So GUADEC 2006 is upon us.

The flight over was relatively painless (for 21 hours in the air). Vilanova is a strange city. Parts of it are really nice, but parts of it are also a bit tatty. We've had quite a bit of trouble with the accommodation. We received no bedding in our bungalow. We've since managed to convince them to give us pillows, but it seems they still didn't want to give us blankets. We've been sleeping without them, but it's not fantastic. The bedrooms are very small (I can touch both walls), so you have to be very good friends with your roomy. We're now down to three people, and I think Ryan has taken to sleeping on the couch, so this hasn't been too much of a problem. The tap water is also undrinkable (and very salty), this means that you simply don't feel clean after a shower (my hair feels so dirty).

Transport looked like it was going to be a real problem. The accommodation is really far away from the conference venue. There are shuttle buses in the morning, and we have discovered there is also a couple of shuttle buses back at around midnight. This has saved on requiring taxis. The cab fare from the train station to Vilanova Park is around €10. There also aren't that many taxis in the city.

I spent the warm-up weekend catching up with people, rather than attending any of the talks. Also drinking a lot of Sangria. The Drooling Macaque band had its rehearsal on Sunday afternoon and actually sounded quite good. I hope that we can manage to sound that good at the Maemo party on Tuesday.


the guitarists of the Drooling Macaque band rehearse a song
It seems that a lot of the food is seafood, which is something I am not a seriously big fan of. I've been pretty much eating vegetarian since I got here, just because I don't really feel like eating meat. Ordering food is sometimes incredibly easy and sometimes incredibly challenging as not that many people in the city speak English. We usually manage to order something though, and we've only had incredibly bad service the one time.

There were a number of talks that I've wanted to see, but I either missed because I have gotten distracted, or conflicted with other things that I wanted to see. Fluendo have an archive, so I'm hoping that I will be able to download them all from the wireless network to my laptop to watch while I'm in the UK next week (plus on the flight home). The GUADEC edition of LugRadio should also get released, so I'm hoping that a local copy of that will be made available so that I can listen to it on the way to the UK. Seeing the booths for both Google and Fluendo today made me think that as well as having Ogg Theora archives of GUADEC on the GNOME.org website, we should put the videos on Google Videos with appropriate tags in an effort to expose people who might not know about GUADEC (or maybe even GNOME) to some of the stuff people have been working on.

I'm trying to get my talk into shape. To be honest, I'm not very happy with it. A number of the things that I wanted to talk about when I submitted this talk have now been resolved (this is good), but what this leaves is mostly empty brochureware (this is bad).

The beginnings of Ryan Lortie's new applets API is coming together. Hopefully he'll blog about it soon, and perhaps do a lightning talk. I have some ideas that I've shared with him, particularly about implementing some of the ideas I spoke about at GUADEC last year and on my blog over the last year or so (like implementing desktop/panel mode for applets. Hopefully, if the API can be gotten into shape, we can then look at doing things like implementing Stuart Langridge's Dashboard/Konfabulator/Gadgets layer on top of it, as well as porting it to the Maemo. Ideally allowing every GNOME applet (that implements the desktop render path) to run on the Maemo. Also perhaps allowing things like Dashboard widgets to run.