From Switzerland with chocolate
Last week Olivier and I had the difficult task of handling the booth at RMLL and showing off Haiku in the land of gruyère, chocolate and banks.
I arrived on saturday, after chatting in the train with some other attendant (tshirts help a lot to recognize your peers), and it didn’t start very well since I pinched a finger under my luggage. I had some medecine at hand luckily, and after some tram we arrived and I asked for a glass of water and ice cubes. At least the week-end was for the general public and we didn’t have to care about a booth yet, so I spent some time talking with others to avoid thinking about the flattened finger.
This year instead of student houses we had a casern to settle in at night. Quite odd for a neutral country. The showers were a bit unusual (and downstairs), but all in all the accomodation was enough for a summer week. After leaving the luggage there, I went with others to the Kugler fundry for the evening event.
The first morning was quite rainy so I didn’t really feel like going out for Tai Chi, and the rest of the week was also quite wet. On sunday I continued lurking and chatting, and I also participated in the lightning talks session by presenting a quite useless gopher gateway for OpenStreetMap I wrote out of boredom. The french power sockets I brought were quite useful to many people, as not everyone thought about bringing the needed adapter, and the ones sold there were semi-fixed, that is quite hard to remove afterward.
On monday Olivier arrived and we set up the booth, located between the Debian and Mageia tables. I brought my old faithful laptop for the demo, the one with a broken chipset, which was updated to a nightly build just before the trip. Olivier also had a machine to show, a nice little piece of netbook.
One of the ex Gobe developers paid us a visit, and he was quite amused to see Gobe Productive running under Haiku. We had a nice chat about the past and future of the platform, and how happy or not he was about the MSWord and PDF export he wrote. Another visitor we had sported a Be tshirt, and admitted having a BeBox and developer documentation somewhere, we’ve yet to make him tell where >:-)
We had a BBQ on monday and tuesday evenings, without much trouble from the weather. Despite the heavy schedule, and friends trying to watch DrWho episodes all night long (“spoilers!"), I managed to evaluate my GSoC student who didn’t need me much (congrats!).
At the “Repas du libre” on wednesday, we enjoyed samples of swiss cuisine, and we also celebrated the victory over ACTA, which the European parliament rejected just a week ago. I opened a bottle of Clairette that I brought for the occasion.
On thursday I gave the mandatory talk about the latest Haiku features, you can watch the video (french), or read the slides (english). The room wasn’t full but as always people attending were really interested and had questions.
On friday I went to get a really good raclette with a new friend (yes, he’s trying Haiku by now) at a very nice place, before getting my train just in time (can you believe even swiss trains can be late?).
My finger is getting better now, allowing me to write these lines for your enjoyment. As every year, the RMLL are a good opportunity to see old and new faces, exchange ideas and projects, and get some visibility. This edition was as intense as usual, and I’m looking forward for next events.
