FOSDEM 2007 was, as expected, really good. Wherever possible I avoided talks in the main 'Janson' room as I knew videos would be available. Some highlights were:
- Seeing the OLPC device and learning about its crazy power-saving tricks - "So, we thought it would be a good idea to turn off the CPU between every keystroke"
- Seeing an OpenMoko-based Neo1973, and Sean Moss-Pultz's talk being trolled by Trolltech
- Meeting the OpenJDK developer team, especially Tom Marble and javac-guru Peter Ahé.
- Interesting talk by Shane Coughlan of FSF Europe's Freedom Task Force. Seems like yet another FSF Europe project that isn't receiving enough publicity and/or respect it deserves.
- guile-gtk! There's something I just find hilarious when I see (use-modules (gtk-2.0 gtk)), but that's probably just me.
- ..and much more
Bad things were minimal: losing my hat, leaving my SD card at home, missing the keysigning due to OpenJDK, no zzuf talk, and missing an important project lecture.
It was great going with the WUGLUG guys, even though we completely fail at anything involving public transport or ordering things at restaurants. Several new memes were coined ("if you feed a $noun..", "Samsonite all over your trousers", "Thai ladyboys"), several existing ones had their genres subverted ("in ur-ope/Europe, spending ur-o/Euro", "In Soviet Russia, Rough Guides you") and there was enough blatant KDE, HURD and BSD trolling to keep everyone happy ("KDE-configurable endianness").
Flying was a bit of a faff though, and we did shovel several hundred kittens into a furnace with our carbon footprint.