The yearly FOSDEM was excellent as always. I could not attend all talks; mine was on sunday afternoon and as usual I was still improving it at the conference itself. Nevertheless, I spoke with many people and saw some very good presentations. Now that the videos are online, I will mention some of them with a link to the video footage.

Why Political Liberty Depends on Software Freedom More Than Ever (video).

Eben Moglen rallied the FOSDEM troops with early morning politics. He warns that we need not just Free Software, but also a Free Internet. If it is possible to turn off the internet, it is flawed.

Calligra Under the Hood (video).

Boudewijn Rempt gave a technical overview that shows that Calligra is a good starting point if you want to write your own custom office suite.

Building a free, massively scalable cloud computing platform (video)

Soren Hansen talked about the 'Apache of cloud solutions' OpenStack.

Firefox 4: new features for users and developers (video)

Tristan Nitot talked about the improvements in Firefox 4. It's nice to see them summarized in one talk. I particularly like the improvements in speed.

Cloud 9 IDE (video) A development environment for JavaScript in the browser: awesome!.

KDevelop: Rapid C++ Programming (video)
For those not entirely in the cloud, KDevelop is a great IDE. Milian Wolff gave a nice overview of some of the coolest features.

and of course the amazing talk on
WebODF: an office suite built on browser technology (video)
where I showed how to add WebODF to a website, how to write an Android application using WebODF and simply explained how it works. If this talk does not answer all your questions, come to #webodf on freenode, or post a question on forums.

Here's this year's crossdesktop group picture of FOSDEM, featuring all your favourite developers that attended FOSDEM (and me)! \o/

(and yes I now also see that I focussed on the building instead of the people, but it's hardly noticeble ;))

Currently I am enjoying FOSDEM, the excellen Free Software conference in Brussels. Tomorrow I will give a presentation "WebODF: an office suite built on browser technology" about WebODF. If you want a preview, you can look at a screencast about it.

Office suites for the cloud are becoming more popular. All of them are closed source and, worse, running on a server that is outside of the control of the user. A Free Software solution for this problems is urgently needed.

WebODF is a library for adding OpenDocument Format (ODF) support to applications, regardless of whether they are running on the web or on the desktop. WebODF is a small JavaScript library that can display ODF documents in browsers and HTML widgets. Currently, simple editing support is being added. WebODF can be used in web applications and desktop applications.

WebODF is extremely innovative because it is the first FOSS implementation of an office suite based on HTML5. Using HTML5 means that the code will run on nearly all modern computing systems. On top of that, it uses CSS in such a way that the ODF document is used nearly unaltered as the run-time presentation. This simplification allows us to develop fast and with little code.

Less than a week to go for FOSDEM 2011 next weekend! Just so that you don't forget: this year we have 2 days of (Cross)Desktop-related talks in their own devroom, but be sure to also look at the entire schedule since there's a lot of interesting stuff in the other tracks as well (including some KDE-related ones). Hope to catch a glimpse of you then :) Especially for the group picture on Saturday afternoon

As always, I took some pictures at FOSDEM 2010. Disappointingly I took less than last year: only 55 instead of 132 (and even that is cheating, because that includes a picture *of* me taken by xvello). Still, better than nothing, I guess... In any case, as always at FOSDEM, I had lots of fun, and that's what counts! :)

As always, we had the KDE Group Picture taken at FOSDEM. It went pretty smooth this year, apart from not immediately hearing when the autotimer of the camera clicked :)

[Edit: Hmmm why does this not show up in the feeds?]

It's been a while, but I'd just like to bring the following 2 upcoming events in to your attention:

• FOSDEM. As always, the yearly free/open source software is being organized in Brussels again. I think there's something interesting for most of you, so be sure to have a look at the schedule (even though it is not finalized yet) :) Of course, for all the KDE people among us: don't forget the KDE Group Picture! As for people wanting to know which talks I'll probably attend, I put a tentative list on my website.
• Vlaamse Programmeerwedstrijd (Flemish Programming Contest). This is a programming contest, open to almost everybody: senior high school students, 'hogeschool'/university students (bachelor, master and PhD), and other people that have graduated from one of those options. This year, it's being organized at Ghent University, which happens to be where I'm working. That means I'm obviously attending it (using Haskell and/or C++). So if you ever wanted to make fun of me or humiliate me (and my teammate, of course) in a kinda-official setting: this is your chance ;)

I took a few pictures of KDE people and the area around the hotel most were staying in. Click for the rest: