moving about

Tomorrow morning I pick up the moving van and then begin the 800km or so drive out to Vancouver with my worldly posessions in the back. A friend, Steve, is driving out with me. Well, he's actually driving my car out and playing chauffeur to the cats. Caravan style, baby!

I'm in Vancouver for nearly two weeks and then I'm off to Switzerland for Tokamak III. I'm actually heading over a bit early to do some stuff in Switzerland before the meeting, but I'm quite looking forward to the week of hanging out and experiencing a high level of creativity with my fellow Plasmers.

We'll be following a schedule very similar to the KDE Libs hackfest prior to 4.0 in Trysil. Communal breakfast, a morning kick-off session to coordinate, hacking until lunch, lunch, a nature walk where we can discuss ideas, concepts and the especially gnarly problems away from the computers, back to hacking (punctuated by dinner) until we all fall over in happy heaps of Plasma. The first day will be a bit of an exception to this as we'll be doing technology presentations.

Some interesting numbers:

• 27% of attendees will be from the Americas, 2 from South and 2 from North America


• 13% female attendance; if Annma could have made it as she usually does it would have been 20%.


• One KWin hacker will be there, so we can work on better workspace integration


• One Qt Software hacker will be there


• Three GSoC students will be there


• It will be fully 1/3rd of the attendees first Tokamak, with two KDE contributors coming

We will be discussing and working on things like remote widgets, activity actions plugins, new widget browser, netbook, great usage of context and social desktop technology, integrating Plasma activities and KWin window management and much more. It's going to be a busy and, I am confident, productive event.

We'll be hosting a "live blog" of the event everyday on identi.ca. Dents will be going to the KDE group with the Tokamak tag. We will also endeavor to provide a two-way audio link for our fellow Plasmers who can't be with us for this Tokamak. There will also be the customary wrap-up article. It's important to us to make sure that the community of contributors and users can keep up with what goes on at these meetings.

Once Tokamak has completely drained me, I'll be back home for a few weeks and then it's off to France for a friend's wedding. Then back home. Then possibly down Arizona in October for a F/OSS event there ... in other words I'll be back to the usual travel schedule. Hello, carbon footprint!