Having an extraordinaire hangover is, by far, not the best way to start
attending a conference. But with FOSDEM there doesn't seems to be any
alternative. The night before the conference a bar is kidnapped from the night
circuit so
FOSDEM-goers can get together to have a drink or two... or three, four,
I-lost-the-count. You have to buy 'tokens' from the organizers (EUR 3, standard
price) and then exchange them at the bar. I bought 4, which probably it was a
little too much for me (I weight around 60Kg and my food input during the day
was not even on the 'enough' level), but that was not the reason I was so
hungover the next day. The reason was that clever people were leaving early and
left their extra tokens behind, and that I didn't control myself. That's
probably because the first one I had was a [Delirium
Tremens](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium_Tremens_(beer)), which is above
8% instead of the normal 4/5%. Whoever to blame, no matter how hard I tried, I
couldn't get off bed before 15h the next day.

So the first thing I did in FOSDEM was to miss [the
talk](http://fosdem.org/2010/schedule/events/beernet) about
[beernet](http://beernet.info.ucl.ac.be/)[^1], something that sounds like a
transactional and replicated DHT. I also missed the KDE group photo, which would
have been a good way to introduce myself to the (rest of the[^2]) KDE guys.

The first talk I saw was Will Stephenson's talk about
[OBS](https://build.opensuse.org/) which at first I wasn't really interested in
seeing,
but end up being really interesting. The OpenSuSE guys have a huge farm of
machines for building packages. They can build packages for most of the
mainstream distributions (I remember OpenSuse itself, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu,
Mandriva and more), for all the versions that run KDE4, for several archs. All
that it's needed is the source code and the packaging instructions. And all this
is available to us, developers, just a registration away. The other half of the
talk was in
charge of Luboš Luňák, who promised to also release a tool to help to generate
the .spec and the debian/{control,rules,etc} files. I await spectantly for them!

That night I hung around with some Debian guys, some of them I knew from
DebConf8. We found a nice italian restaurant, where we ate pizza and pasta
almost alone in the fisrt floor. The waiter was all the time telling jokes and
when we were asking for the bill someone asked for another beer, which led the
rest for asking for dessert and coffee. Fun time, which continued in the Monk
bar until 24h. One thing about bars in Belgium: they don't have the smoke ban,
so by the end of the night I was reeking of smoke even when I don't smoke at
all.

The second day gave me the surprise that the KDE track had already finished (it
was only the previous afternoon), so I wandered around a little. I went to a
talk called "apt-get for Android", which given my current work got all my
attention. Unluckly it was only just an Android app store (a free one, both in
the beer and freedom sense) and not an effort to port some Debian stuff to the
platform (it wouldn't make any sense anyways). I also saw the Ofono talk, but I
didn't even got it's motive of existence.

Sebastian Trueg gave a talk about the Nepomuk stack. It's impressively huge and
it's incredibly useful, but it still needs more integration into apps. I got the
apportunity to talk with Trueg after the talk and I promissed to look into a
Konqueror plugin who's sitting in playground. I'm also concerned about the UI
for tagging/adding tags. Let's see if I can keep my promises.

[^1]: again, given the size and behaviour of my hangover and the project's name,
      even if I could crawl off the bed in time to see it, probably it would be not
      advisable anyways :)

[^2]: being a user and a more-times-off-than-on developer makes me a KDE guy, but
      I'm still not confident enough.