n800, nabaztag, Métisse and FOSDEM

n800
So, like other GNOME hackers, this is a mandatory n800 post. Thanks to Nokia (and whoever selected me) for developer discount. I didn't wait very much (about 1 or 2 hours) to order it and I got it one day after (Nokia shop is really fast). I'll also take this opportunity to thanks Quim Gil for giving developer discounts to two Mandriva kernel hackers (Samir and Arnaud) who are both doing a lot of maemo development on their spare time. I've take many pictures of the various themes available for n800 here.

Nabaztag


As most of you already know, I'm a geek (and most of our are geeks too :p ) so for Christmas, my mom offered me a wifi rabbit, called Nabaztag. It is really cute and there is a nice community of people with such devices, customizing them, doing some reverse engineering of the device (it isn't opensource, even if Violet, a small french startup doing it is quite open and is using Linux and Java for the server part of Nabaztag). More photos of my nabaztag and his friends (and some nice customizations doing by PetiteCane) are available here.

Métisse
I've been extremely pleased to see reactions about Metisse. We thought it is an interesting technology to promote and it appears we were right. I did a lot of presentation at Solutions Linux show, two weeks ago and response from the public was huge. Things are moving nicely in the entire X.org community, with David Reveman implementing Input transformations in X server (something which is still unique to Metisse and allows interaction on any transformed window) and Quinn Storm, Beryl author, dropped a nice hello on Metisse mailing list. I'm hoping, in near future, all those modifications will be merged upstream so we could run any compositor, like Metisse, Compiz, Beryl or metacity+libcm, without any hacks needed on X server. I strongly suggest interested people have a look at Metisse research paper which is easy to read but very informative. Oh, don't be fooled by screencasts available on Mandriva website, some very interesting features of Metisse aren't demoed yet. If you downloaded screencasts by bittorrent, I suggest you look at Facades demo (research paper about Facades is here).

FOSDEM
I'll be at FOSDEM next week-end in Brussels and there will be a lot of Mandriva people (both community members and company developers) and we also have a developer room. I'll be doing a presentation about Metisse (not too much technical) in GNOME developer room on Sunday at 9h15. I just hope I won't be alone in the room, because of early schedule ;)