I arrived in Taipei at a bit past nine in the evening yesterday. I had started out at 19:30 CEST the day before, flying through my least favourite airport in Europe (Heathrow), on to Hong Kong and finally here. I got a good five hours sleep after doing the usual evening-before prep work, woke up, showered and had breakfast with John Corbett in the hotel cafe. Then it was off to COSCUP by train.
The metro system here is modern and efficient. I bought a metro card and filled it with NT$100. At the last station we were approached by another conference goer: a Finn who now lives in Taipei and has a company that specializes in MeeGo. They also have offices in Tampere, where I'll be next month. What a small world!
My presentation on KDE's Plasma Active was very well received and the live demo seemed to impress. Many people came up after to ask questions and discuss. I exchange business cards with numerous of these people and with some arranged to talk at greater length after the sessions. There is a real appetite for a truly Free and Open device OS right now, due a variety of factors, and we're bringing exactly that to the table.
Even though we're only in alpha and just starting the polishing and stabilization phase of development for our first release of Plasma Active with Contour, something I made clear to those in attendance, the ExoPC demos definitely made ripples, and perhaps even a few waves.
After meeting with Jos and the OpenSuse guys here in town and discussing how we can arrange for a KDE event in Taipei next year with organizers of this year's event, I wrapped up the day with an extended BoF with KDE contributors and enthusiasts. A couple of translators along with some coders and enthusiastic users attended. We ate pizza and talked about KDE. They asked questions and I did my best to answer them accurately and to the point. I did a little KDE trivia quiz and handed out some Swiss delights (chocolates, cheese) to people who came up with the best answers. Then we huddled around my WeTab and explored Contour together.
I got back to the hotel sometime after nine, twenty four hours (and a bit) after I had first arrived in the country. I could feel the energy the day had taken out of me, but I also felt elated at the progress that was made and the wonderful people I had the opportunity to meet.
I decided to reward myself by wandering down to a night market in the area where I hunted about the various stalls for some food. I had a pancake wrap thing that was quite delicious but it wasn't for a few hundred more meters until I struck true gold: a small wheeled cart parked next to a wok half filled with oil. An old wisened woman stood behind the cart which was filled with trays holding various ingredients: tempura vegetables (some of which I'm not sure I know exactly what they were..), mushrooms, tofus and seafood. I picked out three of the most interesting looking vegetables, which she measured out and then dropped into the hot oil. They bubbled away for a minute or so and then she drained them and coated them in a wonderful spicy powder.
I picked up a Taiwan Beer, to see if it is as disappointing as Armijn keeps telling me it is ;) , and wandered on home in the wet heat of the night and digging into this huge bag of wonderful, deep fried, spicy vegetable wonderness. I'm back at the hotel, still have some left and just cracked open the beer to calm the riot in my mouth.
What an excellent end to a first day here. I get up about six hours to do it all over again tomorrow. I can't wait.
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12 comments:
Heathrow does not deserve the boos it gets in my opinion. Try France Roissy in Paris and Air France (strikes, overbooking,...) and you'll love Heathrow (my daughter heading to Brasil 2 weeks ago can write about it)! Have a productive stay in Taipei. How do you make live demo of the ExoPC btw?
I am back home from various trips during the (long) kids summer holiday and ready to re-enter in my KDE skin!
@annma: "Try France Roissy in Paris and Air France (strikes, overbooking,...) and you'll love Heathrow"
what i dislike about Heathrow is how disconnected the terminals are, what a twisty maze it is, how inneficient the transit between areas is, how unhelpful the people are and how generally _cold_ the building is.
i've been through Roissy before and while not great, i do still prefer it over Heathrow. but that could well be because i have travelled through Heathrow far more times. :)
i trust you have more expeirence with Roissy and will put it on my "try to actively avoid" list ;)
"Have a productive stay in Taipei."
thanks :)
"How do you make live demo of the ExoPC btw?"
with a webcam pointed at the tablet and the picture displaying on the laptop's screen (which is connected to the projector for the slides)
"I am back home from various trips during the (long) kids summer holiday and ready to re-enter in my KDE skin!"
hope you enjoyed the summer and made many great memories with your family.
your KDE family misses you while you're gone, of course :)
If you ever want to give up your day job, you could have a wonderful career traveling the world and eating, then blogging about it! I could almost taste that spicy vegetable wonderfulness....
Love you!
Aaron: Are there any updated images for Plasma Active for WeTab?
From what I have seen there is an image that is now quite old and from the description it has some probles at startup on WeTab.
Weren't these images supposed to be updated every 2 weeks?
I bought my WeTab while I'm working in Germany but at least for now I haven't found a good use for it. I'm planing to create a QML GUI for Marble on WeTab, but still haven't found the time to actualy set-up the development environment :(
Hopefully Plasma Active will make my WeTab a little more useful :)
What kind of batterylife can I expect, for the Exopc with alpha KDE plasma on it?
I miss KDE 3.
People people people....this post is about the TEMPURA! :P
@Kenneth Aar: if you mean Plasma Active: right now, only about 4 hours of usage. we have a coule of processes that aren't sleeping but using CPU continuously which prevents the machine from doing proper power management. these are bugs and we will be addressing them in the weeks to come and then we should be able to measure the proper battery life on these devices, and it should be considerably longer than what we're getting right now.
@shevy: so use KDE 3. nobody is stopping you. there's even the Trinity project. but hey, thanks for stopping by with your constructive input, right?
So, are you disappointed at Taiwan Beer? :D
@Shevy
I guess the only thing to do is to fill out wishlist items on KDE4 for the things that you want in KDE4...
What I miss the most is how kworldclock could be set up to generate your background desktop wallpaper (the world in sunlight) every 10 minutes and have that image blended with another image (like Wonton soup)... I haven't been able to figure out how to do this in KDE4 now that kworldclock is a widget and marble doesn't have this capability to export wallpapers.
@sidicus: you can set Marble to draw your wallpaper (that's been there for a few releases), though it doesn't blend with a wallpaper image. blending the world clock _with_ another image is a rather exotic and questionably useful feature and seems a lot like "glass half full" thinking when the marble wallpaper lets you pan and zoom the world view, something kde3's worldclock background didn't let you do.
@Aaron
Hmm.. I didn't know that... Thanks for the info.
And yea, only reason I blend it is to add an artistic flare to the world globe instead of having it so sharply realistic. Maybe what I'm really looking for is a more artistic and less photographic world map to use.
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