GUADEC: 16th-18th March, 2000

Usual disclaimer: my name's Telsa, I'm married to Alan Cox, and I keep a journal which attempts to give the other side of the story to Alan's diary. Occasionally I go to conferences with him; and this time I went to one without him. I am not as technical as him, so you will not find "fixed bug" in my ramblings. There are plenty of "found bug" entries to make up for this, though.

It started some months ago when I spotted the GUADEC site and thought it would be fun to experience Paris in the spring and meet lots of GNOME hachers into the bargain. Attempts to take Alan were initially foiled by lack of interest ("I know someone who said Paris was horrid") and then by lack of time. Curses. So I was a brave little hobbit and booked my solitary ticket and acquired a French dictionary and a new copy of the grammar book I remember from O-level French and found my passport (neatly filed away, unlike Alan's which was last spotted on the bathroom floor) and counted the time down. Some time later I realised that to depart from London at 7.20am required me to be there for some ludicrous time beforehand. Good planning, yes.

My excuse for attending was really that I wanted to say thank you to people for GNOME. My "pay for me" cover story to Alan was that lots of GNOME documenters would be there and this would be good. (Docs folk, I haven't written the docs stuff up yet. That's next.)

Set off on the Wednesday as far as London, where I was met by Steve George and Ness, who put me up for the night and then Ness waved us off as Steve and I set off for Paris. (Ness was coming the day after. It occurs to me belatedly that it's a special sort of woman who can put up with "let's go to Paris, but I'll go on ahead with a woman I met on IRC" from her partner.) Bumped into (as you do) Iain Holmes and Robert Wittams at Waterloo and piled onto the Eurostar: the London-Paris train that goes under the Channel. The tunnel is very boring, by the way.

Arrived in Paris, played tourist on the Metro ("Telsa said she knew how to ask for a book of tickets, let's all ask for a book each") and accumulated about three thousand metro tickets. Startlingly, reached Corvisart Metro intact and found the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Télécommunications with no wrong turnings. Found Miguel DV, Mathieu and lots of others, played "collect-a-name-badge" and people all started showing up. Huge, huge numbers of people. And wow! At least three women! (Don't laugh; this is an improvement.)

There were a couple of tables for sponsors and people. Nothing like the glitzy big shows, though: much more like the small things of a few years ago: institutional tables with posters behind on the walls and things laid out over a cloth on the table. It was nice like that: it gave it a very different feel.

At 2pm the proceedings started officially (on time!) and we all shuffled into a lecture theatre. Miguel was scheduled to give a talk on "Introduction to GNOME" but he took one look at the people in the room and changed his mind. "I think you probably know what GNOME is by now". Instead, he did a different kind of introduction. I was afraid it would be some terrible icebreaker going round the room. "Hi, my name's so and so and I wrote...". Instead, Miguel went round the room and identified and introduced almost everybody (about fifty out of the sixty or so people) with "Sitting there is so and so, they're from (wherever) and they wrote (long list), then there is...". That was quite impressive to watch. Plaudits to the two people who shouted out "We're the users" and took the "we have users? woo!" cheer in good part.

Talks on bindings (would you believe ADA bindings for GNOME?) and other things were happening then, but I went to my hotel to check in -- and discovered they'd messed the bookings up ("It's the computer's fault") and wanted to move me elsewhere. Eventually it was sorted out and I stayed where I was. Reading other people's diaries I find this was almost universal.

Wandered back, slipped into the gnome-print talk, failed to understand any of it, found the talks were done, looked for the docs folk, found almost everyone except them, met more people: Jacob Berkman, bug-buddy author, looked like he wanted to run away from me -- and I didn't have a single bug to whinge about this time; Chema's grand plan of living on European time for a week before leaving Mexico had worked perfectly; by contrast, the Red Hat contingent had all just arrived jetlagged and fallen asleep; Daniel Veillard has had his hair cut since last I met him at Expo (silly man); Larry Ewing hasn't (sensible man); Joakim doesn't look very like the Lord of the Rings character whose name he uses on IRC; tigert is my bestest friend because he gave me some cloudberry chocolate; and almost everybody asked me "Where's Alan?". I suppose that bit was inevitable. There were some drinks in the early evening, arranged (somehow) by Mathieu, Huges, or someone. Then the "sixty people are simultaneously hungry" moment hit.

