feels better... poor Eidgenosse who felt oppressed by the 
mountains... I looked for him in IRC this evening...
We missed him, I hoped to discuss debian packages and livecd (you even had the 
manuals for that, Gerold!).

 
> Riccardo and myself also had brought network switches, so we were able to do 
> a reasonable job in getting everyone hooked up to the internet. I have made 
> myself a note to bring a long ethernet cable to tap directly into the hotel 
> router next time so we have more speed and better quality of service next 
> time.
Indeed, looking backwards my decision to do the extra effort to come by car, 
bring extra cables, computers, etc was wise. Sure not so equipped as you, but 
it did help. I think we had no particular problems except the flakey internet 
(wireless re-shared to copper) which can be easily solved!

 
> Nicolas Roard and Quentin Mathé came first to Geneva and helped me with the 
> packing into the minibus late afternoon. We were on the road around 17:20 and 
> arrived diplomatically late for supper at the hotel.

:)
 
> I had brought up two PCs dual boot with Windows 2000 and Debian Etch. Quentin 
> spent some time with me, where I showed him the difficulties I was having to 
> get started with GNUstep using the latest snapshots.
They were good to demonstrate "on the field" the real problems with installing 
on debian, few of us (like myself, having enjoyed a pretty easy Gentoo and 
NetBSD install) realized them maybe.

> The Live CD from Gürkan Sengün is also very important, and I hope we can 
> pick up from its current state soon as this will be important for FOSDEM.

yes, livecd is a good exposure system. Maybe he can share his work with the 
etoile guys, so we have like two similar off-springs. Like Ububtu and Kubuntu...


> Saturday afternoon, after dessert, coffee and short walk back to our hotel we 
> got down to serious work. We set up our computers on the biggest table in the 
> room, and the water and fruit juices on one of the round tables behind our 
> work area.
In retrospective, we could have used the conference room under the roof!!

 
> Fred and Nicolas were comparing notes for the problems they had found in 
> certain graphic views. They compared application actions between Apple OSX 
> and linux (Ubuntu ?) and then started digging each of them into the code. A 
> few corrections later, added 32 bit image support and a recompile and we had 
> support for transparent windows being demonstrated.

lots of shiny fancy stuf there which will attract attention at Fosdem, no doubt!
 
> Niklaus Schaller arrived from Zurich by car, with his baggage lost in 
> transit. Lunch seemed to pick up his spirits and he demonstrated his OpenMoku 
> cell phone PDA with touch screen. Manon asked for a demo the next morning 
> after I had told her about it.

Yay, NEO was cool... almost a pity the Zaurus was left in the corner though.
 
> He then described Simple Web Kit and what he and Riccardo Mottola had been 
> working on. They were able to fix a few problems and then did a demo of 
> Riccardo's Vespucci web browser which now can display live web pages, as well 
> as change text scaling etc. They then investigated the problem with the 
> scrollbar view not appearing as expected. I think they were pretty happy with 
> the results of the workshop.
I am happy indeed, working closely with nikoalus is much easier than using 
mails... and faster too. Unfortunately the scrollbar and the inconsistent 
images. Those work better here though, so a part of the culprit was the shakey 
delayed internet connection.

 
> Fred Kiefer was consulting for almost everyone, but also gave us an update on 
> GNUstep graphics and the problems he was working on. He explained some of the 
> complexities he was facing (graphic, back ends), and that there are still 
> numerous (55 ?) open bugs. He would welcome more help in squashing these open 
> bugs as otherwise application developers will begin making workarounds at the 
> application level (which is not a good thing).
Poor Freed indeed... he was wanted by everyone.
I enjoyed a short walk in the morning with him though, I hope he found more 
time to actually conclude the hike we commenced, since we were so politically 
correct to be back for lunch on time instead of exploring the nice nature more.
 
> Riccardo explained to us what he was doing with GAP (GNUstep Applications 
> Project). Riccardo was quite pleased that a number of stubborn problems were 
> able to be corrected. He appeared to thoroughly enjoy himself. He took a few 
indeed, it took Nikolaus an Quentin a couple of minute of discussioin to 
pinpoint a stupid bug I introduced in Vespucci and potential solution were 
discussed, I will try them out soon (as soon as windows port works again).

> moments away from the keyboard to exercise his Rolleiflex (a real film 
> camera), so I hope we will have some good photos from Riccardo up as well. 
It was an old Kiev, a Contax clone actually... Didn't bring my Rolleiflex due 
to excessive professional film expenses!
I had no time yet, but I will bring the film for development as soon as 
possible. The camera is from 1957... so there is always a certain possibility 
that... it needs to visit a service centre... but rest assured that if some 
usable images come out I will notify you of them

> Check out Ricardo's blog with his notes from Alpenstep at:
> 
> http://multixden.blogspot.com/
>

I blogged live!

Actually I joined the IRC channel and convinced others to do so (even Fred!). I 
wanted to share the joy and extend virtually our hack session to others. 
Unfortunately Gregory wa able to say hello but was sucked away. Other channel 
users were in the typical #gnustep mood: absent, ignoring and at most negative. 
So this venture proved unsuccessufl.
But maybe we can turn tis spontaneous idea into something planned and thus ahve 
more success for the next AlpenStep edition?
 
> we know you got back home safely.
Indeed! The retour was actually a bit faster for me... but sadder too.
 
> I hope everyone got home safely. It has been a pleasure to meet and work with 
> you.
> 
> And what about Alpenstep 08?
> Do we try for the same place and dates for next year? I am willing to take on 
> the organising as for this time. Adam, do we make a new wiki page?

I hope there ill be a next AlpenStep and I hope I can make to it again. I'd 
like the same place, the service was good and sleeping in 4 in a room was 
pretty fun and made us feel as young lads. Splitting language and habits (like 
the two etoile night owls...) helped making everything smooth.
Les Marecottes proved to be reachable by me and by others in a reasonable amout 
of time... and "fair" distance to about everybody. Thumbs up.
I could look for a reasonably similar place near Bergamo... our mountains are 
not so spectacular but nice too. The good part is that Bergamo is a Ryan Air 
hub, so convenient for many. The bad part is that stupid italians closed our 
"valley trains" in favour of polluting busses, so the last mile to the hotels 
would be less confortable compared to the small and nice train that run up the 
valley vrom Martigny towards Chamonix (Schmalspurbahn?!)

I personally feel more engaged than before in GNUstep, I am satisfied by the 
fixes, I enjoyed meeting you guys, learning more about etoile.... Too often IRC 
and mailing list discussions turn down the morale...

Riccardo