the written word remains

Today and yesterday I was doing like a real tourist. I visited lots of places in the city, walked tons of kilometers. At the end I got tired but very pleased. Ottawa is a really beautiful city and it doesn't look as other cities I visited :) Cool!

I finally visited America :) Look's like it's a cool place but anyway it's a lot different from Europe. Especially the wet climate makes me feel that the weather in Ukraine is not so bad ;)

I had two talks - one at the DesktopCon and one at LinuxSymposium today. Looks like the one at DesktopCon took more attention. At LinuxSymposium I had two hours for the tutorial. At the first hour I was talking about KDevelop Platform mostly and I had some people interested in the platform stuff we have. Looks like we have to promote it more and try to get more applications written for the platform just to make a really good showcase. The second hour was scheduled after the lunch break and I spent it mostly discussing technical issues with the Eclipse guy (who was KDE developer some time ago btw :)). Other people were not interested in the talk.

Commenting Mathieu's blog, I have to disagree on some things with him. The organization of the conference is ok. I had my two tutorials accepted and we could have more KDE talks accepted if we sent our proposals. But I also have to agree with Mathieu that people who attend this conference are not really interested in KDE technologies. I don't know why - that's probably beyond my understanding. Anyway, there were some cool talks about Eclipse, Kernel (today) and even some X-related talks were ok ;) (we had lots, lots of X talks).

Today my trip to Ottawa is starting. I will give two tutorials - one at DesktopCon (19th) and another at LinuxSymposium (20th). Guys from Xandros were so kind to make this possible by sponsoring me :)

PS: Another thing everybody is wondering about is where is KDevelop Conference dot story. Well, once KDevelop4 is commited to svn, the story will be there ;)

The conference is over now. I'm sitting at home and writing this blog atm. Hope others got to their destinations without problems. I spent great time in Kiev, too bad we had only one week.
The next step will be writing a dot story covering our achievements during the week, I'll do it a bit later after I recover ;)

Despite the conference day started very early we still couldn't start the event in time. Approximately at 10:00 we started. We was torturing our visitors till 18:00 and finished almost in time. Before we finished Ian got his luggage therefore we were able to finish the rest of day drinking Tequila. I think Ian has some really embarrassing pictures of me and Roberto taken during this process :)

Next day we went to the hacking session place, downloaded qt4 and kdelibs4 and started porting kdevelop. This process in ended in the night with KDevelop4 running without any plugins on KDE4. This was quite an achievement so we decided not to continue hacking and spent the rest of the night drinking vodka.

Getting up in the morning was really hard on the third day but we managed to do that and continue porting. This day KDevelop had several plugins ported, Roberto continued working on his parser generator (which is a really cool thing btw ;)). I got kyzis running in KDevelop4. Richard had fun with Ruby grammar and Jens finally made us discuss Quanta/KDevelop integration issues.

Next day I was serving as a city guide :) We walked over almost all cool places in Kiev, visited lots of places and finally about 20:00 we ended up hacking on KDevelop again :) The day was really productive. Roberto wrote ast generator and refactoring engine for his parser generator. Ian started to provide support for qmake from Qt4 in KDevelop3. I updated the documentation plugin to support Qt4 documentation and joined Ian in his effort to improve qmake support.

The fifth day was taxing. I and Jens went to the train station to buy tickets for us. We spent more than an hour waiting in two queues but finally we got our tickets. This day we spent on porting more parts of KDevelop and Roberto and Harald started to improve our projectmanager and other plugins using model/view architecture. At the late night Ian got his improved qmake manager running and said we should have more such meetings. I couldn't disagree with him ;)

When I came to Kiev I didn't realise how much stuff I have to do. The conference preparations took all my time which was spent on arranging meetings with people, printing booklets, announcements and badges. That was really interesting experience for me but now I wouldn't reccommend anybody to undertake such things like conference (especially when you're the only person responsible for that ;) ).

Now I can imagine how much stuff is being done by people working on organizing Kastle/aKademy meetings :) Those guys should really be busy preparing such cool events.
So, talking about the "day-2". I didn't notice it ended because I fall asleep probably just after going back from the city to the place I'm living ;).

Next day in the morning I had an interview at the Canadian embassy. I was applying for visa because I was accepted as a speaker on DesktopCon and LinuxSymposium (17-24 July). Of course, I will be speaking about KDevelop - what else can be expected from me? :)

Canadian embassy impressed me much - I got a visa just in one day. That never happened to me before :). I mean other embassies used to process my application one-two weeks and I was forced to come two-three times.

After I got my visa, I started arranging other conference-related things. That took too much time and therefore I was late to the airport to meet Harald Fernengel and Roberto Raggi. Thankfully, the arrivals queue was really large in the airport and Harald and Roberto managed to get through it only after 1.5 hours waiting. Ian Geiser had more interesting experience of arriving with the wrong flight without his luggage. I must admit he was ok even without the luggage. The only thing he missed was the bottle of Tequilla that was somewhere in his luggage :) Only Richard Dale arrived without problems.

Despite everybody was tired, it was decided to replace Tequilla with a Vodka and that helped a lot to overcome the "tired" state :) The only side-effect Vodka had was that we had 3 hours to sleep before the conference. Of course we could sleep two hours more but nobody had even started their presentations that time ;) So we woke up at 6:00, prepared our presentations and went to the conference place but... that's another story...