Jonas had a simple approach to this. He just started tapping the nearest people to him and asking "Food?" I had, by this time, lost all three people I originally arrived with, although I found two of them again and we headed to a restaurant which said "Provence cooking" on it and was willing to put up with a table for twelve suddenly being requested. I'm not sure why, but most people seemed disappointed at the idea that they weren't going to get wolf, when my dictionary revealed that filet de loup was not in fact "wolf steak" but was instead sea-bass. I managed not to have the shellfish (my first sentence in most other languages is "I am allergic to shellfish", although I haven't gone as far as my mum, who has this written down in Chinese characters as well as every other language she can find) and conversation ranged from GNOME to... erm... GNU. Wide-ranging, yes. (Okay, there might have been a little more to it. Other than "So. Where's Alan?", I mean... It was a fun meal, and to my amazement we didn't use the laptop (yes, I'm afraid there was one) to work out the bill. Yay!

I'm not sure where everyone else went, because at the time I didn't know that the Butte aux Cailles (or some such name), full of bars, was the next road along, so I went back to the hotel hoping for people in the bar. That's when I discovered the lack of a bar. Waah.

Met bunch of people for breakfast in the morning. Hmm. Apologies. Memory is now hazy on who! Wandered down to ENST for the 'hacking party' scheduled for the morning. I wanted to find the docs people, arrange a time to meet, and head off to sight-see. I found Dan Mueth, but it emerged that Evil Dave Mason had gone sight-seeing already. Hung around more and met more people. One of the O'Reilly folks was on a quest for a US/Europe power adaptor (these things were like gold-dust and people were clutching them in much the same way that Dave Mason was spotted clinging to his very own piece of ethernet cable); lots more people asked me where Alan was (in fact I think Radek and Martin are the only people who didn't); I discovered that various people from the meal the night before had been very ill after it (couldn't possibly have been the drink); Mathieu was doing a presentation in the back of the room with the hacking party in it, which had a load of power sockets and network connections, and people were just randomly connecting themselves up. It all worked rather well. Eventually caught up with the rest of the docs folks and realised that rather than scheduling a meeting for the following day, we could do it then. So we did -- and realised we'd need the following day, too. Came out of that into the talks for the afternoon. I don't remember doing this, but I appear to have taken notes for some of them, so:

I fear I have missed a talk out and someone is going to be cross. And I know that I've focused on the sillies rather than the technical details, but what did you expect? The talks finished and the meal organisation began. Mathieu had arranged for ENST to feed at least some people, and others headed off. I saw some people head off and was going to tag along with them because I thought there might well be drinking involved but a small hitch had arisen. Nat the plausible had persuaded a British friend to turn up to GUADEC on the Friday night, and the last thing we'd seen on IRC was "So, if I turn up at the ENST at 9.30pm will anyone be there?" And the place shuts at around 8pm. So someone was going to have to meet him. So I insinuated myself into the "eating at ENST" crowd, probably bored the other two people on the table to death by talking DocBook with the fourth person, and at about quarter to nine, everyone headed off to drink. Dan Veillard, who has more than the usual quantity of chivalry in him, saw me hanging around looking solitary and lost outside, and stopped to talk, and ended up waiting with me for dan for about two hours. And telling me about XML and SGML and parsers and very interesting (in a "I'm glad this is not my problem" sense) it turned out to be. We did talk about other things, too, mind you. It got colder and colder, and some strange person borrowed my lighter and started heating a small black lump of stuff next to us and we looked all puzzled and he went away, and we spotted Mathieu and friends heading to bars and pubs, and in the end we stuck a note up and gave up. Since I'd said which hotel (with no bar, waah!) I was in, I went back there, just in case he showed up.

Just about everyone else had a brilliant night in pubs, as could be guessed from the expressions the next morning. I was up bright and early, but some of the other people weren't seen for some time.

More docs discussions and meetings. I believe we actually made a definite decision on one thing, but I can't quite recall what it was. I did take some notes, so I suppose I should find them at some stage.

More treks to the nearby shop selling croque-monsieurs and chaussons aux framboises (I am convinced I have spelled that last wrongly but they were yummy). Lost Steve again. (Collecting girlfriend from station.) Confirmed with Miguel that the boat party was happening. "Yes, yes, of course. Oh my god. There is just one thing. The boat has moved".

A minor technical detail, yes.

Found Dan (hooray!) who had more sense than I did and simply tracked down Nat's hotel and then went drinking with everyone. (Well, okay, he found me, but still.)

