Archive for the ‘travel’ Category

't Amsterdamse Concertgebouw

February 21st, 2008

The swanky atmosphere Sunday morning was slightly impaled by a grammar blooper in the program. But never mind. Wikitravel proclaims:

Concertgebouw

Famous for its orchestra and its accoustics (among the top ten in the world), this is the world's most frequently visited concert hall.

I have to say I'm starting to suspect it's the staff authoring this glowing review. Personally I wasn't all that impressed with the acoustics. The large performance hall is a venerable interior with profuse decor, however the technological realization seems to have evaded modern technology. The chamber orchestra was not heard terribly well in the rear half of the hall, which seems a bit amateurish from a sound technology perspective in this day and age.

But for just 15 bucks it wasn't bad value for money, even though I expected more from the venue.

impressions of fosdem07

February 26th, 2007

What I thought it would be like

If you've ever been to a trade show this will sound familiar to you. Trade shows are marketing stints, it's where companies go to sell their image (and hence their products). It usually goes a little something like this. You have a big open area, like the area of a large supermarket.

This floor is filled with booths, that is a couple of screens to separate it from the next booth, on which they hang a poster or five of the company logo, product catalogs, whatever they want to catch your eye with. Then there' s a desk where the person manning the booth sits. There are a couple of other people standing around the booth, engaging onlookers in conversation about the company/products. All of them wear matching apparel to show you they represent this particular company. The best booths also have some other gimmicks, like computer screens showing a demo of their software or some other kind of demonstration/snapshots of their product in action.

When you go up to the desk, they have all kinds of free stuff for you, like pens, keychains, stickers, candy etc, branded with the company logo.

This is essentially the way I pictured Fosdem to be. Given that it's not a commercial event (or at least for the most part it isn't), it might be a little different. I certainly expected the projects that think of themselves as being the most exciting (KDE, Ubuntu, Fedora etc..) to have some cool demos or whatever that would wow those of us present. Obviously these projects publicize everything they do (so it's not like they need a conference to explain what they are about), thus I thought they would take this opportunity to show off their best features and tricks.

What I found it to be like

I narrowly missed Fosdem last year, which I regreted, so I was looking forward to it for a long time. Out of the two days it is in session, I arrived Saturday at about 12:15 (opening was at 10:00) and stayed until the last talk, which ended at 5pm.

The first thing I was looking forward to was "the floor". Unfortunately, there was no floor. Instead there was a crummy and very crowded corridor which doubled as "a floor". The moment I walked in I was quite lost, it was so crowded that I could see booths, but I couldn't see what they were for or which direction to even go. As I walked around, I realized how they had organized the booths. Actually "booths". They arranged a bunch of tables in a long line, most of which had an A4 sheet taped to it, printed on it the name of the project it was for. Behind the desk were a few people sitting behind laptops. On the desk were some items, like stickers, pens etc.

So... there weren't any actual booths. And they hadn't brought very much with them either, some a single poster with the project's logo, some didn't even have that. The items were not for giveaway, they were for donate-and-get-for-"free". Which ruins the whole point of having free stuff, but I suppose since these aren't rich companies that can afford to give you stuff, it sort of makes sense. And it's kind of in the spirit of open source anyway, you can donate to the projects you like.

The trouble is.. that's it all was. None of the booths actually had anything going on. In most cases the people at the booths were just sitting behind laptops, consumed in their own stuff. I think OpenSUSE had a computer actually turned the other way, with an open document and the words "Try XGL now!" written in it. Well... that's nice, but wouldn't you think OpenSUSE would have a little more to show off than just a plain boring desktop with ripple effects on the screen and XGL which everyone has seen 7 times over? I mean when you go to a certified geek event, what you would expect is shiny hardware, huge screens, fancy graphical effects, software running on exotic hardware etc. The whole idea of booths is that you go up to them and there is something to see/read/try/experience there. KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mozilla, they all had nothing at all to show you. O'Reilly was much more interesting, they had brought in lots of books they were selling (and of course geeks love O'Reilly books). The Free Software Foundation was mostly selling clothes with various advocacy slogans, but at least they were trying to engage people in conversation, not consumed in their laptops.

The Gentoo booth was one of the least noteworthy. They had one laptop showing "Gentoo for Mac" on the screen, and that was it. No other materials (well there was a small one page flyer listing the advantages of Gentoo if you count that), and when a guy asked about t-shirts they were apparently sold out. So either they didn't bring any or they didn't bring enough. As a Gentoo user, I'd have to say that was a pretty pathetic showing for the biggest annual European event.

