Sorry for the delay in blogging about UDS, but a week of "doing nothing" was wellcome and necessary :-) Unfortunately real life also came back far too early and an unusual work load in pharmacy prevented my blogging so far.

Monday night we (Belinda, Anthon and Scott) were out for dinner in the village where we ate some french food: "Gigot d'agneau" (lamb with mixed salad and fries) was in my plate and, well, quite good. Unfortunately wine was not very good: too young and very acid. We decide to go back to the Radisson for a drink and had the quite unpleasant surprise to learn that one beer was €9 ! Excuse me, this is not the Ritz AFAIK ! After some discussions we decided to buy some drinks in a shop. Loaded the dinner folks plus 2 KDE people (Aaron and Sebastian) into my car and tried to find an open shop... it was already way past 9 o'clock so we headed towards Paris. After a first try in a shop where nothing alcoholic was available we managed to find an open liquor store and my passengers went to buy some beer and wine, but came back without wine (/me not very lucky obviously) but french and dutch beer and even a bottle of some harder stuff, e.g. vodka. The drive was very, very funny, especially having Aaron on board who is not only a brilliant writer but also a witty entertainer :-) But then, me (after dinner with wine) behind the wheel and another 5 funny bones in the car could have been reason enough to be stopped by some patrol car. The drive was hilarious as we either had to follow an overloaded truck at 10 km/h for ages or found the motorway entry blocked on the way back from St-Denis, already fearing to get lost in french countryside in the middle of the night.

Back at our hotel we sat together in the lobby chatting and drinking ...  still loaded with adrenaline from the day,  sleep was not something we were thinking of very much. I remember going to bed around 4 in the morning !

And of course, "9 sharp" was mandatory, but I managed to get up in time and was at the Radisson at 8:45.

We rise early enough to be at the Radisson for 9 o'clock. Some 10 or 11 round tables wait for developpers to gather around and UDS specs are presented from top to bottom by those who filed them. This takes about 2 hours after what all the others present themselves to the audience. During specs presentation I try to find some interresting ones, so I end up with a quite impressive list of some 15 specifications I might try to help out. Remember: I am _not_ a developper !

(What am I doing here anyway ?)

There really is an impressive list of great names some might have heard of. Check the specifications list to get some ideas what we are working on. Well, ideally this list should turn from Braindump to Review or even Approved by the end of the week.

 I subscribed today for "What do NonGeeks want ?" and had a very nice braindump session with some very interresting folks. Before that I stayed at my initial table and tried to find my way to work with "Quieten Grub" specification.

Actually, all sessions are on Gobby server where one can join the party from the outside world, so check this if you want to collaborate.

And, of course, there also is some critics from the FSFE fellow I am:

Besides the fact that Launchpad actually is _not_ Free Software, there is no other way to participate, well one can read on your neighbours laptop, but this somehow keeps you out of touch with the ongoing work.

But there is worse to come:

There also is VOIP in use and TeamSpeak is an affliction. Am I consequent enough to get my hands off and follow RMS' advice ?

"To use non-free software will have the effect of excluding certain
participants from the discussion: those that on ethical grounds will
not install such software on their computers.  We already press hard
against e-government practices that demand citizens use non-free
software to communicate with the government.  We will do likewise if
WSIS adopts such practices.  You have only seen the beginning of it
here."

Attending "Tab Consistency" BoF afterwards showed how much VOIP could be used to integrate users from the outside, unless you manage to get it to work. I decide to give it a try...

In the afternoon I attended the "Common Customisations" session and it was quite  a... strange experience: Strangely, all the attendees around the table had their heasets on but nobody spoke. Some typed on their keyboard and I had a feeling of total exclusion. So I decided to install VOIP and the collaborative editing tool !

First I struggled to get TeamSpeak: the link to it was well hidden in a then undocumented subpage of UbuntuDeveloperSummitParis wiki page (which is well documented by now). Then I got aware I had no Gobby and installed it from the Universe repository.  At about 2/3 into BoF session I managed to join the party and spotted a thread about media players. As I sat 20 centimeters from the drafter I asked about VLC aloud: and I got te answer on Gobby typed! No external users were visible and still everyone got their headsets on in total silence. Strange...

Still, I'm not a developer nor a computer scientist of any sort, maybe I just missed the point. But using VOIP needs bandwith which is not available all around the globe at reasonable cost...

With all this new experience, Belinda and I got in touch with two other attendees staying at the Comfort Hotel and we decided to look for a decent restaurant at reasonable prices, eating at the Radisson not beeing sponsored definitely was a no go. Fortunately we found a french restaurant in the village and had a not too bad meal with a typical cheese ending :-)