Two talks in the afternoon. Dave talked about documentation in free software projects (slides on the web soon, apparently) and Miguel talked about Evolution. From the technical end of it, not the pretty screenshots end (wail). I gather that saying "it's a new mailer" is not entirely accurate: it's a tool that (if I understand things correctly) is a shell which can have lots of components a la bonobo, one of which is the mailer (others are calendars, contacts lists, and things I have never heard of that apparently all the world but me knew about). The bit about asynchronous sounded good: it means you can have lots of things happening, but it also means all those things need to know about each other. A wombat fits in somewhere: I gather as a server which talks to the evolution backend via CORBA. And you can have "vfolders": files containing the results of queries to the database via the IBEX (?) library for indexing and searching. This should solve the 'grep "something" Mail/*' stuff. (When you forget whether it went under a folder based on the person's name, a folder of things you saved to remember not to lose, a folder where you typoed the name of it, or what, and you have to shell out or start another terminal to find the name of the file in order to read the thing again. I'm sure Miguel will read this and say I got it all wrong, but then again, I use mutt :))

That was pretty much the end of the formal stuff. Everyone descended on the hacking party room, and a session of "sign my poster!" began which ended up with a pipeline of people and posters to be signed being passed up. It was funny. I borrowed Dan's laptop to find the rugby results (the Really Important News that Wales had finally won a game hadn't filtered through yet, though) and then we decided to find food before the party and ended up drinking coffee with Nat in the cafe which must have been bemused by the number of people traipsing in for coffee over the course of the weekend.

Returned to hotel, collected booze for party, headed onto the metro, sat there in a day dream until "Excuse me, you are going to the Helix Code party?". Found the boat. The weather was turning dark and cloudy and the boat didn't appear to have a roof. Fretted. Lots of people arrived, but no organisers, so we all stood about getting cold and looking at the boat. Someone suggested we imitated penguins and huddle together and then rotate people from the inside to the outside (the knowledge that you can accumulate by accident is really scary) but that didn't happen. I thought we should just find a bar. Eventually we simply invaded the boat and discovered (hooray!) a downstairs. With disco-lights. Uh-oh.

More people started arriving. Party began. I daren't recount this in chronological order. But bits that stand out (alas, I do not have photos of these):

Michael Zucchi was brave and walked back. I decided not to find out how safe Paris was for small lone females after dark. Apparently six-foot Australians don't have to worry about that quite so much. Arrived back at hotel with various people departing early the next day, packed in a haze, discovered Deutschmarks (how useful) stuffed in the rucksack pockets by Alan (one assumes) months ago, and fell asleep.

Breakfast bright and almost-early with Radek. Wandered outside for fresh air and met Mathieu on an early morning hangover-cure sortie, off to buy about six litres of orange juice. Apparently it was a very good night.

Headed off to Gare du Nord. Encountered FSF stickers at surprising places during the journey. Found a very tired Iain at the station and set off back to Britain. British Rail continued its run of surpassing irritation by stopping the Swansea train at Cardiff and trying to fit all the passengers onto one coach. I got my baggage on, but not myself, then had to retrieve the baggage in haste. In the melee, encountered friends from Swansea, and caught up with all the gossip. "How was the rugby?" "Wales won". Important stuff like that. Also read many many Sunday papers. Either the Sunday Times or the Observer was claiming that thinkgeek is scary; and the Observer is having another go at Demon. The Sunday Times had an article about strange work titles, and the Chief Lizard Wrangler of Mozilla managed to make it into the headline of the article. Found a Sunday Express on the tube with a guide to browsing the web on it. First, you need a PC capable of running IE or Netscape... The Sunday Times also had a great article on why satellite television sponsoring rugby is not responsible for the decline of rugby. This approach makes more sense when you know that the Sunday Times and Sky (the satellite company who recently snagged exclusive rights to certain matches) are part of the same stable.

Returned, presented Alan with (the remaining) lakka-chocolate, bartered over who got the tshirts, and life returned to normal when I discovered the computer junk in a neat heap I had left for him to remove was still there ("But I got rid of the sparc!" was presented as an excuse, but since I hadn't known we had one I didn't think a lot of it) along with the coffee mug I had been drinking from right before I left. Uuurgh.

I suppose it's nice to be back.

So there you are. That was GUADEC. It was brilliantly-organised from my point of view, and well done to the folks who did it. It was fantastic to meet other people who I'd only known off the net, and I got a Czech to admit that Welsh beer wasn't too bad, too! There are loads of people I have missed out of this, and loads of people I met for about thirty seconds and would have liked time to chat to. Lots of people felt the same, I think. Mathieu and friends are doing their best to avoid organising GUADEC 2, but someone needs to :) There's other things I have missed out: hearing about the tent-peg dhcp incident from someone at that camp with some entertaining memories; discussing Evil Browsers with Will (I think it was Will) and so on. And everyone who has read this so far has assured me that hey, they didn't ask where Alan was, but I am beginning to be unconvinced!