Google was there too, not sure why. I think they had a raffle going, but from Google you would expect some gimmick. All they had was a demo of Google Earth running on a laptop, which isn't open source, and everyone has seen anyway.

There are some pictures to be found here. Notice how a) there are very few shots of the "booths" and b) how they look a lot more like a cake sale. A booth is supposed to look something like this, or this, or this, or this.

Okay, so the booths weren't quite what I expected, but what separates a thing like Fosdem from just a trade show is that you have something for the intellect as well, you have interesting talks. The way they set this thing up is that they have 3 different locations for talks. Then they have a host of other project specific locations where they run talks about that particular project. At the time I arrived, there was actually nothing happening in any of those rooms yet, there was just a talk in the main auditorium, for which I was late anyway. So I strolled around the area and tried to decide which of the later talks to go to.

img_1244t.JPG

From 2pm onwards, there were suddenly parallel talks in 17 locations. :eek: I have to question the wisdom of this system, I mean if you find that you would like to attend a few of them, it's very hard to be in multiple places between 2pm and 5:30. I ended up just going to the main auditorium for a talk on ReactOS (which was very technical and not too interesting from a user perspective), then a "lightning talk" on OpenWengo (which was too short to be informative) and then Andrew Morton's talk on the kernel (which again turned out to be quite dull). Of course, I can't say whether the 16 other sessions at that same time were worthwhile or not. :/

By all the noise about Fosdem on Planet KDE, I would actually expect them to put on a good show. I suppose instead of setting up a great booth they went to work on giving good talks, which I didn't attend as I'm physically indivisible.

The verdict

I really wanted to see one of these events, and perhaps I picked the wrong one to attend. In any case, I think I've satisfied my curiosity. What strikes me most is how badly organized it is from a "physical" perspective. You have these tables set up in a narrow corridor, which is flooded with people. At times I actually had to stand aside and let a stream of people pass before I could make my way ahead. The place itself is a university campus, not a very pretty one at that. ULB is clearly in pretty heavy decay, so the hallways were sort of dirty, with paint coming off, crooked walkways on the outside and so on. The auditoriums themselves are in pretty decent shape, at least. Of course, it's a matter of resources and having permission to use university buildings for this, but I can imagine that holding this at our campus in Utrecht would be heaps better in the sense of actually having the necessary space. When you go to a conference, you're not supposed to feel like oxygen is precious, you're supposed to enjoy yourself in a nice location, with good lighting, plenty of space to move around, and a nicely organized "floor". (Needless to say, though, obviously Brussels is a much more interesting city.)

It might be fun for developers who have a chance of getting together and hanging out, but from a user's perspective, unless the talks are dynamite, I don't really see the attraction. Definitely nothing to warrant spending 6 hours on the train. I mean I'm very interested in free software, I use it, I read about it, I'm into a lot of the projects. But coming to Fosdem I don't see much of interest to me, which is surprising. I brought my camera too, thought I would get some nice pictures of the booths, but there was nothing there I would take a picture of.

There's a little feedback form here in the Fosdem program brochure and among other things they ask me to rate the "catering". I have to ask "what catering"? Or maybe the question isn't meant for me, but as far as I'm concerned, the coffee machine in the J building works well and the coffee is quite good, thanks for asking.

For being the biggest annual European open source event I would certainly expect a lot more "magic", in one form or another. I donated 25 bucks to Fosdem for a t-shirt (in a way just to feel like it wasn't a total loss), so in that I encourage them to keep at it and improve, but I don't think I'll be coming back.

traveling to Barcelona?

January 16th, 2007
  • popular opinion: It's magnificent.
  • my opinion: It's kinda lame.
  • them: It's heaven on earth.
  • me: It's rainy in February.
  • them: The city is so beautiful, Gaudi masterpieces on every corner.
  • me: It's a congested city, with very little architecture of interest, and Gaudi is extremely overrated.
  • them: Gaudi was a genius.
  • me: He was a great engineer, but a lame artist. As an architect he doesn't hold a candle to Calatrava.
  • them: Barcelona is the greatest city in Europe.
  • me: Valencia is a lot more beautiful and interesting, Barcelona has few avenues and streets to see.
  • them: Camp Nou is a-w-e-s-o-m-e.
  • me: It's nothing too special if you only take the tour, Stade de France is a lot more impressive.
  • them: The weather is delightful.
  • me: Winter in Barcelona is roughly the same as winter in Norway.
  • them: I would gladly see Barcelona and then die.
  • me: The hype is ridiculous and the city is a big disappointment.
  • art lovers: Joan Miró is exquisite.
  • me: Very gifted for a six year old, why did he retire so young?

