Just a quick one, people want food: my Telepathy talk at GUADEC earlier this week was a success by most accounts, and followed up by after-hours talks today with Kai Vehmanen’s on Telepathy SIP, and Yannick Pellet on the IM/VOIP project on the 770. My slides are available for people who missed my talk, and hopefully soon Fluendo will grace us with videos feeds too.

For people still around at the conference tomorrow, I’ve arranged a BOF with Martyn Russell for discussing/hacking Telepathy and Gossip stuff. It’s in the museum library room at 11am tomorrow (Friday). Hope to see you there!

I made it to Vilanova on Friday for GUADEC, managed to get settled in to our chalet (I’m glad we opted for one with air conditioning!). After we got them to fix the hot water, I now think it’s pretty decent accomodation for the price, complete with wifi, swimming pool and a well-stocked shop. The only downside I can see is the distance from town. On Friday night we missed the last bus and walked in, which took over an hour and I developed a bad headache by the time we reached the town (we didn’t find the right beach, but stopped in a bar instead). My enjoyment of the walk wasn’t helped by the small children who were out on the street launching fireworks, mortars and other incendiary devices at or near us most of the way. 🙂

Yesterday we hired bicycles to get to the town center which was certainly more fun, but there’s quite a hill on the way back. Also, bus in and taxi back is pretty much cheaper than the cost of hiring bikes here anyway, so I’m not sure I can recommend it as a long-term strategy. We might do it again for the novelty, and it has the benefit of not needing to wait around for a taxi to get back.

Even before I made it to the conference venue yesterday, I’ve already met loads of cool people who hack on all sorts of cool software which I use every day, and I’ve recognised lots more people who I’ve not managed to speak to yet. I’ve also realised that we need to do a lot more work to raise the profile of the Telepathy project which I’ve been working on for almost a year now (eek!). It’s a really cool way to get IM and VoIP stuff properly integrated into the GNOME desktop, and everyone should go and check out the website, play with our releases, chat with me and come to my talk on Tuesday. Oh, and if anyone wants a Telepathy or Collabora t-shirt, grab one off me or daf. 🙂

In the office just now, daf complained at me that he finds it very annoying when people blog about how they havn’t blogged recently. I apologise, although in my defence, the post was mainly about C (I’ve subsequently learnt that -Wextra will warn me about such errors in future, thanks :D). The question is, is this post also annoying because of this meta-blogging property, or can it be excused as meta-meta-blogging?

Although, whilst I am talking about my blog, I found that Ross Burton took a reasonable picture of me at FOSDEM (I’m the one on the left, versus Iain Holmes on the right :D), which I’ve cribbed for my photo on the GUADEC speakers list. I was wondering if in exchange for beer (or cake), anyone would like to make me a hackergotchi for my various Planet appearances?

I’ve decided with mjg59 that when referring to Web 2.0, the correct pronounciation of RSS is ‘arse‘ (linked to the definition for people to might spell that word wrongly ;), leading to witty concepts such as ‘arse feeds’, ‘arse readers’, etc. It amused us in the pub anyway.

I wasted a non-trivial amount of time yesterday debugging code in which I’d accidentally written:

if (...);
  {
    ...
  }

Is there any situation where if (foo); can achieve something which just foo; couldn’t? Could the compiler not warn about a conditional that contained no code?

Aggravating lapses in competence aside, I’ve realised I’ve not blogged for months, so over the next few days I’m going to try and write a little about what I’ve been working on recently.