Back from OOoCon 2007

I just came back from OOoCon 2007. It’s great to see those folks whom I had only interacted with on mailing lists and IRCs. And I have to say talking face-to-face is way, way, way different from talking with text only. I was particularly delighted to finally meet with Niklas Nebel of the Calc team. We’d been interacting in various places for ages, but had never met in person. Now we have. :-) It was a real shame to not see Eike Rathke and Daniel Rentz, but I’m sure we’ll have our chance some day.

Also pleased to meet and chat with Ricardo Cruz (IRC nick: blacksheep), who is a Google Summer of Code student working on VCL layout support mentored by Michael Meeks. It was such a joy to talk with him on various topics. His demo on VCL dialog resizing was mind-blowing!

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Mac port team (led by Eric Bachard et. al.) using the src-to-xml converter that I wrote during Novell’s Hack Week (which they referred to as the “Novell parser” during their talk). Glad to know it’s being useful to you all.

Of course, it’s always great to see my fellow Novell hackers, whom I don’t see on a daily basis because of our geographical constraint. The trip to the beach in Saturday afternoon, with Florian, Noel and Hubert was particularly fun. Water in the Mediterranean Sea was very cold, and the wines were fantastic. BTW, I’m always amazed by Fridrich’s language skill: you speak how many languages in total!? So far I’ve seen him speak in Czech, German, Catalan, French, and English.

Aside from meeting with various people, I was also able to hack during my stay in Barcelona on one data pilot feature I’d been working on. The hack continued from my flight to Barcelona, back from Barcelona, and I was finally able to make my cut while being stranded at the Philadelphia airport because of my flight delay. Isn’t modern technology great? You can be stranded at an airport and still being able to hack. :-)

Some pictures from the conference:

Mingling at breakfast on 1st day
Mingling at breakfast on 1st day

(from left) Back of Tor, Fong Lin, Michael, and Hubert (front)
(from left) Back of Tor, Fong Lin, Michael, and Hubert (front)

(from left) Michael, Noel, and Tor
(from left) Michael, Noel, and Tor

Eric Bachard giving talk on native Mac OS X port
Eric Bachard giving talk on native Mac OS X port

Petr Mladek talking about splitting OO.o source code into pieces
Petr talking about splitting OO.o source code into pieces

Kendy (Jan Holesovsky) on git
Kendy (Jan Holesovsky) on git (there is Jon’s follow-up to this talk).

Fong Lin and Tor posing for photo
Fong Lin and Tor posing for photo

I’ve uploaded all of my photos here.