New Year's in the Old Town

January 5th, 2007

Ah, New Year's Eve. Awesome if you've never seen fireworks. Otherwise, as established in 2005, New Year's generally sucks. Though this year there was a new twist to it all. The venue - the venerable Old Town in the capital. It's quite a voyage to get there, even if you happen to live by the one line of subway that Warsaw has so far (which really undermines the whole point of having a subway, by the way). Get off at City Hall and you're near, the Old Town is but a short walk away.

Although this was indeed New Year's Eve, in a city of indeed 1.7 million people (Wikipedia), the Old Town wasn't exactly busy. Nor was it even lit up. Indeed, a big Christmas tree with a "Merry Christmas" neon sign, in small face "by Company X" outside the Royal Castle. But no other special lighting or anything fancy like that, the Market Place was completely dead as well. About half the people out were tourists, mostly Japanese with cameras (who knew), but a lazy Sunday afternoon might draw more people to this place than, well, New Year's Eve, apparently. The cops were out in force, every 50m there two of them, in black uniforms ornamented with yellow fluorescent vests.

For New Year's, the atmosphere was extremely timid. Very few fireworks in the sky, both here and elsewhere in the city that you could see. Finally, around midnight, the festivities started in the square outside the castle. The Polish have long and strong traditions of firework abuse, and the first notable rocket hit the castle wall, bounced off, and exploded near a couple of cops. Most people were standing at the highest point in the square, around a statue, on the sidewalk around the square. One of the fireworks misfired and exploded literally 10m away from the people closest to the square, scaring the hell out of some and causing them to step back. Hilarious. :D

As it was about ten to midnight, the explosions were now closer together. One of the rockets apparently exploded right near the neon sign by the Christmas tree, the sign went ablaze. The cops were looking ominous, but they exhibited a generous dosage of Scandinavian cool. Some got on the radio, but none of them actually did anything to tame the fire. It's just a shame that the damn tree wouldn't burn, it would have been fun to see it fall to the ground. :D Christmas is over, by the way.

There were several different languages around me, but I practically had Swedish right in my ear, giving a running commentary of the action. I didn't mind though, the girl was cute. At midnight, there was a culmination of explosions, and a whole lot of noise from far and near for those who don't especially value their hearing. Several more fireworks went practically along the ground in the square, from one side to the other, as bottles were knocked over when the rockets ignited. I don't think anyone got hurt, but the January 1st news always report the number (in thousands, customarily) of people severely injured by fireworks the night before. Apparently, the cops were on scene to make sure everything was civilized, but frankly they were entirely redundant since they clearly didn't plan to restrict what people did with their fireworks.

Then, around ten past, we hurried to catch the last subway home. Indeed, a night to look forward to the whole year. Here's a hot tip. If you're torn between an invitation to a private party and going to the Old Town for New Year's, go with the former.

bike trails

November 19th, 2006

So far I've been mapping my bike trails with Gmaps Pedometer, which is a handy site just for this. You have to plot the points and then the trail is stored and you get a persistent url. It shows the distance traveled and it can show you the elevation as well (which in Holland is, well, pretty redundant :D). But there's no special interface for keeping track of these routes, so I'm switching to Bikely.com, which is the same concept, but specific for bikers. It has a nice interface for browsing and searching for routes. I've transfered my routes to the site, three so far, and I hope to add some more in the near future.

Apparently, I've covered almost 130km in three trips, can you believe it? :dazed: That's easily Trondheim - Oppdal. :D If I keep this up I might even cover enough distance to the equivalent of Den Store Styrkeprøven (the Great Test of Strength), that is Trondheim - Oslo. Well, aside from one little detail - the terrain on that route is hilly as hell (elevation of up to 1000m), whereas Holland... isn't. ;) Apparently, last year's winner took 14h over those 540km, insanity! :eek: That's an average speed of 38km/h, mine last night [you know, when I almost killed myself? :D] was... 18 km/h :/

Anyway, the cool thing about this stuff is that it's actual GPS data being handled. Both of the sites are derived from Google Maps, which really shows how great Google's concept is (and how they are allowing others to use it instead of locking it up like a lot of companies would!). So that means you can download routes in GPX format, which is a standard format for this, and use it with a GPS device, for instance. You could also use GPS to track your actual travel route (instead of plotting it by hand) and then upload that to a website that handles GPS info. It's pretty neat, all this.