Recent blog entries for chrisime

just something
This guy seems to be a little bit jealous. I really enjoyed the latest blog entries. Poor souls...

GNOME 2.14
Another successful GNOME release. Congratulations to everybody who's involved.

No time...
...to blog. I decided to stay at my parent's place next week. Gotta learn for university again and I hope that I'll find some time in there.
2 Jan 2006 (updated 2 Jan 2006 at 19:11 UTC) »
wow...
This is really cool!

Berlin
Berlin was very cool. I've been to that great city for three times now and I'm still seeing new places/things. Gonna upload some photos I took when my server's up again.

Work
Got some work to do for university. My professor wants a visualisation of the Traveling Salesman Problem. He gave me the algorithm about a week ago; I GObject'ified it and have to do the drawing stuff now (using cairo). Should be fun/easy...hopefully ;-)

Second USA trip within 3 months
My plane will leave Munich at 7.10 on Thursday morning. Looks like, I have to get up very early. Packing will be done on Wednesday. I checked out weather.yahoo.com and they are saying that it'll be quite warm in Houston and even in San Francisco. W00t!
Nazi-GNOME

It's always been interesting for me what Linus Torvalds thinks about software and especially about desktops. I won't add more comments here, since the flamefest has already begun and even some sites are already down.

Next USA Trip

I sort of planned my next USA trip (5th January -> 16th January). A friend of my dorm will also go there. First, we wanted to go from Houston to San Francisco by car (approx. 3100km), but we reconsidered (I should be more precisely: we changed our initial plan about 5 times...fun!). Looks like, we gonna fly into San Francisco. A good old friend of mine is currently living there. He's studying informatics/comp.sc. in Munich from 2000 - 2003. Finally, I'll meet him again -- nice.
23 Nov 2005 (updated 24 Nov 2005 at 11:06 UTC) »
Blogging blabla...
Let's blog again (am I bored? no, not really!)

post-USA:
The last day (16th Oct) the weather was quite nice, I was in a good mood and thought nothing could go wrong (haha, things go wrong when you aren't expecting it). So, I got to the airport, everything packed. Waited for some hours (the usual procedure at airports, most people know it) and learned just 45 minutes before boarding, that no airplane would leave for Philadelphia etc.pp. Very nice, I thought! So I got to the ticket counter (where already about 50 people were waiting; I decided that it would be more -- let's say -- appropriate to go to the First Class counter. I had to wait for about 10 minutes (better than waiting more than one hour!), tried to explain my problem (errr, the airline's problem actually), got a new ticket, took the T back where I was staying. Bottom line: I had to stay for one more day in Boston (well, my baggage has been already sent to Philadelphia -- bad luck, like my trip to the states where I had to wait for my baggage as well). I finally arrived in Munich on Tuesday (18th), got to Passau in the evening and was finally home.
A brief summary about my trip:
I really enjoyed Boston again, met harshy, cinamod New York was very nice, very big, very crowded. I enjoyed the view on top of the Empire State Building, got to Staten Island, visited the remains of the WTC (the only thing which is left is the basis), experienced New York's weather (2 days rainy). I'm going to upload my photos soon. Stay tuned...

LWE in Frankfurt and LinuxDay in Dornbirn/AUT:
Beside some bad organisation, LWE was quite ok. Unfortunately, it was smaller and fewer people visited the fair. Our booth was well equipped and I want to thank Zoltan for his good work and his efforts. We gave away about 1200 Ubuntu CD's; this means about 2500 CD's found their way to the users this year (Linuxtag and LWE). We can do better and the newly founded Ubuntu Deutschland e.V. ordered additional CD's for the next event(s). The GNOME Deutschland e.V. and the Ubuntu Deutschland e.V. will cooperate in the future and combine their efforts, which makes me really happy. Both e.V.'s can learn from each other. As a sidenote I'm especially content that "Josh" is our new treasurer now. He's going to help us in many ways. I'm hoping that the next months will be easier for me. The last days I contacted some people in our e.V. to see, if they want to help and in which areas they want to contribute. Got some replied -- promising. BTW, I uploaded my LWE photos here. Check them out, if you're interested.

UPDATE:
At Systems this year we gave away about 3000 Ubuntu CD's (thanks for the update, Murray). This makes more than 5500 CD's! w00t!!

