Finally got around to booking travel and accomodation for FOSDEM 2010; I've left it late again, possibly even later that last year, so it's a little more expensive than I'd like (also, I didn't particularly want to share a room in a hostel with stangers again, so my accomodation isn't as cheap as it could be). On the other hand, I've money saved from my placement, so what the hell.

One thing that did puzzle me, incidentally, was the booking form for the hotel, which offered a choice of rooms: “Standard Room +£0.00” (no additional cost, as the default selection) and “Standard Room (breakfast included) +£41.46”. That's per night.

I cannot quite grasp just how wonderful a breakfast would have to be to justify spending that much on it. To put it in perspective, that's approximately what the room costs per night (I think; it's bundled with the Eurostar cost, so hard to tell). It's also not much less than a return ticket to London. I could quite easily get breakfast in a hundred other places on my way from the hotel to the conference for less than a tenth of that. What the hell are they thinking?

So, not all that much has been happening recently. Spent New Year coding, eating curry, watching Monty Python, then watching the countdown with Jools Holland and drinking, for some reason, amaretto.

I bought myself an Eee PC 1000 so that I can have a laptop that I can actually carry around, and I’m generally very happy with it — I’ve put a stock version of Debian on there, and it works pretty much perfectly. (The only issue is that when it comes out of hibernation after more than 10 minutes it immediately thinks "oh, I’ve been inactive for ages, time to go to sleep" and suspends, but that’s probably my fault…)

I had hoped to go to FOSDEM this year, but due to university stuff on the Friday I’d pretty much ruled it out. However, somebody pointed out I could get the sleeper to London then the first train to Brussels in the morning, so after some rushed booking I’m going after all. :)

And I’m still not dead, in case that wasn’t obvious. Though hills seem to have gotten steeper over Christmas.

Something that I wasn’t expecting when I decided to do a placement, or right the way through until after I started working at PML, was that I’d have the opportunity to do any travelling for work.

Most of the work I’ve done at PML so far has been part of InterRisk, an EU project to develop software for "environmental risk management in marine and coastal areas"; basically, there’s lots of data that can be used to detect things like oil slicks, algal blooms, etc.; there are also lots of people who are interested in such things, for various reasons — either for research, or because it’s their job to deal with them, or whatever. InterRisk is meant to make it easier for these people to get at that data. There’s various groups involved in it — as well as PML, there are organisations in Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Norway, and every six months representatives of each organisation meet up to discuss progress; this time around I got to go along, with the head of the Remote Sensing Group and another of the programmers working on it.

The meeting was at the Institute of Oceanology in Sopot, Poland (just north of Gdańsk). Tuesday morning, two of us took the train up to Birmingham from Plymouth and met the boss there at the airport. The flight went without incident, though I did manage to get searched again — and once again, it was because I had change in my pocket (which I actually realised before I stepped through the metal detector, and was holding it up as I did so in an attempt to point out that my stepping through would be pretty pointless…). Oh, and screaming kids. We arrived at Gdańsk Lech Walesa Airport (not, for some reason, Lech Wałȩsa airport) and promptly got ripped off by a taxi driver.

Gdańsk, Sopot, and Gdynia form one big conurbation. Gdańsk is a big port and formerly part of the Hanseatic League, and has lots of old buildings and so on (though apparently most of them were rebuilt after WW2 — they were very cool anyway) and the largest brick church in the world (St. Mary’s; got some good pictures from the top of the tower). We visited a few museums, including one on Solidarity (though I didn’t have a chance to get myself a Solidarność t-shirt). Sopot seemed to be mostly bars and restaurants, with little to do during the daytime; it reminded me of the Barbican in Plymouth, but without the interesting old stuff. Gdynia seems to be mostly industrial/commercial; it was relatively unnotable until the Treaty of Versailles gave Poland access to the Baltic but made Gdańsk independent, leaving it without a major port — Gdynia was expanded to fill that need. We went to the aquarium on Saturday, and were pleased to see that their display on oceanography, with various sensors and instruments attached to model boats, also had a model plane and satellite for the remote sensing side of things.

The first evening we looked around for a bit then got pizza; the first full day there we spent in Gdańsk, then met up with a few of the other InterRiskers for dinner at an overly-complicated fish restaurant (where my order of "fish and potatoes" was interpreted as "fish and more fish"; luckily one of the Polish representatives was around to translate). Thursday was the first day of the actual meeting, most of which was pretty boring (lots of talk about deliverables and user requirements and so on), though the technical side of things was quite interesting — it gave me a much better feel for what the project was about and what the code I’m writing is actually for (which always helps, you know). That evening was the conference dinner; we went back into Gdańsk and were given a guided tour (the opposite way around to our previous visit) then went to some reasonably fancy restaurant place. Friday was much the same, but we spent the evening in Sopot instead, and went to a bar that played weird (but reasonably good) remixes of classic rock.

