Hello everyone! It’s been a very long time since my last blogpost, and I haven’t updated my blogsoftware in a long time. Apparently, some spammers noticed this as well and were able to add some hidden spam links in some of my pages. I should seriously update my WordPress one of these days…

Anyway. Let’s talk a bit about Akademy this year. It was my first Akademy and it was a great experience! I met a lot of interesting and fun people! Everyone seems to agree that this Akademy was the best one yet, so I’m very glad to have been a part of that, although honestly most work was done by Bart Cerneels and Wendy Van Craen.

The first day

The first day was the hardest day for the organization, or at least for me and Pieter Vande Wyngaerde. After helping out at the Akademy location (Campus De Nayer) we had to make sure everyone had a place to sleep at Roo?[sz]enda[ae]l (the name was spelled different on every sign!). The rooms list wasn’t all that clear, because the numbering was different from the room numbers, but after a while we were able to figure it out, and we were able to give everyone a place to sleep.

Resting out on the floor after all that hard work

Party time!

On the second day I was just walking around the campus, helping the team with small things. I wasn’t able to see many talks, but I was able to at least see the Nokia keynote from Sebastian Nyström. A very interesting talk, although I’m still not sure exactly what direction Qt Software will be evolving towards with Nokia, but up until now it’s been going well, so that makes me happy enough for now.

In the evening it was party time: there was this social event at Het Anker in Mechelen, which meant free food and free Belgian beer! The “Gouden Carolus” beer is something even I – as a Belgian – had never drunk before. Personally, I think there are much better tasting Belgian beers, but maybe that’s just my personal taste. The beer was pretty strong though. But I’m sure that most of you noticed that

After the social event I went for a small evening stroll with some of the guys who were staying at Zandpoortvest. In the end, we walked all the way to the Zandpoortvest hostel, and after I had a look around the hostel, I had to walk all the way back to Rozendaal (I’ll just stick with this way of spelling it..) Unfortunately for me, I got lost. Too bad I didn’t have the N810 with its GPS (yet), otherwise I could’ve gotten back at Rozendaal a lot quicker. My cellphone batteries were dead as well – doesn’t this sound like some horror story? – so I just figured I’d walk and follow the signs pointing to Sint-Katelijne-Waver.

After a while I saw some arrows pointing to the train station, and from there, I was able to find my way back to Rozendaal. By then, it was around 5 am, and I had a big blister on my left foot from walking all night.

…I tried to stay up, but around 11 AM I felt really tired and I wanted to sleep a bit. And because of that I missed all the great presentations that I wanted to see! It was in the late afternoon somewhere that Pieter Verledens woke me up. Then I realized how late it already was and that I missed Zack Rusin’s Gallium3D talk, which I was looking forward to. Luckily, the talk was recorded and is available on blip.tv now (thanks to Bart Cerneels).

Nokia converts KDE developers to GNOME

The Mobile and Embedded day was one of the best days of Akademy. Not only because Nokia gave away a lot of Nokia N810 devices to more than 100 KDE developers, but also because the talks were really interesting. The big problem however is that it was a pretty busy day and I wasn’t able to see most of the talks (I really wanted to see the maemo, QEdje and OpenMoko talks as well). I ended up seeing only the OpenGL ES for Embedded Linux talk by Tom Cooksey, which was very interesting though. At the end of the talk he told us about the OpenPandora handheld device that will be released soon. Apparently it is a great device for OpenGL ES development. I found their website here: www.openpandora.org

Now, the title above this paragraph is inspired by Vincent Untz‘ blogpost. It refers to the free N810s that Nokia gave away. The devices run the Maemo OS, which is based on GNOME. And to be honest, I like Maemo a lot. It works very well. But I’m very interested in the progress that Marijn Kruisselbrink is making with porting KDE 4 to the Nokia internet tablets. Me myself, I haven’t done much with the device yet, aside from playing some games, listening to some music, and doing video calls with other KDE people I did however manage to get some Qt applications ported to the device, but that was ridiculously easy. Hildon integration Just Works™ out of the box and there’s very little that has to be changed to make your application look great on the N810. Except for graphics operations which are a bit slow at the moment, as explained by Ariya Hidayat in his blog post, so I also hope that the performance problem gets fixed in Qt 4.5.

The Nokia N810 Internet Tablet.

Oh. And my cat was chewing on my N810 adapter (even cats seem to like this gift from Nokia), so the pin doesn’t fit my N810 perfectly anymore. But it still works if I put it in carefully and don’t touch it, so I’m still good…

Boat and Barbecue

Thursday was a really nice day. A nice boat trip, and a very tasteful barbecue. I enjoyed it a lot. Jonathan Riddell was busy interviewing a lot of people, you can download the interviews from this link. I didn’t volunteer for an interview, but you can see me sitting in the back during interview number 44. That’s enough for me

At the end of Akademy, Aaron and Chani treated us (the Akademy organisation team) to a nice dinner. Thanks for the good meal and the great stories.

Everyone had to leave back home on Friday or Saturday. Sad times. I’m planning to come to Akademy next year as well. It was a lot of fun this year.

To wrap it up, here are some random notes:

• I’m not sure who’s the noisiest: the Amarok Wolves or Team Humongous
• If you are in dire need of some music, maybe you can hire the A-Team!
• Video’s of a lot of talks are available at http://stecchino.blip.tv/
• The Emsys guys really like Mega Mindy …