Boston:
Finally, I arrived after a 12 hour's trip ... to be more precisely, my baggage didn't. It's stuck in Philadelphia, where I almost missed my connection flight to Boston -- sucks!
Leon told me, that my baggage finally arrived in Boston today.
The summit's been great so far, lots of old friends meeting again; I'm especially happy seeing harshy again. I almost forced him, to go to Boston *g*.
Currently, I'm listening to the iFolder/Simias talk. Looks more promising than I thought. I definitely have to check it out some time. The Beagle talk should be also quite interesting.
I still don't know what I'm going to do in the evening. There'll be the Informal Ubuntu Party at Mako's place.
I'll put some photos online soon...
Back again to do some GNOMEing
Looks like, not much has happened while I was studying (I might be wrong, because I haven't been on IRC lately...). There's just now a pile of things to do regarding GNOME in Germany. Over the last few weeks I gathered some ideas what might be interesting for our guys and how they might get involved more easily.
But first things first...we have to find a new treasurer first, since Kay-Uwe doesn't have time anymore. Julius already told me, that he wants to do the job. So best thing is, to ask him again and announce it, if nobody else wants to jump in.
The other problem we're still facing is that there still is no bank account available for the e.V. Germany (and it looks like especially banks) are THE bureaucratic area. Murray found out, that we still have to go to the notary and change the names, since the persons on the board also have changed. So, I'm asking, do we always have to do that? What a waste of time and money! I'm quite pissed. Now, I somehow have to solve this matter, not very amusing.
But there are also other things which are worrying me a bit: it seems like HP isn't able to hold their (should I say) promise. It looked very good, back at LinuxTag when we spoke with them. They wanted to provide some HP laptops for fairs, so that we can show them at out booth. Those laptops are running Ubuntu. In the end it would have been good for both of us. Unfortunately, HP is a very big company and little things are a very big problem. As for now, we're on our own again, which is a bit sad, but we can manage. The e.V. is still young and there's lots of potential. Some of our guys are doing a great job, others don't care too much about it. That's usual...
The next big event is System in Munich. I hope I can be there for at least 2 days. Murray does a good job, he tries to solve things the easy way. I'm quite grateful. After System the LWE is the next big thing and personally I hope, that we'll have most of our guys there. Finally, we gonna have our general meeting there. Lots of things have to be done, I already mentioned some of them...

Boston Summit
I'm glad that I finally found a place to stay. Leon and Laura are kind to let me stay at their house. Initially, I wanted to stay at Luis place, but he won't be able to host anyone; at least I heard that.
I'm also planning to go to New York for two or three days. I wanted to do that two years ago, but didn't have time for the trip. I'm quite happy that the ride will only cost 10$ or 15$. That's really cheap. I'll try to stay at the youth hostel, finally my youth hostel card will pay off again. :-)

Writing articles
Currently, I'm working on a GNOME 2.12 article for LinuxUser. I'm going to finish it today. It already looks quite good: four or five pages about GNOME goodies for the masses. It always takes me quite some time to start writing it, but then, it's sometimes just a matter of minutes to finish a chapter. I also hope that our guys will finally start writing one of those articles. I have to ask them again. It'll work out...somehow.
Boston Summit
Just booked my flight for Boston Summit today. It's quite cheap, but I hope that I can get some money back from GNOME Foundation.

Home again
I'm in Munich again for about one week. After that I will have to learn for university. The test will be in mid-September which will give me about 6 weeks; should be enough, hopefully. Murray and I will meet up in Munich tomorrow. There's lots of things which have to be discussed about GNOME Deutschland e.V..

GNOME2.11/Ubuntu
Ubuntu (Breezy) is still broken regarding X. I really hope that someone will fix it soon. Otherwise, GNOME 2.11/2.12 looks promising. It's been running without any crashes (err, some random crashes *g*) since its early developer versions. I really like quality software.

Long time no blogging. I'm lazy, everybody knows. Besides, blogging takes lots of time, first because I have to think of something I want to write down. The second thing is, that my English could be better *g* Well, right now, there's not much to think about it, because there's so much to talk about what has happened the last 2 months. First, there's GUADEC which was a huuuuuuge success. I was quite worried the days before GUADEC, because communication could have been better (we're working on it). In the end our local helpers did a great job in making GUADEC rock! Thanks to all of them. I really love you :-) GUADEC was quite busy, I was mostly on my feets heading from one to another room. I wanted to make sure, that everything was in place. I met new people and this paid off; I'm quite happy...Everyone seemed to be happy. That's good... I volunteered to help out for next year's GUADEC again. It's been hard work, but enjoyable. I just want to make sure, that we'll do better in some areas.

I'm also very happy seeing that GNOME Deutschland e.V. is finally working. Our guys seem to be very excited about it. I think they've finally seen, what we're trying to do and that it will be for their own good :-) Currently, we're trying to get new sponsors like HP or Nokia (and others). The organisation of events has been much improved, mainly because of our superb wiki and our open mailinglists. Daniel Nümm is doing a great job designing logo's for CD's T-Shirts, etc. With the help of Andreas Müller we're now able to provide unique GNOME (Live)CD's for each event (and even more). Julius Bloch has done a nice job organizing LinuxTag. Murray also did a great job in motivating our guys. Thanks to all of you!

The next bigger shows will be Systems in Munich and LWE in Frankfurt. I hope that we'll again have lots of Ubuntu CD's and our own GNOPPIX ones. With the help of Mako Hill and Andreas Müller, this should be possible. We even might have our own unique Poloshirts; Andreas and I are on this. It'll work out :-) Maybe we'll already have our new HP laptops there, who knows. Anyway, I think we're well organized now, though we can do better in some areas. That's not bad, with the help of our members this can be solved.

Let's rock!

OK...as promised, I took some photos:

Looking out of my window in the morning

I like that :-)

...snow...finally (pictures coming soon)!

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