FudCon Milan 2011 – the rest of it

The Shortest FudCon Ever

Yay, after two days of exploring the cultural and artistic values of Milan, we finally had the chance to get busy with something more geeky. After we signed up, and received absolutely awesome t-shirts, we gathered in one of the rooms, and started the hunt for the second most important commodity. This is just the beginning of the mighty beast to come.

Once we managed to overload the fuses, Jared Smith came forward and had his welcome speach. Then all the people with presentations stood up, briefly described their talks, and so the barcamp started.

 

I liked all the sessions, I attended. The Inkscape workshop was the first one on my list. Even though the presentation was held quite good, I’m still not convinced, that Inkscape is a good tool. But it might be just my huge love for the intuitive and easy-to-use UI of CorelDraw 9, that holds me back. (but still, being required to change the angular rotation of an object in the source xml… meh).

Then I moved to room Gamma, where the Aeolus Project presentation was held. My intention was to evaluate, whether we could use it (or bend it) for our own humble purposes (disposable test clients for AutoQA), but it seems to be targeted more to the corporate users. BUT we might be able to use some parts of the project, like Image Factory, so nothing is lost!

After the lunch, Kamil and I held the AutoQA presentation. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of people in the room. Just before I had to go to the front As you can probably guess from my red face, the stage-fright affected me quite a bit. We then had some questions about Upgradepath & the whole AutoQA thing (yes guys, I’ll create the KVM images of the server-client setup in a week or two).

 

The highlight of my day was Jared’s “You could be the next Fedora Project Leader” talk. He’s always inspiring, and I feel really driven to do a lot of good stuff after his talks. Even the same-old-fisherman-joke got me laughing.

I spent the rest of the barcamp on ZeroMQ and Safe Haven talks. ZeroMQ (Message Queue) finally made me better understand the thoughts and principles behind message queues, even though I won’t be using this little beast as such (but the python bindings look AWESOME!). The Safe Haven is a new-born project for backing up systems. It has some interesting features like ISO/archive/filesystem image inspection (so you really back-up on a file basis), automatic metadata backup and replication, or ability to ‘revert roles’ from client to server (even to function as a proxy for other clients).

FudPub

The evening was dedicated to another party – this time in a pizza restaurant. I must say, that I have eaten better pizza than that. But since the main intent of the FudPub is to have fun, I loved the event and people (especially the beefy miracle!).

 

Hackfest and the way home

Even though I did not really participate in the hackfest sessions, it was quite refreshing to see all the people doing the stuff they love, whilst getting up to speed with the ton of e-mails and working on ResultsDB. There were two highlights of the day though. Melting power connector of some Brazilian wifi hotspot, and (sadly closed) Python Cafe. I’ll definitely have a cofee there, should I ever return to Milan.

Our trip home was a bit stressful though. We made a huge error of booking seats in the shuttle to Bergamo Airport in advance. One would think, that electronic ticket with barcode and passenger id should suffice even on the screen (what would be the point of electronic ticket otherwise…), but no. When we arrived to the bus station, we got only energic “No, no, no! Paper!” from the just-italian-speaking driver. After a while, some other guy explained, that they need a printed proof to pass to the agency, in order to get their money. So we can either print it, or buy other ticket. We tried our best to find a printer (we even tried to convince some ladies on the train station to print it for us), but without success.

To sum it up – while in Italy, never buy tickets in advance, if you don’t have access to a printer. The ticket means basically nothing (as they don’t really reserve the seats), and it’s more of a trouble than one would like.

Also, I’ll never ever again fly with Ryanair. I’d rather sit an hour more in bus from Vienna to Brno, then listen to the never-ending advertisements…

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