Akademy Day 5/6

Day 5 of Akademy was spent hacking too. Then I had a great meal at Plevna), Tamperelainen, which was mashed potatoes + lingonberry jam + Tampere’s famous blood sausages. Well it lived up to its expectations, the sausages were definitely good, but different. It was kind of like sabudana vada.

Unfortunately Germany lost :( The final will still be a good watch though.

Once again, I would like to raise my fictional hat to COSS and all the volunteers for the excellent organisation of this year’s Akademy.

The day trip was spectacular.

We were treated to Finland’s natural beauty in abundance. Merunlahti Centre for Nature Tourism has this camp like area right next to lake Höytämöjärvi with canoeing, slacklining and other activities.

The first thing to do was to jump in the lake, which was pretty cold. I have never properly swum in fresh water before ( which says something about India’s screwed up Nature ) so it was great. And unlike the sea, a lake actually has a reachable ‘other side’. So I swam across and back about 150 m or so. Give a human a log in the water and he is transformed to a 5 year old. KDE developers spent half the time trying various things like standing on the log, getting everyone on without falling off and other stunts, which was really funny and great ‘community bonding’. Maybe day trips should be done at the beginning of Akademy :)

I tried my hand at a bit of darts, but I am bad at it. Archery was more my thing. Slacklining was not. Canoeing was great though. I got a feel of the boat immediately, although it was my first time ever, I think I’ll be trying it again when I get the opportunity.

The food was great too. We had bread and fruits and BBQed corn and potatoes, sausages we could cook ourselves over a fire and marshmallows!

Now a sauna isn’t really my thing, but they had a great sauna house and so I took a few spins. When in Finland, do what the Finnish do. Get out of the sauna and jump into the lake!

Tomorrow is the last day of Akademy, and I will miss this place and all the fascinating people. I wish I had a hackspace like Demola, fast internet, food, no disturbances. Kudos to the organizers again.

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Akademy Day 3/4

Akademy just keeps getting better and better, and this year's location
couldn't have been more perfect.

The Demola office, if it could be called that, is the perfect
hackspace. Lots of tables strewn over the place, no partitions, sofas
to relax on and even a retro arcade game!

Yesterday and today and the rest of the week will be hackdays and
BoFs, so there isn't really much to report.
But at the end of today I just took a random walk across Tampere, and
its a beautiful city as you can see.

Tomorrow I plan to take the free walking tour that takes place everyday in Tampere, any other KDE
hackers planning to go?

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Akademy Day 2

Today was the day of fluffy, hands down! Frederik Gladhorn gave a
super lightning talk introducing his quite serious pet project

Other than this I attended Lubos' performance talk, and Milian and
Aleix's great KDevelop feature promo. I mean if Ctrl+Space can give a
complete program, why am I even learning C++? :) In addition Casper
gave a very nice talk about getting KDE to work on windows, and hats
of to the KDE-Windows team for there efforts.

The show-stealer was of course Aaron Seigo's keynote, exhorting all of
us to strive for 'elegance' now that KDE has achieved a great
technical base. The simple brush paintings, which I assume are done
with Krita, complemented it perfectly. So here's to more elegant
software.

I spent the rest of the day tracking down a pretty annoying bug in the
UpnpSearchCollection and then find out that UPnP has no way to group
searches to clarify precedence. So I have to think about that
tomorrow. The thing with the first two days of Akademy has been that
by the time you settle in to do some coding, there is an interesting
talk :) So with that done, I am planning to get quite some work done,
not only with the GSoC but a few kwin and Amarok things too.

I will also attempt the Qt certification to see if I'm good enough.

The most important thing is that we had free icecream today, thanks to
the basyskom guys.

Unlike yesterday's party, today was a relaxed evening, with the TOAS
sauna running. I attempted it, but my body's capability to produce
sweat is very high and I had to get out in 5 minutes. I did some
random stuff, met some more people and figured out where the laundry
room is!

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Akademy Day 1

Into the sea of existing akademy posts enters another one.

Technically its my second day in Finland. I arrived on the 2nd with Pradeepto from mumbai. We met seele and Justin at Schiphol itself, while blauzahl and Mek were on the same flight! If that wasn’t enough, the bus from Helsinki to Tampere found aseigo and Hans Chen on it too, making it the Akademy bus.

The Student House TOAS city is an awesome place to live in, with rooms just like in college, a bit better :)

The Finlayson area hack room was really cool too, and yesterday I spent a few hours there getting to know quite a few people, including Vishesh Handa. I also bought my KDE shirt. At 8:30, the sun was still high up in the sky, at 11, its like evening in Mumbai which was bizarre. Akarsh and Prakash also caught up after a delayed flight.

Today was even better. The keynote was pretty good, its great to see KDE going deeper into the mobile space. Meanwhile (Qt made sure to give us all a rubber duck)[http://developer.qt.nokia.com/duck].

I met a lot of people who have been mentors, helpers and friends over IRC – Martin Grasslin, Leo Franchi, Nikolaj Nielsen, Friedrich Kossebau, Martin Sandsmark, Lydia Pintscher and many many more, whom I have to talk too about various topics.

Thomas Thym’s talk about principles in open source communities was very interesting while both Nikolaj and Leo conveyed social music capabilities and Amarok’s role in it very well. During the few talks I didn’t attend, I tried to do a bit of work, but it was a little hard due to all the excitement :)

Now Martin had written a plugin for the match, but I couldn’t stand not watching it and missed his talk. I wasn’t alone. It was great fun to travel 9000 km to watch football with other KDE developers. And since KDE has a large number of Germans you can guess who was supported. Germany were amazing with a 4 goal trouncing of Argentina, and with this form they can easily win the Cup.

With all the talks out of the way, me, kstar and pinocchio went to the downstairs supermarket. I had a strawberry-pineapple bread and rajma-chawal for dinner :) followed by liquorice sticks.

The KDE Akademy party was at the Love Hotel on Hameenkatu and it was fun meeting a lot of people and talking non code stuff and enjoying the Spain-Paraguay match. But now I’m really tired and have to crash if I want to be attentive tomorrow, particularly with performance, UX and cloud talks.

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