Computer

by Miguel de Icaza

Ordered a desktop computer online. I just remembered that I forgot to get an ethernet card for it and a monitor. Details, details.

Mono

Ravi got enumerations going in the compiler, very good news. I am stuck handling a few non trivial cases for some unary operators.

Movies

Saw Amelie with Daniel. Best movie I have seen in the last two years. Wonderful movie.

Not only is the movie excellent, but it manages to capture the spirit of Paris. Juantom�s had suggested in Spain that I watch it. I was in the mood to discuss the movie, but Daniel was in the mood to get a sweater. When I got home, Nat was yelling at his computer so I decided to purchase movies on amazon.fr as a replacement to discussing Amelie.

Posted on 10 Nov 2001


movie-night

by Miguel de Icaza

Went to the movies with Duncan and super hacker Radek (which just arrived this weekend to Boston) and we watched the Heist. The Fandango internet-ticket thing did not quite work as advertised so there was a long line of people waiting, and we missed the first few minutes of the movie.

Radek

I got a chance to talk to Radek about Mono and .NET. He currently works on GtkHTML together with Larry Ewing for the Evolution project, but he is looking for a spare time hacking activity.

Mono is of course the right spare time activity for every hacker ;-)

Posted on 09 Nov 2001


Madrid

by Miguel de Icaza

My last day in Madrid. Lunch with Rodrigo, Juantomas, Hector, Ismael.

Dinner with everyone. Went straight from dinner to pack, and then to the airport at 5am.

Posted on 05 Nov 2001


sleep

by Miguel de Icaza

Went to sleep at 7am, woke up at 12:30, just in time for lunch at Juantom�s'.

Paella

Juantom�s made a RFC for a Paella on Saturday. He cooked it today.

Pictures available somewhere in the web site, I have to track them down.

Hector came back from Valencia, and was quite sleepy.

Posted on 04 Nov 2001


Lunch

by Miguel de Icaza

Arroz caldoso with everyone.

Posted on 02 Nov 2001


Frankfurt

by Miguel de Icaza

Jetlagged and woke up at 2am, ran into Nat on irc.

Went to the conference center and found that the GNOME booth was completely crowded! The guys in charge of the GNOME booth had been doing some excellent demos.

A bunch of pictures (no thumbnails) from the Frankfurt trip are also available.

Went to a panel on Open Source, met Roberto Zicari on the panel (after so many years of emailing each other).

Did my Mono presentation

Flew to Madrid very tired.

Madrid

Ismael, Juantom�s and Amaya picked me up at the airport.

Mandatory dinner in town, we went to the Galician restaurant close to Ismael's house (which is now close to Juantom�s' new office).

Stayed at Ismael's

Posted on 01 Nov 2001


Back home

by Miguel de Icaza

Traveling back home.

Posted on 26 Oct 2001


Morning

by Miguel de Icaza

Woke up late again, so I missed breakfast at the hotel and at the show. While on our way to the PDC we saw a show being shot a few blocks away from our hotel. The dude from McGiver was on the set. The bus driver told us everything we wanted to know about McGiver.

PDC

Pretty good talk from Jim on the internals of the CLR, I took various notes on his talk that I will share later on the Mono list.

Someone asked about .NET on Unix and C# on Unix and Jim pointed to the shared source non-commercial implementation that Microsoft will be releasing and also mentioned Mono.

Various people approached me after the talk to ask more about Mono. There was a lot of interest on .NET for Unix.

I had lunch afterwards with various people interested in alternate implementations of the CLI and C# afterwards (Sam Ruby had lunch with us as well). It is always good to see Sam again, a very pragmatic guy, and also enthusiastic about C# and the CLI (he particularly likes the metadata).

Ask-The-Experts

In the late afternoon there was a large get together of people in the "Ask the Experts" hall. This has to be one of the best ideas of the show, basically there are various workgroups organized in tables with the various topics about .NET. It is easy to find the group you are interested in, and have a nice talk with them.

I had a chance to meet Anders and enjoyed listening to the answers he gave to the various questions that people asked him. His comments were very interesting, as he shows definetly a sign of good taste in language design. For example, regarding the lack of exception checking in C# his answer was along the lines of: none of the current approaches really have proved to work or are too cumbersome. When we find a good way of implementing that, we will.