Saturday was the last day in Poland, but since our flight wasn’t until 21:00 we had plenty of time beforehand. We were assured by our representative from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute that the weather would be sunny (with some cloud) all day, that their forecasts were completely trustworthy and that there’d definitely be no rain. To be fair, it never actually rained, but there was no actual sun, either, and it was bloody cold. We suspect that met.no’s definition of "lovely weather" is "no snow on the ground". We went into Gdynia, visited the aquarium, had some very expensive coffee, then went back to Gdańsk to see the Solidarity museum.

The flight home was again uneventful. My laptop bag got searched, as far as I can tell because the metal nibs of my pens looked suspicious and threatening; on the other hand, I remembered to take the change out of my pocket this time. A small child screamed for almost the entire journey; unfortunately, nobody seemed willing to put it out of its misery. Stayed at a Travelodge in Birmingham overnight, then drove back on Sunday, stopping off somewhere in the middle of Somerset to visit some canal thing that was open for National Heritage Weekend. We didn’t find the canal, but we did find a very nice pub for lunch (the Martlet Inn, near Wellington, if you’re ever in the area). Then off down the M4 listening to obscure (but, admittedly, rather good) music, provided by the boss again (the least obscure parts were the Dune and Blade Runner soundtracks; the best parts I don’t actually know how to spell).

Now I just need to work out how to fill in this expenses claim.

I said I’d write about it, so I suppose I’d better. A few weeks ago I heard that Richard Stallman was to give a lecture at Manchester University; looking into it, though, it seemed to be prohibitively expensive, mostly because it would require staying somewhere overnight. A little later, though, I discovered he was also giving one at Cambridge University — and earlier in the afternoon, so it would be perfectly possible to get there and back in one day. Tickets were booked.

The morning of the 30th comes; I get up at 0600 (okay, okay, 0630), get ready, and leave the house. It’s not until I’m halfway across the park that I realise I’ve left behind the maps of Cambridge I’d printed off. Jog back across the park, down the hill, up the stairs, into the office. One page printed, out of paper error. No paper around. Stick that one back in to print on the other side. It prints on the same side instead, but luckily both parts are mostly readable. Back out of the house, to the station, onto the train just in time. I find Gem already on board and playing with her EeePC, and spend the next few hours alternating between sleep and The Selfish Gene.

Skippy joins us at Reading, and spends the last stage of the journey to London arguing about the economics of cars versus public transport with a random stranger. We arrive at Paddington, I get something to eat, then we head across London to King’s Cross, then onwards north to Cambridge.

We arrive at Cambridge with no further mishaps, and get the bus into the centre of town. As we get off, we ask the driver where to get the bus to Madingley Road Park & Ride, and he tells us it’s just around the corner. After a few minutes waiting, we realise that although the bus that stops here is the right number, it’s going the wrong way. We hunt around for the real bus stop, only to see our bus go right past us — although this does mean we know where it stops now, and Cambridge has public transport that doesn’t suck, so we only have to wait a few minutes for the next one.

Madingley Road is quite long; it’s several kilometres from the city centre to the Computer Science lab. We spot what we think might be the road before it, and sure enough, the next road has a sign for the Cavendish Laboratory, which we know is on the same road. Skippy presses the bell. The bus goes right past the bus stop. Skippy presses the bell some more. Eventually, the bus pulls into the Park & Ride, about five minutes walk up the road, in the rain. Yay. We find our way to the William Gates Building (oh, the irony), and I get a picture of Hector by the sign before we go in.

The lecture itself is pretty interesting; rms explains that it’s not about free software, but rather an answer to a question people often ask when he talks about free software — can the same rules be applied to things that aren’t software? He starts off by explaining a little of the history of free software, and then the history of copyright — why it came about in the first place, how it has evolved, and how, although the laws we have now were perfectly reasonable a century ago, or even half a century, they’re not so useful now. After that, he proposes some possible changes to copyright law, to make it fairer both to authors/artists/musicians and to end-users. He recommends that functional works — software, recipes, textbooks, reference books, technical manuals, and so on — be required to be Free-with-a-big-F; "testimonal works" (i.e. works which explain an author’s opinions, beliefs, experiences, etc.) should be free to share and copy, but not free to modify, since that just leads to misrepresenting an author’s views. Finally, artistic works need not be free to copy, either. He also advocates reducing the length of copyright; ten years, he says, might be more reasonable. He goes on to talk about ways that musicians, specifically, could earn money without the overbearing presence of the record labels, like having a "Donate" button on music players that would automatically pay the musician a small amount of money.

