Woah, I haven't had time at all to blog since I arrived here. The daily activity never stops, so it's going to be quite difficult to summarise what's been going on here for the last four days

First of all, it's a pleasure to be with all the Canonical people and the other few guests that have been around the conference since the first days. Mako and I have been spending quite some time just discussing stuff, both technical issues here and there, and the really important things in life like what MAME game is more crackful. I hadn't been laughing so much in a few months.

The conference is as interesting as Oxford was. Every day is packed with BOFs and discussion, with our daily dose of technology presentation early in the morning. Of special interest to me were the "language packs" BOF, which showed how hard it is to update translations on a Debian system without changing the package or recompiling anything; and the branding BOF, which also showed some problems in that direction: changing conffiles without recompiling.

Everyone misses the Oxford days for one main reason: some people, like James Blackwell, are starving, and others are just getting rid of a few extra kilograms. :) There was a proposal to look for the local jail to get some food there, as our "lunchpacks" are really not that attractive. Mark has been heard to refer to them as Death in a bag. You get the idea. Food at night is a lot better because we're free to go wherever we want to look for food, which is working very well.

As for what's my main focus for this conference, Rosetta, it's great to see how things are being polished day after day for tomorrow's debut. Rosetta has a big potential to become a tool that most of the l10n communities won't be able to do without, specially the ones that are starting now or will be starting in the near future. My main activity in the mornings is to make Rosetta blow up, and see how Carlos and Daf fix it. :) Then, I make it blow up again, and they come and clean up after me. It's a fun game. :) Fortunately, it's getting more and more difficult to make things crash lately, and hopefully everything will go smoothly during tomorrow's presentation I'm doing with Steve Alexander.

Of course, I'm also keeping and eye on the Desktop team BOFs, but not as much as I'd like to, as the Launchpad stuff is downstairs. There was a good BOF two days ago about new aproaches to easy software management for Ubuntu. The ideas that were thrown out rocked, and I guess Hoary will be a great advance in that area.

Yesterday I found some time to upload HOWL packages for Jeff, while doing a double-round of alsa-lib (to be completed today with alsa-driver and -utils) and an update of ephy-extensions. In the meanwhile, GNOME 2.8 is getting better every day. According to Sebastien, we're just missing gconf-editor and evolution; gedit made it in yesterday, gnome-control-center, gnome-applets and gnome-utils will hopefully go in today, and this morning's evolution upload should have fixed the last two remaining RC bugs for the 2.0.x release.

Tonight we're hopefully going to the swimming pool, after a failed try yesterday. And tomorrow I *promise* I'll be down in the lobby at 7:15 to go running with lu, kiko and SteveA. I've failed to wake up for two days in row now and I really don't feel too proud about it... Staying up until 2AM mostly every day doesn't help much anyway.