Well… I went to fosdem 2010:) Very nice indeed as every year. Kudos to the organizers. Even though this year I didn’t manage to grab a t-shirt as I usually do …
indenti.ca
I attended a presentation about identi.ca. I’m not very much micro-blogging person. I like social networks but just to get in touch with friends and nothing else. What I like about identi.ca (as many other people at fosdem) is the FOSS side of it and it’s implementation of open standards. The talk was well delivered and informative. Thanks !
gwibber
So, during a presentation I snoop on my neighbor’s laptop and he was using twhirl, that is a nice “freeware” piece of software. Closed source ? No way ! There is a nice FOSS alternative though. Gwibber. I’ve tried it out yesterday and it does a nice job. From its homepage, this is the description.
Gwibber is an open source microblogging framework and desktop client for GNOME developed with Python and GTK+. The Gwibber backend is a stand-alone daemon that manages updates and retrieves stream data from social networks. The Gwibber backend can be accessed through D-Bus and currently uses GConf to store account configuration info.
homepage: http://live.gnome.org/Gwibber
Does it work ? uhmmm playing with it I would say that is a still a bit young. The interface does not always work (how do I replay to a message, or how to I subscribe to a specific tag on identi.ca ?) and it is not very well polished. A piece of software to be consider, but not ready for prime time, at least for me.
Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE)
I attended a very nice presentation about NSE, the nmap scripting engine that I didn’t know at all. It’s a very powerful tool to scan an analyzing networks. There is a free chapter of the nmap book available and I think it’s completely worth reading it.
This is the material from the presentation that includes a very nice handout about nse.
lua
And NSE is written in LUA that is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. I’ve already came across it and I think I’ll spend sometimes to see if it can be useful for my projects.
homepage : http://www.lua.org/about.html
Drupal
As every year I spent a few hours in the Drupal run. The drupal community is extremely active. I failed to attend the talk about the upcoming drupal 7 release. Fortunately I’ve found this keynote online that is work watching if you are interested. Drupal 7 is going to be a super release both from site designed and developers. I really looking forward to it.
During a presentation about installing and developing with Drupal, the discussions went on the dependency system of the modules and plugins in Drupal. Needless to say that this might be a nice application of the work we are doing with mancoosi. At it should also be reasonably easy to integrate it with drush. Now I just need a php binding of a sat solver that understands CUDF. AH!
guake
Guake is a quake console stile unix terminal for gnome. I’m addicted. I’ve configured guake to slide down with alt+space, in the same way I’ve ubiquity on firefox. I feel home. The console is there when I need it, it’s fast, and with the correct key-bindings is just like gnome-terminal. I’m definitely happy I’ve discover it. Next step is going to be a tiling window manager, but this is material for another post.
this is the wikipedia page about it : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guake It’s homepage seems down at the moment.
I attended many other presentations, but this is enough for one post. See you at fosdem 2011