Today we celebrate the fact that we have a palindrome date. If we write the date as YYYY-MM-DD we get 2011-11-02 which is a palindrome.
Another palindrome date, which we only get by cheating by writing the date as YY-MM-DD, we get 11-11-11 (Nov 11, 2011). This date is IMO not a real palindrome day, but really cool. So cool we used it for FSCONS
I, and many others, are working hard with FSCONS 2011. Me and some others have been working with FSCONS since 2007. It’s now time for the fifth incarnation of FSCONS. Actually it’s only about 10 days away, depending on when you consider the conference to start. We have some potential start dates:
Nov 10 – Richard Stallman speaks at Runan in Gothenburg
Nov 11 – FSCONS workshops, FSFE Fellowship meeting, FSCONS social event in the evening
Nov 12 – FSCONS presentations, Nordic Free Software Award
Nov 13 – FSCONS presentations
For me FSCONS starts on Friday Nov 11., for no really valid reason. The reason is the cool date: 11-11-11, fact is that the coolness of the date was the primary reason to go for this weekend.
Get on with it Henrik!
Sorry, it’s hard to focus with all the amount of work.
As for every year, I can really recommend FSCONS. This year I am really happy to see more software related presentations than ever. The schedule is up:
http://my.fscons.org/schedule/
To register for FSCONS: http://fscons.org/registration
Nov 11 – FSCONS workshops, social event in the evening
Apart from being one of the keynote speakers at FSCONS, Richard ‘rms’ Stallman will also speak at Chalmers University of Technology
For more information: http://fscons.org/rms
The nomination period for Nordic Free Software Award closes on October 22.
About
The Nordic Free Software Award is given to people, projects or organisations in the Nordic countries that have made a prominent contribution to the advancement of Free Software. The award will be announced during FSCONS 2011 in Gothenburg.
Nominate
Send an email to award [AT] fscons.org (moderated mailing list) with the following information:
* Name of nominee
* Bio of nominee
* Website
* Contact info
* Motivation
Previous Award winners
* 2010 Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson (more info)
* 2009 Simon Josefsson and Daniel Stenberg (more info)
* 2008 Mats Östling (more info)
* 2007 SkoleLinux (more info)
Wow, yet another FSCONS is over. Feels a bit strange but also totally awesome, being one of the founders and organisers of the conference, to see this event having grown up to be what it is today.
In this post I will focus on my personal thoughts, as an organiser and not as a guest. So, here comes some (pseudo) random notes from me.
Previous years the feeling after the conference have been a mix of “never again” and “let’s do it again” mixed with being very tired. Last year I noticed a slight change right after the conference. I was still tired and still wanted to go for yet another FSCONS but I didn’t have the mixed in feeling of “never again”. For this year all I think about right now, after the conference, is that it was awesome (but hey, I leave reviewing and reporting the conference to other… I may be biased 
) and that I want to do it again. But I am not tired. Most of this boils don to the experience we now have in organising events like this, which ends up in better management. This better management made us relax more during the conference (I even attended some talks!). I feel confident and am looking forward to next year.
Ok, I have already said that I leave to others to report and review the conference it self and especially the content/topics presented. But I would like to say that I think the mix and quality is something we should try keep for next year’s FSCONS.
A question that have been discussed, mainly with Jonas Öberg and Rikard Fröberg, is on how to let/make/stimulate FSCONS grow and how to measure a success. For me growing in number of guests is not that very interesting. Rather I would like to follow up the impact or direct or in-direct output FSCONS may have had. So, for me, growing would mean increasing the number of impacts FSCONS have, be them measurable by some method or not. Does this sound like a fluffy goal? Well, I guess it does sound fluffy…. but to be honest, I don’t care. Let’s see what the others think during the coming FSCONS 2011preparation meeting (tomorrow).
