..feeding the attention whore within

Whoa, been quite a long time since I’ve blogged last time now and the longer it’s been, I’ve felt that I’ve needed to come up with something of more interest to blog about once I finally do some blogging again… ;)

Well, I read this poor review of Mandriva Linux 2010 (the only poor review I’ve seen so far actually), which I got a bit provoked about, not that much because I’m taking things personal, but it’s rather more about stupid people pisses me off! ;p

The reviewer seemed to only actually try review the One edition and then trailed off making up his own irrelevant and ignorant FUD conclusions about the Powerpack version which he didn’t tested, about how we seemed to be more interested
in pushing proprietary software (despite he later made some ignorat complains about the trouble from lack of this in the Free edition later on), then on and on.
With such amazingly borderline retarded and biased ranted I just had to write a longer comment on the article myself (which is something I seldom do), and in the process I was very happy to see that others shared my annoyance and awareness of ignorance as well- Pretty much all comments flamed the article, most of them based on very nice insight and knowledge about the distribution and it’s strengths, especially in comparision with others, this also from many people who weren’t even using Mandriva!

I found it really nice to see that we seem to finally gain a more favorable impression and also really our users finally growing aware of our strenghts and all.

I really hope to see this being a growing trend with a community hopefully finally starting to really be growing again for real! :)

Oh btw. Happy new year to all of you, even those of you who doesn’t deserve it or that I just don’t like. ;p

The french Mandriva Linux community magazine MAGNUM has just published their 06 issue where they’ve started a series of interviews with open source developers, and at the end of last year I had the honour of being their first to interview for this. :)

The interview were conducted by mail, and since I was running late, had a friend visiting and stressed getting it done by time promised, I didn’t get time to read before I replied with my answers (that didn’t prevent me from writing in great lengths though;), so I hope it doesn’t come off as something to be easily misinterpreted, taken out of context etc., I suspect some of my points might not seem as balanced as intended..

Oh well.

You can also the original in english here.

It’s been over a week since I got back from FOSDEM, so about time I should blog a bit about it. :)

So coming back from FOSDEM last year I was a bit disappointed about Mandriva presence, this year
we had our own booth at least and I must say that it was quite succesful! :)

I hung out at the booth a lot of the time and our booth was next to the Ubuntu booth (those bastards!;), and guess what?
We seemed to actually attract a “lot” more attention than our neighbour booth most of the time, I’m not sure at what the
Ubuntu people presented in their booth (I actually forgot to really check it out:/), but since they didn’t seem to catch
my attention I guess they didn’t seem to have that much interesting and flashy stuff to offer (hmm, that’s kinda pretty
much in sync with my general view of Ubuntu, coincidence;p)..
I guess that all the different netbooks with the different Mandriva versions was sufficient to catch a lot of attention
from various people to our booth, especially the mips based Gdiums from Emtec running Mandriva G-Linux (which is our mipsel port with special customizations for the Gdium). I got mine powered up at FOSDEM and put it on display and basically everyone else but myself seemed to get to play with it more than I did, which is a good thing since it’s not available for sale quite yet so that way people get to discover it and I got to play with it when I got back home anyways. :D

In addition to the Gdium, Emtec also displayed their new and upcoming G-cube which is a HTPC solution which is also mips based, unfortunately it wasn’t demonstrated so no first impressions there yet, but I’d sure like to get my hands on one later!

For the talks at FOSDEM this year I was a bit disappointed, most of those I attented (ie. the cmake and rpm talks) wasn’t really targeted at developers, but more of the introductionary type for (new) users.. And for most of the talks that I would’ve found interesting I managed to miss, ie. Rob Savoye’s talk about gnash (which I had the pleasure of dining with at Sunday evening, really cool guy!:). :/
I did attend Peter Pöml’s talk about MirrorBrain though which I had interest in since I did the initial implementation of the geolocalized metalinks stuff for urpmi a while back and I exchanged ideas with him on the metalink mailing lists regarding these things, you’ll even find me talking about these things in Mandriva in the video stream of the talk. (Watching it now I think that I with my dry mouth picked up Peter’s german accent in there;p)

Other good things regarding Mandriva was that Anne managed to calm my scepticism towards the Community Steering Committee and the Mandriva Linux Assembly stuff, it seems like we’re mostly on the same page about stuff, aware of the same things with ideas and all that should be quite compatible. :)
I kinda regret that I left FOSDEM early on Saturday to go with Jeff to dine with the CentOS people in Leuvre though as I didn’t really get the chance to discuss such things in dept and interact with all the cool Mandriva d00dz as I hoped for. :/

In summary, FOSDEM was as always great and I’m most definitively planning on attending it next year as well! :D

I’ll be arriving in Brussels as early as 9:55 in the morning, if anyone wants to help me kill time before the Beer Fest, feel free to give me a call at +47 41681061.
:D

Despite not really having any money to afford it, I finally got around to buying a plane ticket for Brussels a couple days ago, so I’ll be attending FOSDEM this year as well. My new years resolution for this year is to get out more, so I figured that I could charge the whole thing to my credit card with good conscience (I just love to make up excuses that I can even make myself find valid;). :D

There also showed someone up on irc with the interest contributing to my totally free and improved clone of the Dune 2 engine (which in contrast to all the other clones out there is totally free of copyright violations as well!) Doon Lunacy yesterday, so I got around to doing some work on it again after not having touched it since the summer. First thing I started with now was to migrate our libeastwood library (which does the reading of the native game data) and doonlunacy from scons to cmake to make it easier to deal with for myself and others, this turned out to take more time than I expected, but it also was a very nice occation to actually get to really learn cmake, now I’m growing more fond of it than I used to be. :)

Most parts of the game should be in place (ie. here’s a screenshot of the menu gui, notice that’s it’s drawn in memory from the original game data, no modified graphics shipped at all! :D), although the most fun and important part is left though – gameplay!

Maybe 2009 will be the year where I’ll finally get a playable release of the new branch done, when it does it’ll be sure to hit cooker before any places else!

I’ll look forward to met all you sexy cooker people again at FOSDEM and also those other sexy, non-cooker people out there as well!

Cya at FOSDEM soon!