Michal Čihař - FOSDEM 2013 summary (Sunday)

FOSDEM 2013 is over and it's time to look what interesting I have seen there on Sunday.

Sunday was supposed to start for me with L20N, but it was postponed to 13:00 as the presenters weren't on time. I could have used one more hour of sleep, but at least I spent some time on coding.

Detect merge conflicts in realtime was quite interesting talk, though I was pretty surprised that the conflict detecting does not at all care about underlying version control system, but does purely file based guesses.

The Hardening MySQL talk pretty much described why security in MySQL sucks and what you should do to make it secure. Quite good introduction to the topic, but not much new information for me.

Introduction of Firefox OS, was quite nice demo showing they have something working, though it had some problems with flaky network on FOSDEM. Looking forward to see phone being sold, though it will probably not be something I'd buy.

To add some fun, I've stayed on systemd, Two Years Later presentation, which gave some summary of what is currently in systemd and where it wants to go. Still it did not move systemd from category of "I don't care as long as it works".

Now followed delayed L20N talk - it showed new Mozilla's effort for localization. Which is quite powerful and has nice features, on the other side it put's quite more load to translators - now they would have to understand some basics of programming as well to be able to use the new features (or not so new ones as plurals). Their motivation is to remove localization effort from developers, but I'm not really convinced it will work nicely.

After some meetings and lunch, I went to LibreOffice: cleaning and re-factoring a giant code-base, which showed some challenges LibreOffice has to take and how they dealt with that. I think it's pretty great job done and I'm looking forward to new releases.

Being GNOME user, I could not skip Has the GNOME community gone crazy?. It of course tried to tell that they did not :-).

Last, but not least my friend Dieter from phpMyAdmin had talk Present and future of phpMyAdmin. He listed some of the new features, demoed 3.5 and 4.0 version (of course the demo of 4.0 version broke due to some caching). Even when the talk had quite unpleasant timing, it has attracted some people and they even asked few questions.

This years FOSDEM was again great and looking forward to be there next year.