October 23 to 24, 2010 Düsseldorf (Germany)

Article by DaaT - 24 October 2010 - IsComputerOn

Hello everyone, I'm now back home so it's time to write the report about this past weekend's BeGeistert. As usual, BeGeistert's numbers tend to fluctuate and this time was no different. Last October's BeGeistert (I wasn't here in the Spring) for example was one of the busiest but this time we didn't make it into the 20's, it was close though. So was it fun?

Of course it was fun! BeGeistert always is. And it was an intercontinental BeGeistert as well. René (aka, a yak who is evil) came from the US for the coding week and left on Sunday morning. Even further than that, Christof and Clemens both came from New Zealand! Clemens was also here for the coding week prior to BeGeistert and Christof arrived on Friday morning. By Sunday he was still walking around like a zombie due to the jet lag (poor guy was 11 hours ahead of us, so basically having breakfast at 7pm). Two absences were most noted during the weekend, François Revol (mmu_man) didn't make it due to work and Charlie himself wasn't able to attend, for personal reasons (it's just not the same without you Charlie, you were missed by all).

Saturday was presentation day. We kicked off with a PDStore (Parsimonious Data Store) presentation by Christof (thanks for the PDF), an interesting project he's involved in the Auckland University. Next up was Clemens, this time with the SAT (Stack and Tile) and ALM (Auckland Layout Model) presentation. Earlier that morning we each did a few SAT tests on his laptop, to measure the time it would take us to perform certain tasks, with SAT and without SAT (in my case the results were much better with SAT, it was quite nice to use), and at the end we filled out a questionaire with our opinions, likes and dislikes about SAT.

The third and final presentation of the afternoon was Stephan's, and he showed us his work on a new Wonderbrush re-write that he's doing as well as his work on Clockwerk (an audio/video compositing app) that he's been working on for some months now, getting it back to shape and I must say it's quite a good looking shape.

The rest of the day was spent coding (they of course, not me) and after dinner at a nice restaurant, some more coding!

Sunday afternoon, in between all the coding and chats, we had a Haiku Status talk, with several developers participating:

  • Alex (working on Tracker & layout code)
  • Jerome (talking about Janito's GSoC 2010 project and his own work extending it)
  • Olivier (working in porting applications, for example Lazarus, an open-source IDE which uses Qt to run on Haiku, and OpenOffice for Kids)
  • Oliver (talked about the different version control systems he's been testing for future use by Haiku and his work on the Locale Kit)
  • Axel (mainly talked about his network work)
  • Stephan (talked about his media related work)
  • Fredrik (talked about his current work on ACPI and IRQ)


We were also told that there's the possibility of making BeGeistert a "once-a-year" event while keeping the coding week to its actual schedule of twice a year. It does make sense, in the way that the money being spent in rooms, etc, would be spent in the coders and helping to move the project forward. It's still undecided of course, but talks are ongoing, let's wait and see what their decision is. If they do decide to make the change, I just hope they keep the Spring BeGeistert, the weather's much nicer :)

After the status talk people started leaving, like Alex, Stephan and Oliver and as the afternoon moved on, others followed. Later on it was my turn and after a pizza dinner with Axel, Clemens and Christof, I took a taxi to the airport for my flight back home. All in all it was a fun BeGeistert and whatever their decision will be about its schedule, I know I'll come back.

Thanks for reading this far, hope you enjoyed it.

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