Quite a few things exactly like last year: Berlin is beautiful, East Berlin is fantastic. Weather is great, food is good and I’m having a blast. LinuxTag still tries to balance between a hacker conference and a trade show, admittedly not very well.

A few things different this year. Michael Jackson died. We’ve got FUDCon this year organized in a way to overlap with LinuxTag. Talk about strong Fedora presence! Everywhere I go I see people with blue polo shirts, it’s simply rocking wild. This gave the chance to more folks from the US to fly here and join our partae which is great.

Once again, I created a ‘Faces’ album with portraits from the event by invading people’s privacy.

http://dimitris.glezos.com/photos/events/linuxtag-09/

Jesse Keating

• Had the opportunity to present our work with Transifex at a press conference of the Greek Open Source Company (also known as EELLAK), being broadcasted live and showcasing some big FOSS projects led by Greek teams and companies. Besides talking about our recent progress and requests from our customers, I had the chance to meet some hacker friends who build enterprise and government-level solutions, also utilizing Amazon Web Services for complex tasks. I love discussions between folks using completely different technologies who try to find patterns between them to improve their own work. Fantastic.

  After the press conference I stayed a bit longer and discussed with the EELLAK board their community architecture, communicating how popular and successful communities abroad operate. Our focus with EELLAK is to be a catalyst and accelerator for the Greek Community, supporting its operations and motivating for more work and results. The presence of such an entity behind communities, even so loosely-coupled as a country-wide one has proved to be a great accelerator factor in a lot of cases.

• The annual Venture Capital Forum took place in Athens last week, and we took the opportunity to identify possible partners that could share the vision we have at Indifex and bring value to our team. I had the chance to meet some very interesting people, including representatives from a few VCs who were interested in exploring the possibility to invest in Indifex.

  The general feeling at the conference from most entrepreneurs (and established startups) was that the VC land in Greece is quite risk-averse (read: techophobics?). There are quite a few technology companies with leading, disrupting technologies in Greece, however very, very few big Greek investors are willing at this point to take this adventurous and exciting path. Which makes sense if one doesn’t like the excitement and adrenaline of changing the world and competing with software giants.

  But really, I’m positive there are people out there who want to put their money in revolutionary companies with global audiences.

• The annual Greek Open Source Developers’ Conference took place in Athens last week. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend and present Lotte (greek) but John was there and presented how Indifex is adopting Open Source to help its customers solve their localization and content management needs. Really, I can’t imagine how we could have achieved half of our goals if we weren’t walking the open source road.

Finally, I was able to wrap-up things for a week and travel to Berlin for LinuxTag and FUDCon. I’m feeling very excited to meet again with good friends and new people.

(cc) by alexdecarvalho

Been experimenting with new things too. One of them was various mockups to improve the way we present information to release engineers who need an overview of how a release looks like from a localization perspective. Take the XFCE default branch πpage, for example. It gives a good overview of the release, and I was wondering if we could make it even more rich by breaking up the statistics in the ones comprising the total percentage.

I’ve been playing around with a mockup for this. This came up in Inkscape:

What do you think? Does it make sense? Is it useful?

Update: I neglected to mention that the numbers and colors are random, but the idea is that they are completion percentages and red = low ones, green = high ones.

So, FOSSComm is now over and everyone has returned to their base after a really fun weekend. Kudos to the Linux Team of TEI Larisas for the excellent organization, and a big thanks to the TEI itself for sponsoring some great swag and coffee/food!

Day 1 ended with the side-effects from tsipouro and other poisonous liquides quite visible on a couple of hackers. A person had to sleep in our room, since even a few blocks’ walk was pretty much out of the question. Definitely out of the question.

Drunk

Wow.. the world is spinning…

X

I swear I just saw a Ferrari pass (in reality was a Mini Cooper)

Drunk

Whoa! Awesome…

I always find it fun talking with drunken people, especially if you pretend you’re wasted too.

Day 2 stared slowly, and by 11am the amphitheater was populated for Pierros’ talk about Fedora and its Greek community. His presentation was insightful on the areas where Fedora shines as a distribution and project with a particular emphasis on how friendships and fun are evident in most of our events. I really liked his graphical theme too: he emulated Fedora’s installer, anaconda, as the presentation theme. Neat. Costas’ presentation on FEL and Fedora Spins was quite interesting too, and the room was pretty crowded.

As usual, I grabbed my camera and 50mm fast lens and flash and evaded people’s privacy by taking portrait pics of them. I’m quite happy with the “Faces from FOSSComm ‘09“ result.

My presentation on Transifex went well too. I realized this was the first time I presented our work to the Greek hacker community, so I was a bit nervous too. I pitched why localization is important to both software and publication in general, and the current problems in this area. Then I run a live demo of Transifex and was able to finish in time for quite a few questions which filled all the gaps I left out of the presentation like translation memories, Launchpad’s shortcomings and translation team workflows.

The F11-el hackfest did OK, but not without surprises. Day 1 included some power surges and network unavailability, and day 2 some urgent calls from $dayjob. We did manage to get some translations done, testing of F11-preview media, and some prototyping for some team features in Transifex.

Later on in the day I had the honor of being invited to the OpenCoffee Larissa III to talk about hacking and entrepreneurship. Delved into some open source licensing and investment discussions too. Had one of those not-fresh yet delicious ‘cranberry & white chocolate’ cheesecakes of Starbucks.

The evening was.. well, my English vocabulary isn’t rich enough to describe it. It included some very good food, some insightful discussions on the powers that drive Linux forward (is it new users or contributors?) and what space each major Linux project fills in the open source landscape.

The highlight was post-dinner, when a disturbingly dangerous mixture of Fedora, Chania LUG and Larissa LUG folks got together with beers at the hotel and busted some guts laughing. Tears were runnig when the reception called at 3am to tell us to shut up, and Christos replying “We’ll think about it and get back to you”.

(Click on photo for names of people — help collect names/tweets)

Had a very relaxing and insightful trip back with great discussions with security hacker Fotis aka ithilgore.

All photos from the event @ The Gallery.

Returned from a full day of fun with hackers from all around the Greek open source community. Had some great discussions. And flames.

Slept at 6:30am, finishing off some details for Indifex’s business plan to present to some good investors. After an hour’s of sleep and a cold shower, we were ready to go. Picked up John and drove the lovely route from Patras to Larissa, passing the Rion-Antirrion Bridge, following the south coastline of the Greek mainland, passing through Bralos and on to Lamia, Volos and Larissa. The trip was great, and the weather was perfect.

The day was full of catch-ups with Greek open source hackers, evangelists and enthusiasts. Talked a lot about Fedora, what we value in the community and why what we do matters. Had the chance to update a few folks about Transifex’s progress, and discuss how it could be used in other distributions and projects too.

Oh, I met some trolls too. Rare species to meet in real life, not always a pleasant acquaintance, but always one to remember. ;-)

As usual with any Greek happening, this too ended up at a tavern. Our event organizers booked us a tsipouro place, where you order alochol and the meze dishes continue to come until you ask them not to. Dangerous stuff.

Off to polish my presentation for tomorrow now and get some sleep.

Looking forward to it!

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