Six impossible things

Hi folks,

I am coming to DebConf10!

In addition to New York, I’ll also be in San Francisco and Seattle.

And here’s my travel plan to go with it:

Day by Day Itinerary

• Day 1: Friday, July 9, 2010 (Paris, France)

Depart: Zurich (ZRH), 19:45 CEST, Arrive: Paris (CDG), 21:10 CEST
Air France 5109 – Aircraft Avro RJ85 Avroliner – nonstop 1h, 25m 475 km Class K

• Day 3: Sunday, July 11, 2010 (San Francisco, CA)

Depart: Paris (CDG), 10:40 CEST, Arrive: San Francisco (SFO), 12:50 PDT
Air France 84 – Aircraft Boeing 747-400 – nonstop 11h, 10m 8,958 km Class H seat 25A

• Day 8: Friday, July 16, 2010 (Seattle, WA)

Depart: San Francisco (SFO), 07:00 PDT, Arrive: Seattle (SEA), 09:00 PDT
Virgin America 740 – Aircraft Airbus A319 – nonstop 2h, 00m 1,090 km

• Day 11: Monday, July 19, 2010 (San Francisco, CA)

Depart: Seattle (SEA), 07:00 PDT, Arrive: San Francisco (SFO), 09:15 PDT
Virgin America 751 – Aircraft Airbus A319 – nonstop 2h, 15m 1,090 km

• Day 14: Thursday, July 22, 2010 (New York, NY)

Depart: San Francisco (SFO), 23:05 PDT, Arrive: New York (JFK), 07:50 EDT(+1 day)
Virgin America 28 – Aircraft Airbus A320-100/200 – nonstop 5h, 45m 4,150 km

• Day 17: Sunday, July 25, 2010 (New York, NY)

DebCamp10!

• Day 24-30: Sunday, August 1 to Saturday, August 7, 2010 (New York, NY)

DebConf10!

• Day 31: Sunday, August 8, 2010 (Paris, France)

Depart: New York (JFK), 19:05 EDT, Arrive: Paris (CDG), 08:35 CEST(+1 day)
Air France 7 – Aircraft 388 – nonstop 7h, 30m 5,829 km Class V seat 86A

To get an up to date version of my travel plans, visit the TripIt page:

http://www.tripit.com/trip/public/id/4CE972068378

I’m looking forward to getting as many of our Google Summer of Code students as possible at the DebConf.

See you in the US!

Update: Actually, I might attend DebCamp too.

Are you ?

I was also entertaining the idea of giving a lightning talk in the Debian room (not as part of the general lightning talks) about aptitude-gtk. I certainly don’t feel like talking for a whole hour talk or what. I don’t have that much interesting stuff to say. Maybe we could do it with other 2008 european GSoCers. That could be useful as we didn’t do much publicity-wise (see) in a timely maneer.

Certainly I should write a mail about that to the soc-coordination list about this or ramble about it on the planet. Oh, I’ll get around it.

So any Debian GSoCers going to FOSDEM ?

I’ll be in Great Britain next week. I’ll come to the Debian Party 2008 in Cambridge on Saturday 23rd August and will be back to London to visit ’till Wednesday 27th August. I’m staying by myself in a nice little hotel in Bloomsbury.

It will be very interesting to meet Debian people and probably do some pitching for my Aptitude GTK project which is making nice progress.

I’ve never been to London before. In fact, I’ve been once when very young and all that I can remember is that the hot dogs seemed nice . I’m currently reading the Lonely Planet book about London and filling my program. Hi, London!

I finally got back from Switzerland. Google invited all the Summer of Code students to visit their offices. I chose to go to the Zurich one. It wasn’t the closest (London was) but it was the largest and it had more engineers than MBAs.

It has been very interesting meeting other Summer of Code participants from all Europe and a lot of other people of the free software community. There were about 40 people overall for the meeting at Google, along with free beer, cake and nice food.

I gave a talk about Aptitude, how it could be useful and how I worked so far. It was nice to see that nearly a third of the audience used Debian or a derivative.

By the way, the proprietary Nvidia X driver seriously messed up with the projector. It just wouldn’t detect the external display at more than 640×480, which Impress didn’t like at all. I didn’t feel like hacking around my xorg.conf while on stage so I went without the slides (well, you could see about a half of each slide actually). I heard that it was because of my old GPU (GeForce 7400) that I had poor support and the impossibility of, for example, doing RandR correctly. I had to restart X and stuff…

The talk went smoothly otherwise and Google staff graced some of us with a guided visit of the 6 stories building, complete with slides, cable-cars and 18th century-themed rooms. I had to sign a NDA over whatever secrets I may see and surender my DSLR, but you can find pretty pictures in this blog post from Valleywag.

The Google office really lived up to the hype. I wondered: do people actually work in there ? I guess they must do, and very well.

I’m going to the Google Europe Headquarters in Zerich, Switzerland, tomorrow (July 10th).

Google is inviting us Summer of Code students, which is really nice.

I should be there in the middle of the afternoon from Paris.

I’ll be wearing a Slashdot tshirt. Drop me a mail or a comment if you go too so we can meet!