FOSDEM 2011

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FOSDEM 2011 Announcement

FOSDEM 2011 will take place at at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, in Brussels on Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 February 2011.

This page is for organizing GNUstep's participation in the event. This includes the organization of a developer meeting the Friday before FOSDEM.

Organizer(s)

Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf (lars dot sonchocky dash helldorf at hamburg dot de)
is somebody else interested in lending me a hand?

Who will attend FOSDEM

One of the main reasons people attend the event is that you can meet, and talk directly to, other developers, whom you would otherwise meet only virtually (on mailing lists, emails, newsgroups, IRC etc.). We expect many lead developers and contributors to be present, so if you have never met them, you shouldn't miss this occasion!

The following is a list of people of GNUstep fame who have confirmed (or denied) that they will be able to join us at the GNUstep meeting at FOSDEM 2011:

Name	Presence	Friday 4. Feb	Saturday 5. Feb	Sunday 6. Feb	Monday 7. Feb	Special comments / topics	Hotel
Lars S.-Helldorf	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	event organizer	Argus Hotel
Nikolaus Schaller	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	?	QuantumSTEP	Louise, Rue Veydt
Quentin Mathé	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	?	Étoilé	t.b.d
Niels Grewe	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	?	Étoilé	Argus Hotel
David Chisnall	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	?	Étoilé	t.b.d
Sebastian Reitenbach	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	?	OpenBSD packages	t.b.d.
Nicolas Roard	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	?	Étoilé	Argus Hotel, Rue Capitaine Crespel
Nicola Pero	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	?	GNUstep	t.b.d
Fred Kiefer	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	?	GNUstep	Argus Hotel
t.b.d.	t.b.d.	t.b.d.	t.b.d.	t.b.d.	t.b.d.	t.b.d.

Dev-Room Presentations and Events

The room at out disposal will be AW1.117 (capacity is 31 seats; in the building "AW"), -- on Saturday 2011-02-05 from 13:00 to 19:00

Call for participation

We are looking for people who want to give a talk, moderate a discussion, hold a hand ons (practice) / hacking session or organize a code sprint. Please send your proposals to GNUstep discussion list, the organizers mentioned above or - if you've got a wiki account - enter them right here. At first a title, a short summary, proposed duration and a preffered time slot would do, so we can start scheduling as soon as possible.

deadline for filing is t.b.d., deadline for the papers is t.b.d.

Note: The FOSDEM organizers strongly recommend a granularity of 15 minute blocks. So if a talk is just 15 (lightning talk), 30 or 45 minutes long - fine! But we should have 15 minutes breaks between the talks so that the visitors have enough time to find a seat and the presenters have enough time to get ready.

List of submitted talk/discussion/session proposals

David Chisnall:
- t.b.d.
- t.b.d. (Yeah, David, I know you want to give some talks ;-))

Nikolaus Schaller: Latest progress of Simple WebKit and QuantumSTEP, 45 min

Quentin Mathé:
- Fast and Flexible UI Development with EtoileUI (overview and what's new since the previous FOSDEM), 45 to 60 mn
- Étoilé Status Update, 30 to 45 mn

Niels Grewe: DBusKit: Integrating GNUstep applications with the free software desktop (30min or lightning talk)

Nicola Pero:
- Objective-C support in GCC 4.6, 30 min

Wishlist for talks/discussions/sessions

Enter talks/discussions/sessions here you would be interested in.

CoreBase and CoreGraphics/Opal in GNUstep
GNUstep Progresses and Roadmap
DBusKit
EtoileText (… I'm especially curious about the possibility to leverage OMeta to write the tree transform rules)
LanguageKit Progresses
How to develop a UIKit?

