Acts of Volition

I spent last week in New England visiting some clients, friends, and geeks. The geeks part was at the Linux World Expo and Fedora Users & Developers Conference. I’ve posted some photos from the trip.

The Linux World Expo was comprised mostly of creepy salesmen at booths with microphones giving out penguin toys made by children in Malaysia (I presume). It was definitely aimed at corporate middle-management types. There was much talk of “deploying comprehensive integrated solutions on a L.A.M.P. stack. All about the stacks. It was worth visiting for a few hours if only to witness the sheer spectacle of it all.

I then visited the Fedora Users & Developers Conference (cleverly named FUDcon) at Photonics Center at Boston University. There were some interesting talks and some more interesting people. The contrast from FUDcon to the Linux World Expo was quite striking (salesmen talking loudly into cellphones vs. geeks, doing stuff). Video of the FUDcon talks will be posted on the FUDcon website soon.

Screenshot of Roadster mapping Boston. See the full-size version.

The trip was also an opportunity to meet up with Ian McIntosh, who I had met at the fall Boston Gnome Summit. He is working on a project that I am very excited about. Roadster is a street mapping application for Gnome/Linux much like Microsoft’s Streets & Trips.

Ian is just getting going on the project, but it is already quite promising and has some key potential contributors interested. Carl Worth, maintainer of Cairo, the graphics package that Roadster uses to render map, was quite enthusiastic about the project and eager to help improve the rendering speeds (it’s pretty slow right now). Eric Raymond, who maintains the GPSD package for GPS tracking devices on Linux was also interested. My own friend and co-worker, Nathan Fredrickson is also helping out.

It was fascinating to see a young project spark enthusiasm and participation from people like that. Several people told me that Microsoft Streets & Trips was the only reason they still keep a Windows partition on their laptops and would love and alternative.

Roadster is still a young project, but there is a Roadster website, a development wiki, and a roadster-devel mailing list if you are interested in helping out.