Anyhow, I would like to thank all speakers, all staff, sponsors, both organisers etc for helping out with the conference. But more important I would like to “thank” all FSCONS visitors for really making up the event. Without guests there would not be a very interesting conference. Hey, am I neglecting the staff and the speakers? Are they not important? On the contrary, they are. But they are also visitors and is thus included. This is in my opinion one of the coolest impressions I get from FSCONS. Everyone at FSCONS is a visitor. No more, no less.
One major concern though:
Women…. there are too few women at FSCONS. Are we sending the wrong message on our website? Is the content typically “male-ish“? Could a topic be more directed to women or men? We are, however, trying to address this for the coming year.
To conclude this post:
Do you want to help us making FSCONS 2011?
Send an email to info [at] fscons.org
Enough of my random crappy thoughts…. see you next year!!!
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BTW, what do organisers do during a conference?
Well, this pictures gives you a clue:
Rikard and Jonas in action at a planning meeting during FSCONS
This is the last day to send in your nominations to Nordic Free Software Award 2010.
The Nordic Free Software Award is given to people, projects or organisations in the Nordic countries that have made a prominent contribution to the advancement of Free Software. The award will be announced during FSCONS 2010 in Gothenburg.
For more information, visit: http://fscons.org/award
Previous winners:
The Nordic Free Software Award given to people, projects or organisations in the Nordic countries that have made a prominent contribution to the advancement of Free Software. The award will be announced during FSCONS 2010 in Gothenburg.
Send an email to award at fscons.org with the following information:
The Nordic Free Software Award has previously been given to:
Over the last days we have started to add the accepted talks into the embedded schdule
Getting familiar with embedded Linux using inexpensive hardware
Embedding Linux for an Automotive Environment
Workshop on file system formats
And we have more coming in… just you wait and see
Do you want to present something at FSCONS? File a proposal here: http://wiki.fscons.org/page/Call_for_participation_2010 When looking at the submissions so far I can say it’s going to be a great conference this year too. We are in contact with some really skilled hackers and just a few details away from getting them to come over 
June 8, I opened the doors of IT University for an extra FSCONS event arranged by FSCONS and GTUG. Andrew Gerrand from Google was here in Gothenburg to talk us through the language Go.
I liked Andrew’s talk btw. Clear. Easy to understand. He seemed to be interested in the questions asked. During the talk theere was a discussion on IDEs and according to Andrew there’s no need for an IDE when writing Go (which is the case (IMHO) when you’re programming for example Java). That sounded promising. Anyhow, let’s talk about Go. I am usually skeptical to new things (a clear sign of a geezer) and to some extent I’ll stay that way regarding Go. At least for a while more. Without any deeper knowledge I present my reflections on the language (as if anyone cares):
When it comes to memory management I feel pretty ok. As a developer it’s easier to let some one else do memory allocation for you (i.e not alloc and free), but at the same time when doing C/C++ I am in control and I can predict a bit better when things happen.
[In a previous version of this blog post I by mistake used the word concurrency to mean the distribution mechanism in Erlang. This is such a big mistake I've decided to rewrite history and edit my blog post - 2010-06-11]
Looking at “cross machine distribution mechanism” (think Erlang) I miss it. I asked Andrew about this and he said that there is none, but I interpreted him as if the door is not closed, but until then we will have to rely on a library (think pthreads in C). However, if concurrency comes with a virtual machine or run time system (or what ever you want to call it) I am not sure I think it’s worth it. At least not when it comes to the kind of programs I normally write.
I asked Andrew about shared libraries and there is no such thing in Go. I surely understand why, but it would be neat to have. This could be done I guess with the C bindings mechanism in Go.
Enough of my complaints and ramblings. What do I think?…. what is my gut feeling. I am not a big fan of leaning on arguments such as “my inner feel says”, but that’s more or less what I will do.
Why Go?: It’s free software. It seems to be a language with which I can quickly get my things done.
Why not Go?: Not that many targets supported, no shared libs, non concurrency (why not use C instead of Go then?)
I guess I will give it a try…. and that’s not something I say that often. Perhaps write some Xnee bindings for Go.
Makes me wonder, should we invite some one to talk about Go at “the real” FSCONS 2010?
