Small FOSDEM 2010 round up (with pics and video)

So I've spent last weekend in Brussels, Belgium at FOSDEM, gave a talk, met with some colleagues and had a great time.



Ok, this was a bit tense :)

FOSDEM 2010 was the 10th incarnation of the Free and Open Source Developer's European Meeting. There have been thousands of geeks at the ULB (UNiveristé libre de Brussels) - exact numbers are not known as there has been no official registration. THere have been tweets about being around 2000 devices with IPv4 and close to 2000 devices with IPv& active - this already shows the size of the audience.
Despite this huge number of devices online, the network was great (FOSDEM had a 1GBit link to the internet) - wireless was available in nearly every room at good strength and performance On sunday morning they even encouraged people to use more bandwidth - many much more commercial conferences should talk to the FOSDEM NOC in order to learn how to do this.

I arrived in Brussels on Saturday morning having taken an early train from Stuttgart - after Cologne I met the first two other guys heading to FOSDEM too :)

Later on saturday I gave myself a talk about Systemsmanagement with RHQ. Slides are available here.

After my talk, my colleague Mark Procter gave a presentation about Drools. When my talk was over I felt very much relieved and was more able to attend other talks. I wanted to attend some Postgres related ones, but they were already crowded.

One of the/my highlights was the talk by Andy S. Tanenbaum about Minix 3 - he presented with a good sense of humor, so it was nice to listen. His talk actually made me want to do some low-level stuff hacking again (I used to work on NetBSD in the past). Later on I was sitting in the Free Java track and was thinking that I should perhaps also start hacking on the VM. Lukily for me I did not attend all talks. Otherwise I'd probably end up with programming Drupal in Assembler for one of those little embedded boards I that the OpenEmbedded guys had on display :-)

On Sunday Dave Fetter from Postgres showed on Sunday how to compute Mandelbrot sets and solve the Traveling Salesman Problem in SQL on Postgres - totally crazy! :)

After this I have been in the Free Java dev room and met some colleagues from Red Hat, working in that area - it is always nice to finally be able to put a face behind a name.

Below are a few impressions from Fosdem and Brussels - enjoy (I will fix the image orientation as soon as I know how ... ). More pictures are e.g. on Flickr, here and here.

Below movie is also available as .ogg version (79 MB).