Learned also that foreach (X i in SomeArray) is translated by the C# compiler into for (X i = SomeArray.LowBoundary; i <= SomeArray.UpperBoundary; i++), which turns out to be pretty cool as it generates code that is as efficient as it can be.

I also ran into Dick Hardt which is a combination of a hacker and a businessman. Passionate about technology, and also interested in widening the use of Perl and Python in the windows world. He introduced me to some of the programmers at Active State and Ian who has been working on making Perl expose .NET components and consume .NET components.

Don Box is a pretty cool dude. He is the only hacker I have outside the GNOME world that uses the word "dude". His new book is about .NET. A preview of the first two chapters of the book were distributed at the show.

His new book is `a thousand times better written than the Essential COM book'. It was pretty funny that he told us `The Moniker section on the Essential COM book is the part I like the least; That and the first chapter of Essential XML'. So honest and so funny.

Don apparently loves Barcelona.

Jim Miller and David Stutz was extermely busy fielding a bunch of questions on the CLR, C# and ECMA.

I was so tired and had so much wine, that I went back to the hotel afterwards (and got to discuss the GPL, american ideology and the war with Frank).

Posted on 25 Oct 2001


PDC

by Miguel de Icaza

Another long day at the PDC; Ran into Ben a couple of times. He finally got his Mac wavelan to work at the show.

I decided to skip the concert as I was too tired and had a headache, so I went back to the hotel to sleep for a few hours before I went for dinner with Pilar and Sid.

sister

My sister picked me up at the hotel and we went over to her house which turns out to be perfectly decorated by things that both her and Sid have painted, built, designed and assembled.

It was pretty amazing, I took lots of pictures of her house, it is a very nice place. Sid is a really creative person and builds all sorts of things.

They both like LA.

Posted on 24 Oct 2001


Laptop woes

by Miguel de Icaza

I have been having some problems with my upgraded laptop and my upgraded OS. Been fighting them all day.

The network at the PDC is horrible. Getting an address from the DHCP server can take up to a 30 seconds if you are lucky.

Then they have some kind of proxy server that crashes all the time, because now is the second time that a guy shows up and tells us `Dont worry, we are rebooting the proxy server, it will be ready in a few minutes'.

When the server comes up, I can visit many web sites, but many others just never resolve to an IP address. Randomly. Wild guess of the day: the Proxy Server is MS Proxy Server.

Linux at the PDC

I have not heard a single mention of Linux so far. But I ran into Ben Adida (from OpenACS) and Eric of AbiSource fame (which is not doing much AbiSource these days).

All the talks are pretty focused on the new .NET stuff, which made me realize that we should ship and distribute a library to make propper use of Jabber on Linux. I am not sure if Gabber is enough, or if Gabber can act as the multiplexor it is supposed to be, but we should look into that.

Ben is having a love/hate relationship with the various .NET technologies.

Project-7

Met Luis Daniel Soto in between breaks finally. He was kind enough to sponsor my trip to the PDC. Talked about Mexico, .NET, Passport and found out that he got married last year.

I went to the Project-7 talk at the end of the day. The presentation on Fortran for .NET was pretty fun. Bertrand Meyer also tried to convince the audience that Eiffel was the way to go.

Bertrand made a good point that is not mentioned very often. .NET will give people a chance to choose the best language for a particular application instead of choose a language because of the libraries provided by it.

He also discussed how the Eiffel compiler for .NET supports multiple inheritance. It is a pretty cool trick: for each class created an interface is also created. So multiple inheritance is implemented by having the derived class implement both interfaces from the parents.

Pilar and Sid have been working on their costumes for Halloween and they decided this year to use some science fiction characters, so they had been working on all the pieces: the dress, and the gadgets. I am not sure if I took pictures of that though. We had dinner in a nice restaurant called `North' in Sunset boulevard. We had a good night.

Dinner with the ECMA guys

Thanks to Sam Ruby, I had a chance to join the ECMA committee members that attended the PDC. A bunch of us got Mojitos at the restaurant.

Bertrand poses with other ECMA members (here you can see Jim, the man in charge of the MS CLR). Bertrand made very compeling points on why people should use and buy Eiffel ;-)

Posted on 23 Oct 2001


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