Mon, 13 Dec 2004

Beware of Canonical conference cleaners and Ubuntu viruses

NB: refrain of bitching in comments if that should read virii or viruses. We'll leave that to the language police in the various planets. ;)

After "lunch" on Friday, Steve Alexander found out that elmo's friends, the Conference cleaners, had silently attacked Canonical again. This time, we were missing one big paper with all our notes for the Rosetta presentation during the Mataró Sessions.

Without panicing, we decided to try to rethink the ideas as soon as possible so we could prepare the slides, but some problems in Launchpad had SteveA busy for most of the evening. mako, daf, Steve and I ended up working while we had dinner in a restaurant, thanks to Steve's micro-laptop, where we managed to get everything back in place.

Back at the hotel, daf and carlos kept hacking on Rosetta to iron out the last few bugs before the conference. While they did so, mako, LaMont and I had fun reading past entries of mako's and mika's blogs using the projector, some of which were just too good. I also read my mail and mailed my triathlon team mates without remembering my computer was still hooked up to the projector, allowing everyone to read my private stuff. Yay.

In the meanwhile, some of the guys from Madrid (telemaco, Ismael, etc.) rrived at Mataró, which left mako prepare his presentation with Ismael for a while. Carlos and daf kept banging on rosetta, and at around 2:30AM we started doing a demo exactly as we planned doing the day after. At 3:30AM or so, everything we needed to navigate through was working correctly, so we finally went to bed. No swimming on Friday either. Of course, no running on Saturday. I needed to sleep more than three hours...

Saturday was the big day at the Canonical meeting. Less people than I expected showed up, but there still was a good number of very active participants. While the presentations kept going, SteveA and I finished up our slides and decided which computer we would use for the Rosetta presentation. Given I had to type in a full translation of GNOME Hello, I really wanted a keyboard I felt comfortable with, so we discarded using daf's lappy and used mine, even if it was a bit slow.

After Mark's introduction, Steve and I started explaining what the problems currently are in the l10n world, and the presentation kept going smoothly until we had to demo Rosetta. After importing the template I found out some of the keys in the computer didn't respond. Uh-oh... not knowing what was going on with it, we quickly decided to switch to daf's laptop, and then the fun began... writing accents in a Welsh keyboard is a bit more complicated than usual because you have to use compose, so my typing efficiency decreased quite notably. Also, daf had his Japanese input method active, so every now and then I accidentally enabled it and started writing Japanese stuff, which amused the audience quite a bit. I managed to complete a few strings, and we decided to not finish the whole po as it would take too much time. We exported the file and I guess people could get the idea, but I really was not that happy about how things were going...

After the demo, SteveA and I finished what was left of the slides without using the slides, and luckily Steve remembered the bits, because at that point I was suffering some brain failures due to the lack of sleep and wouldn't have remembered much... People seemed quite interested in knowing more details about Rosetta and what it would be able to do in the future, and we got much feedback during the 20 minutes of debate.

After the presentation, I was interviewed by two girls from the Canal Blau of Vilanova i la Geltrú, which asked me the typical "why are you involved in Free Software" questions. We had a chat after that, as I told them part of my family descends from Sitges, where one of them lives.

I had a chat with Jordi Mas from Softcatalà during lunch, and then wondered if I should go to Barcelona to spend the evening. I decided to wait at the hotel until Sergio left to go back to València, and then back to my room for a long nap. I was woken up by the mobile phone, and didn't know where I was... found that mako was having pizza in his room, and got elmo and Kinnison to order one with me too. After completing Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja again and showing people how President Ronnie goes to have some burgers with the bad dudes (Mark loved that, while elmo thought mako and I should be locked up in different rooms) we went out for some beers, where I met Juantomás and had a long chat, with him and his wife.

On Sunday morning, kiko and I dragged Mark out of bed and went running to the promenade and the beach. Kiko and I went ahead of him at the end of the promenade, through a small trail at the side of the railway tracks, and around 1 km to the north of Mataró we found what apparently were two bunkers from the Spanish Civil war. After wondering why they might have been needed, we turned around and picked up Mark on our way back. The streets were already prepared for the start of Mataró's Half Marathon, which was going to happen that morning. Too bad I'm not fit enough for that...

At 13:00, a small group including lu, stub, Adi, Chris Halls and I took a train to Barcelona, and we walked the way from Arc de Triomf to the Sagrada Família, where we decided to go up to one of the towers. We met another Canonical group (elmo, daniels, jdub, thom, etc.) by chance around the building and we all started to climb the stairways. Soon enough, people afraid of heights (jdub, keybuk, Anthony Baxter, myself) started feeling unseasy up there as at some points the protection bars were nowhere to be found and I couldn't help imagining myself diving into the void accidentally. Also, the stupid doll that Daniel gave to me a few minutes before didn't help because it meant having one of my two hands occupied during the way down. Naughty Little Daniel!

I rushed to my uncle's house, and despite running quite hard for 15 minutes I arrived late as I first started running in slightly the wrong direction. I had a great lunch and at 6 left for Mataró again. In the train I found the Async guys, who had visited the Parc Güell, and I wondered where the rest were. I found out from thom that they probably were in the same train, but in the first wagon.

For a few hours, my head had been spinning for some reason, and I really felt quite sick. I could just think of go to have some sleep, and woke up at nearly 22:00 wondering if someone had not had dinner already. Luckily, the pyGTK BOF people hadn't, so we went to the town centre to look for some place. Apparently my face showed that I wasn't feeling very well, because soon enough Matt described the syptomps of his illness a few days before, and it sounded quite possible that it was the same thing, given that elmo had been over it. It was the Ubuntu virus! After an excellent dinner in an Italian restaurant, I found sjoerd and mako in my room, but we quickly went to bed until today. Again, no running or swimmingpool. kiko has promised me we'll go swimming today. I'm not so sure now, though!

ahh! hope you guys get over the sick!
I enjoy the stories <:

Posted by Todd Troxell at Mon Dec 13 22:18:12 2004

Viruses.  It is definately viruses. 
I know enough about Latin grammar to know I dont even want to start messing about with it, and English is complicated enough without pretentious pseudo-intellectuals trying to make it even more difficult.

Posted by Alan Horkan at Mon May 16 02:21:21 2005