Back from London/Boston trip

LinuxWorld in london was a surprisinggly small to me, smaller than the "Solution Linux" equivalent in Paris (I will talk about GNOME there in Feb). Apparently I was a bit too loud during my speech about Xen, people from the other room came to tune down the volume of my speakerphone (sorry gary :-) .

GNOME Summit

Most notable points of the Summit were the focus on performances, Federico did a good job of pointing people at tools though I'm surprized most people looked like having their first session on optimizations. John Rice also made a nice presentation on DTrace (but he seems to have fogotten his syscalls ;-), looks really good, too bad I will have a hard time using it at the moment (I'm waiting for a complete OpenSolaris distro with Xen 3.0 support, yeah I don't hold my breath ;) . Anyway the Summit is really about talking to the people and try to focuse on technical areas, but I didn't spot any big innovation.

Servers

First the alim for my home network dies while I was on the trip, then there were some problems with INRIA lab power where I host my boxes, fr.rpmfind.net was down for most of those 2 weeks, then xmlsoft.org is now down for similar reason waiting for someone to push the Power button (use http://veillard.com/libxml in the meantime). On the good news it seems the rpmfind.net server at speakeasy will be repaired :-). Oh and the server in my closet don't seems to find the network, I don't yet know why.

Vacations

I also took a few days of vacations while I was around Boston, spent last week-end in Cape Cod with Jeff Johnson, that was cool, I enjoy cooking and being able to work with a real kitchen and barbecue after a week cooking in the hotel room was a pleasure :-). Oysters are better in France but you can find excellent (i.e. ultra fresh) fish and sea food around Boston ! I was also hosted at Seth place, we tried to kill ourselve twice, first with an expresso machine (nice job Seth ;-) and next evening by sailing at night on the Charles River. Sailing at night is amazing, doing that within the town was fantastic, really, I only feel so stupid because I worked for 18 months at MIT and never discovered they had that sailing club !

There is something going on in Norway

Can someone tell me what is happening at Opera ? First they make that GTK version of their browser for Nokia, great. But I just found those selected pieces from their Changelog for windows 9.0 p1 release :

• Removed support for XML namespaces in HTML documents Hummm is that a good idea ? I got troubles in that area with libxml2
• Added support for xml:id. Yay !!
• Added support for XPath 1.0 hell is freezing !
• Added support for XSLT 1.0 and the XSLTProcessor constructor okay hell definitely froze !!!

Did Håkon spent his summer in Redmond or what ;-) ? As a followup on a relatively heated debate we had at the W3C Advisory Board in 2000 (IIRC) would someone happen to know the runtime size of their XPath and XSLT implementations (in term of compiled code size for i686), I'm ready to keep that for myself if needed...