The talk ends, and rms answers questions from people who, it seems, don’t quite get where he’s coming from. After that, Gem and I purchase some stickers and whatnot to support the FSF, and rms signs my copy of Free Software, Free Society — but refuses to sign the O’Reilly Emacs book that Gem had brought, because it’s not free. Hmm. We head out to the bus stop, and debate the hackability of networked bus stop signs that tell you when the next bus is due — though this one, for all it’s right next to the computer science department of one of the top universities in the world, insists that there’s no bus due when, in fact, there is. Oh well. Back to the train, grabbing a cup of coffee on the way. On the train, Skippy and I debate the value of free software for reading data from the onboard computer in modern cars. Back in London, Skippy takes us to CCK (very nice coffee and cake, even if the artwork is, um, "interesting"), and Gem discusses the website with the manager. This is followed by a mad dash across London as we try to get back to Paddington on time for the last train before the sleeper service — we make it, but barely.

Skippy abandons us again at Reading, and we’re left to sit around while the train waits for engineering works. We finally get back to Plymouth just before 0100.

On Tuesday afternoon, I saw a message on the Debian-UK mailing list, announcing a gathering in a pub in London. The conversation in #termisoc went like this:

<@bma> Hey hex42.
<@bma> Would going to London for a drink be crazy?
<@hex42> just for a drink, yes
<@bma> http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/debian-uk/2008-January/011130.html
<@hex42> but i suppose it depends on the drink
<@hex42> if it made me immortal i would
<@hex42> OK, that looks interesting
<@hex42> you want to go?
<@hex42> just because it's crazy doesn't mean we shouldn't do it

So, Wednesday afternoon after my lecture, Gem and I found ourselves at Plymouth station waiting for the 12:55 to Paddington. For once, the journey went smoothly; we got into London, took the tube to Leicester Square (because we knew there was a Pizza Hut there), had pizza. Next step was to get to Westminster Station (a journey, as it happens, of less than a mile). However, it was by now right in the middle of rush hour, and there’s no direct tube—so, we thought, let’s change at Green Park, two stops from Leicester Square and one from Westminster. Got to Green Park. Couldn’t get near the Jubilee Line train. Bugger. Went upstairs to the Victoria Line platform, thinking we’d go to Victoria station (one stop) then Circle/District line to Westminster (two stops, again). Platform not so busy, but train ridiculously so. Back downstairs, onto the Jubilee Line train, almost getting my bag stuck in the door and having to crouch uncomfortably in the doorway. Off at Westminster, now to find St. Steven’s Tavern. Directions say "turn right when you exit". Very useful, we thought, until it turned out that it really is right next door.

Now came the fun part. There are a few Debian developers I’d recognise, though not many, and I wasn’t sure if any of them would actually be there. We ended up waiting outside until someone (Adam Barratt, if I remember correctly) recognised Gem’s Debian shirt, who in turn called James Bromberger, who’d sent the email and would therefore hopefully know what was going on (and who happened to be right around the corner). We went inside, and attempted to find somewhere to sit. Eventually, various others turned up (Lars Wirzenius, Colin Watson, Steve Langasek, Jorge Castro, Steve McIntyre, Neil McGovern, James Westby, and others whose names I didn’t catch).

Had some interesting conversations, including about the differences between Scandinavian languages, and also advice on getting involved in Debian (I now have a couple of things which I intend to try packaging, one of which would depend on my finding out why it broke…).

Getting home was interesting, to say the least—the tube journey back to Paddington was straightforward, but when we got to the train we discovered that being on the sleeper service doesn’t necessarily mean you get a bed—or even a seat on which you can put the arm up. I was extremely glad to get home to an actual bed. Hopefully, though, I’ll get to go along to more Debiany events in future (with actual ID, so people will sign my key without getting very drunk first).

Update: Jorge Castro blogged about the meeting, and posted a photo. There should be another, where I don’t look like such a fool, but I forget who took it.

Hmm. DebConf 8 looks like it’ll be in Argentina next summer…wonder if I could beat Seth’s record for random long-distance travel.

Okay, so maybe it’s not so random if I’m considering it eighteen months in advance.