Schedule

Time Slot	Author	Title / Abstract	Kind	Slides
Saturday, Feb 05, 2011
13:00 - 13:30	GNUstep Developers	GNUstep Developer's Meeting Meet the GNUstep developers face to face, discuss current afairs of GNUstep, share news about the latest development and plans on GNUstep, improve collaboration between the several GNUstep related projects	meeting, discussion	-
13:30 - 14:15	Quentin Mathé	Étoilé: What has been done over the past year and what's next? In this presentation, we will take a look at the Étoilé progresses over the past year. We will summarize our work on both our core frameworks and GNUstep to which we have contributed a lot recently. We will also discuss the project status in a broader way, and what can be expected in 2011.	talk	t.b.d.
14:15 - 14:45	David Chisnall	LanguageKit - supporting Smalltalk and JavaScript dialects on the Objective-C runtime - what's hard, what's easy, and why developers and users should care. The GNUstep Objective-C runtime was designed to make it relatively easy to support other dynamic languages, sharing an object model with Objective-C. This talk will discuss some of the features and how they are used by LanguageKit, a framework designed to make it easy to implement domain-specific languages with static compilation, JIT and interpreter modes.	talk	t.b.d.
14:45 - 15:00	David Chisnall	EtoileText EtoileText is a framework designed for supporting structured text with semantic annotations. It was used to generate the XHTML for the ePub edition of my latest book, the Objective-C Phrasebook, from LaTeX sources. This talk will discuss the core design of EtoileText, its use, and plans for its future evolution.	talk	t.b.d.
15:00 - 16:00	Quentin Mathé	Fast and Flexible UI Development with EtoileUI EtoileUI is a high-level UI toolkit for Étoilé where elements visible on screen are abstract nodes to which pluggable aspects can be bound. The same uniform tree structure is used to describe any kind of structured content (composite document, application User Interface etc.) and the role of each node can be entirely changed at runtime by altering the aspects bound to it. All User Interface concerns such as layouts, tools, action handlers, styles, model objects etc. are pluggable aspects which can be easily reused and recombined. In this presentation, we will give a general introduction to the EtoileUI framework available on any GNUstep platform and also Mac OS X (EtoileUI is Cocoa compatible). We will discuss which problems EtoileUI tries to solve, and how it moves away from the monolithic widget model used by most other UI toolkits to support treating the User Interface as a permanent prototype. We will share our progresses since the last FOSDEM and highlight various points which were not covered in the last year presentation. Finally we will present new features which have been added recently and talk about our next plans a bit. EtoileUI Overview	talk	t.b.d.
16:00 - 16:30	David Chisnall	Discussing UIKit / iOS implementation plans iOS is increasingly popular as a platform, even dwarfing OS X. GNUstep already has support for a number of the core APIs in iOS. This is an open discussion session, which will begin with a very short talk explaining what is still missing from allowing easy ports from iOS to other platforms with GNUstep, followed by an open discussion session.	talk, discussion	t.b.d.
16:30 - 17:15	Nikolaus Schaller	Latest progress of Simple WebKit and QuantumSTEP The talk will cover two loosely connected areas of recent development. One is about a WebView compatible HTML/CSS/JavaScript Engine written completely in Objective-C to ease maintainance and improvements. This is called "Simple Web Kit" or "Small Web Kit". The talk will show and explain technical details of the latest developments in HTML and CSS processing. The other part is about QuantumSTEP, a lightweight variant of GNUstep with focus on X11/Linux based Embedded devices. A demonstration will cover MIPS based Netbooks and ARM based smartphones.	talk	t.b.d.
17:15 - 17:45	Niels Grewe	DBusKit: Integrating GNUstep applications with "foreign" desktop environments. GNUstep has always encouraged good integration between different applications and provides technologies like distributed objects or the services-mechanism to do achieve this in elegant ways. Since these technologies are limited to the Objective-C ecosystem, integration with other desktop and programming environments has been lagging behind comparatively. This talk examines the present status and future directions of DBusKit, an Objective-C framework that provides access to the D-Bus IPC system, allowing better integration of GNUstep applications into environments that rely on D-Bus for IPC. Slides	talk	t.b.d.
17:45 - 18:15	Nicola Pero	Objective-C support in GCC 4.6 This presentation introduces the state of Objective-C support in GCC 4.6 and discusses the new Objective-C features available.	talk	t.b.d.
18:15 - 18:30	Sebastian Reitenbach	GNUstep on OpenBSD, a short overview The talk will focus on what was there, half a year ago and what will OpenBSD 4.9 have in the ports tree. The following questions will be answered: why GNUstep on OpenBSD? what works (where, i.e. which platforms), and what's not? why its not working on some platforms? whats planned, or needed to have more progress/GNUstep ports added?	talk	t.b.d.
18:30 - 19:00	Gregory Casamento	The latest on Gorm an GNUstep theming	talk	t.b.d.
contingency plan	GNUstep Developers	Frameworks lightning talks	talk	t.b.d.

Suggested Hotels

last year Sebastian Reitenbach and Nikolaus Schaller have booked here. Alk them on the mailing list on their Experience:

Louise Hotel

40, rue Veydt
1050 Bruxelles
http://www.louisehotel.com/
Sebastian Reitenbach says:
- book via: http://www.hotelreservierungen.de , which is cheaper than the offer on the hotel site. The reservation includes breakfast.
- free WiFi is available
- it costs only about half the price of the Argus hotel from last year.
- Its near avenue louise, only a foot walk away from the university campus.

Argus Hotel Brussels (Belguim) (good experiences from past years)

6, Rue Capitaine Crespel
B-1050 Bruxelles, Belgique
Tel +32 2 514 07 70
Fax +32 2 514 12 22
reception@hotel-argus.be
Rate: 65/night - but you have to ask for the 'GNUstep/FOSDEM' discount
has free Internet ;-)

Normal prices are here:

http://www.hotel-argus.be/ukrates.htm

but there are discounts available:

http://www.hotel-argus.be/ukpromotions.htm

and we'll ask for even better discounts for a group booking (we need to know who's will be there for that!)

Some people booked that hotel in the last years: Nicolas, Marcus, Helge ,Lars.

Sun Hotel in Brussels (Belguim) (not recommended)

Rue du Berger, 38
1050 Brussels (near Porte de Namur)
Tel : +32(0)2 511 21 19
Fax : +32(0)2 512 32 71
sunhotel@skynet.be
www.hotels-belgium.com/brussel-al/sunhotel.htm

50 EUR/Single room with breakfast
22 rooms total
3km distance to University

has internet access, will make breakfast room available for developers after 11:00 am. Two electrical plugs for breakfast room, so need extension cord with additional plugs. Ask for first or second floor rooms close to reception for good wifi connections.

Hotel Sabina in Brussels (Belgium)

Rue du Nord 78
B-1000 Brussels
Tel: (32)2 218 26 37
Fax: (32)2 219 32 39

(very good rating by visitors) 63 EUR/Single with breakfast 8 single only + 16 double rooms 4,2km distance

Hotel Mozart in Bruxelles (Belgium)

Rue Marché aux Fromages 23
B-1000 Brussels
Tel +32 2 502 66 61
Fax +32 2 502 77 58
Email Hotel.mozart@skynet.be

http://www.hotels-belgium.com/brussel-center/mozart.htm

70 EUR/Single room NO breakfast WLAN

51 rooms total 4,2km distance

We are open to other suggestions. Please take into account distance to the University and access to public transportation.

A quick introduction to Brussels: http://wikitravel.org/en/Brussel

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