LanzaOS 05

I spent last week in the Canary Islands seeing a company called Fotón Sistemas Inteligentes in Santa Brigida, Gran Canaria. I stayed with Gonzalo, Marianne his girlfriend and their 11 cats and their very 'woofy' dog. They showed me the mountains with spectacular views of the island, although it was a bit windy high up. It really is a very pretty place. Wednesday is a public holiday in Spain, so Foton had a barbecue Tuesday evening on the roof of their offices. They did some 'Sardinas' for me just like the ones we had at the Malaga beach party - nice! Everyone is very friendly and I'm really looking forward to learning Spanish, and working with them.

On Thursday and Friday the 13-14th, we went to Lazarote for a conference called LanzaOS 05.

Lanzarote is a strange place - it's full of tiny volcanoes with flat fields of ash in between. And lots of building sites. Hmm.. But Arrecife itself was quite pretty, although I was surprised how few tourists there were on the beach at this time of year.

I gave a presentation called Why Use Software Libre and KDE?. I started with a screenshot from the Croquet project of a rabbit avatar looking at a web browser, as an example of what a shared 3D environment would look like in the future. Then I worked back from there to the present, and explained why KDE was such good stuff and how the community was thriving. You will have a smoother ride into the future with KDE! The main theme was that if you wanted to build a software infra-structure which was going to last, you were better off using Software Libre as basis because communities last longer than companies, and can think in the longer term.

Technologies like NX, thin clients and Kiosk mode can make KDE very easy to manage. Another talk was about the LTSP and they gave a demonstration of an old 100Mz Pentium machine running KDE as a thin client - it was very snappy and looked exactly like a normal KDE desktop. I think this 'manageability stuff' could be KDE's killer app in applications like schools or local government.

My favourite talk was a marathon 3 hour session by Esteban Manchado Velazquez from Foton about Ruby On Rails. Even though it was in Spanish I could follow most of the presentation and the demos. I learned a lot about Rails, I've got some idea of what support needs to be added to KDevelop to create a killer Rails RAD environment. A couple of the other guys at Foton are experimenting with using the Rails persistence layer 'ActiveRecord' with QtRuby - that could be a really good combination.

KDE seems popular in the Canaries with most of the presenters using it, a couple with Gnome and one WindowMaker (which looked pretty funky to me).

I had a great time, and I think everyone else did who went. So a big thanks to