FOSDEM 2008 thoughts
February 27th, 2008 Stephen Lau
FOSDEM 2008 was, IMHO, a great success (and apparently not just MY humble opinion). The whole Mozilla presence there was amazing. On a personal note, it was great to meet and hang out with a bunch of the Mozilla crew. As always, it was great to see mfinkle and sethb who were about the only Mozilla folks I knew prior to FOSDEM. It was fantastic to meet all the TomTom crew (I think they sent 7 guys over), and to chat with thunder and andrew from TomTom for what seemed like hours talking about traveling and food.
It was also great to see the OpenSolaris crew, in the form of timsf, patrickf, sarad, and the webmink himself as always.
As to my specific talk, I had a 45 minute time slot to present Saturday evening, the last time slot @ the Mozilla DevRoom (the conference is split into different topical DevRooms/tracks). The Mozilla DevRoom was jokingly called “saunsa.fosdem.org” because it had about a 7 foot tall ceiling, no windows, no ventilation, and brick walls all around.
In other words, it was a brick oven. Yes, like the kind you cook pizzas in.
Toss in 50 to 120 geeks depending on the talk (max room capacity was 100) + laptops, and yeah… it turned into a sauna. When you opened the door to the room you were hit with a wall of humidity and heat.
My actual talk was titled “Songbird: Smashing the Silo (or how to build a music store in 34 minutes)” and mostly covered how to use the Webpage API to do rich media integrations with Songbird. The overall aim of my talk was to point out the more innovative and compelling features of Songbird (i.e. it’s more than just an open source iTunes). The last 7 or 8 minutes, I showed off the display panes, talked about media views, and talked about general music mashups and music meta information. I actually had 3 people come up the next day and say they’d played with Songbird and mashTape and other extensions that night (which is especially impressive given we partied all night @ the Mozilla 10th birthday party).
I see Brian also posted a wiki link to FOSDEM happenings wrt to Mozilla which has more blog entries and photos for Mozilla’s presence.
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