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FOSDEM Aftermath - the Hotel / Notes from preparing and giving my talk


From: Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf
Subject: FOSDEM Aftermath - the Hotel / Notes from preparing and giving my talk
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 03:06:28 +0100

the Hotel:

- I was quite satisfied with the Argus Hotel. My room was clean (also the bath room), breakfast was o.k., some people at my floor did party a little bit on saturday night (but not that much that I had to go out and give them a bollocking … ;-))

- it helped a lot that most people staid in the same place since made getting together (brainstorm folks had a company meeting in the breakfast room for instance) and arranging evening activities a lot easier.

- if we decide to have a meeting/hackathon on friday it would be very helpful to stay in one place to avoid the difficulties of getting around, finding each other and meeting

- If we look for another hotel we should make sure that free WLAN is available




Notes from preparing and giving my talk

What I experienced during preparing the talk:

- I used a vanilla plain Ubuntu 8.10 as basis for my presentation (I also considered Fedora and SuSE but here the out of the box GNUstep support is even worse), just to show that all I do in my presentation can be done without difficult setup procedures required (and even without the need to leave your desktop environment of choice (here I used the default that comes with Ubuntu: Gnome))

- Installing GNUstep in Ubuntu using the Synaptic Package Manager was rather easy - this (or a similar easy) way should be the way of choice to install GNUstep.

- Sadly, the GNUstep packages in Debian/Ubunbtu are somewhat out of date (this alone wouldn't have troubled me) and buggy: A simple drag and drop action from DBModeler to Gorm wasn't possible with the available packages - that tells me we need more testing when doing a release.

So I decided to bite the bullet and leave the way of sheer easiness: install GNUstep from SVN

- manual GNUstep installation from source is still not a no-brainer. Incomprehensible for a newbee with no idea about the concepts and structures of GNUstep (for instance the different domains). Despite I already did this some time ago I still had to think somewhat hard about certain details and read the several INSTALL files over and over again. You need to know quite a lot about GNUstep internals to understand what you're doing and what to do if something doesn't work. Luckily I also archive the discuss-gnustep and gnustep-dev lists and could look up things I vaguely remembered (mostly file system layout stuff). Also, Dennis Leeuw's build guide was of great help for me.

I then finally decided to do a install into the System domain to replace what came with Ubuntu (but retain the somewhat good integration into the 'Applications' menu of Gnome)

- I found no way how I would determine what Frameworks/Libraries are required for a given gnustep-make based project/application (since there's no configure phase) and whether those are already installed.

- the need to have GNUstep.sh sourced to make gnustep-make work breaks sudo (despite having the sourcing of GNUstep.sh in my system- wide /etc/bash.bashrc). I used 'sudo su -' as a workaround but found that rather hackish. Maybe I missed something here

- later I had to fight a nasty half-offscreen menu (the title of the main menu of DBModeler was offscreen). I found no intuitive way to get it back on screen (I tried - for instance - alt-drag, a way to grab an usual window anywhere and move it then). I don't know if it would be a better idea to automatically "fix" menu positions when an application starts (I've heard some people place the menus offscreen deliberately to get them out of the way and use the right click to get them on demand) or to have a modifier key drag to move the menu by grabbing it anywhere. Maybe we should have even both - combined with some defaults, let's say

defaults write GSAutoFixMenuPositions false

to switch that behaviour off (standard should be 'on' or 'true' to help the newbees)

- while I am on it: I find the right click behaviour of GNUstep (show the main menu under the mouse, like OPENSTEP) quite dated. Mac OS X / Cocoa has a context based menu on right click nowadays (like every other platform). Maybe we can make that configurable too (to cater both OPENSTEP heads who like the old behaviour and everybody else who expects a context menu): how about a default named GSSecondaryClickBehaviour?

- I noticed that at least when using the windows manager of Gnome (maybe other too, I didn't test this) the menus of apps in the background are not hidden of greyed out. So I often endet up with a pletora of menus hanging around, not knowing which one belongs to which application. Very confusing! I was told that Window Maker hides the menus of apps in the background but I think we should play well with other window manager (that aren't aware of GNUstep) too by being proactive. At least the menus of apps in the background should be dimmed

- there are other issues with window managers integration (that don't support GNUstep) for instance: the dock icons (are those square icons called like this?) running apps create interfere with the task bar of Gnome (and KDE): they overlap the task bar and the are placed all on top of each other (in the lower left corner)

- the integration of dev apps (ProjectCenter, Gorm, GDL2) could be a little bit tigher. For instance: * Currently ProjectCenter creates project templates which contain a .gorm file in an outdated version. When you start using that .gorm file in Gorm without re-saving it first you might experience a crash when dragging some GDL2 stuff into it. * ProjectCenter doesn't provide a template for GDL2 apps. I handcrafted one for my talk, which is not included in ProjectCenter, but I have to make a copy of it manually and run a very simple bash script over it that renames particular files and changes some files' contents accordingly. Worked for the moment but doesn't make the best impression in a talk in which I wanted to show the ease of developing with GNUstep.

- I got several minor crashes and malfunctions during my talk for which I will open bug reports if those are reproducible (the developer apps are generally usable but a little bit wonky here and there)


the Talk itself:

- Giving a talk is fun, I did this the first time this year and despite it was far from perfect it still was very much worth it.

- My general idea was to show a simple app I prepared before and then do an all live demo of developing a similar simple database application using DBModeler, Gorm, ProjectCenter and PostgreSQL because I thought this will be more interesting than just showing some slides (I was so naive!) and a real "acid test" and proof on GNUstep (it was, kind of).

- I overestimated the thrill this would create and underestimated the effort of "developing" such an easy app while talking about what I am currently doing, explaining the concepts and concentrating on the "development" itself. So my talk dragged on a bit from time to time when I was concentrating on "developing" - while still trying to talk about it. Especially bad here was I couldn't maintain eye contact during this "development action" (which is a no-no for a presenter).

- It seems to be a very good idea to "test" your talk on some of your friends or relatives beforehand to get a feeling for your talk, to weed out weak spots. I didn't (I was really short on time, still hacking together my demo application the same day I gave my talk while recording the other talks), my bad.

- So slides aren't all bad (as I thought in my "youthful foolishness"): You can explain things in a concentrated form that way, better than just with words, hands and obscure live action on a screen. Meanwhile I think that I'll mostly show slides next time and limit the demo parts to short spans which are non repetitive (like creating one entity after each other is) and illustrate only the central concepts.


I'd like to read your comments!


regards,

        Lars




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