November 7 to 8 2015 Düsseldorf (Germany)

Article by Humdinger - 10. November 2015 - Haiku OS

BeGeistert 029 was once more a quite small gathering, with 14 Haiku users attending, plus one father, girlfriend, wife and baby.
Puck was there the second year in a row, bringing Colin's desktop machine with him, which was left behind when Colin moved to New Zealand. (How is Colin these days?) Another new face to BeGeistert: Markus "TwoFX", one of our finalists in the Google Code-In 2014 and contributer of various patches since. He brought his girlfriend Leslie, who pleasantly doubled the number of attending females.

I arrived later than usual on Saturday, but with perfect timing for lunch - I'm gifted that way - and so, after the meal, BeGeistert was already in full swing. People discussing their latest ideas, chatting, or in my case keeping Axel away from real work by having him show me how to split some massive commit into more easily to handle smaller ones. Also, my iprowifi4965 refused to connect to the WPA encrypted BeGeistert WLAN, as did Adrien's machine, so we used good old tethered LAN...

We had three talks planned for this BeGeistert, but our timetable was thwarted by the lack of a projector (which Germans wrongly call "Beamer", as Jonathan reminded us :)). Maybe one would be available in the evening, but after our dinner at a Spanish restaurant in the Altstadt and a traditional round of "Killepitsch" (a herbal liquor), nobody was really in the mood. So the talks were postponed to Sunday.
Which has its own problems, because as people stay up late into the night, they tend to sleep in.

When finally everyone was groomed, fed and present on Sunday, it was 11am when we had our first talk of the day: Julian presented his work on the app_server. It was the most in-depth and well prepared of the talks this day. There are slides of his talk "Improve app_server for WebKit" which I recommend to view alongside the video.

Then lunch.

The second talk was Axel's introduction to the launch_daemon. For the video I used Daat's footage, because there are no slides and with its higher resolution, you can see what's going on on the screen. There are problems with it too, however. The beginning seconds are audio only, as well as a bit in the middle, where Daat had to change batteries (good to have a separate audio recording). Also, Axel stands in the way a bit sometimes and it's all a bit dark... :).
For more info, see also the wiki topic on the launch_daemon.

A little break. Coffee.

Last but not least, our final talk by François on porting stuff to Haiku, see the video and his massive slides. Took him 40 minutes to list all the stuff he started, finished or plans to port in the past 10 years... "Too many ports". :)

I have uploaded the few crappy photos I took. I know Zoltan took a few as well, as did Jérôme and Daniel, of course. Maybe they'll provide a link to theirs in the comments? The same goes for possible other reports.

So... that was more or less it for the BeGeistert week-end. The following week, Adrien and Julian continued with the CodeSprint, with François, Jonathan and Olivier staying the Monday and Jérôme with Michaela and tiny Alexis leaving on Wednesday. Axel and Rene took off work for the week to participate from home, which is awesome!
There'll be another report by all the code sprinters, detailing who did what, how and why after they've crossed the finish line and caught their breath a bit.

As usual for the past few years, BeGeistert has run on a loss. Together with the CodeSprint it takes about 35 attendees to break even; we were only 14. Many thanks to Haiku Inc. for once again stepping into the breach! Of course it would be much better if more people came to BeGeistert...
Also, thanks to Andrew Hudson, who has donated generously once more to the beverages for our code sprinters!

See you all again next year in Düsseldorf!




BeGeistert 029 Report - November 7 to 8 2015 Düsseldorf (Germany)

Article by DaaT - 12. November 2015 - IsComputerOn

As I'm sure everyone's aware, this past weekend BeGeistert 029 took place, once again in Dusseldorf, and in fact, the Coding Sprint is still going. After not being able to attend last year, I made sure to be there this time and it was, as usual, a fun geeky weekend. This time there were about 17 of us, so not the highest head count of all time but it was still good for a laugh.

Let's see what I can remember happened...

This time around I was the first one to arrive at the Hostel (yay!) and had to wait about 15mns before the next one got there, which turned out to be Axel. After another while, Charlie and François arrived and it turns out I was not the first one (boo!), since François arrived in DUS at... 6 in the morning, after taking the night train (and having his money stolen there, which sucks). As the evening went on, a few more attendees arrived and overall Friday was a very quiet evening, though it did see the first BG-originated-commit, from Axel if I recall correctly.

As usual, everyone else arrived on Saturday and started working on different projects, such as the launch_daemon and clang. Speaking of launch_daemon, on Saturday evening Axel took the stage and a discussion followed on what name to give the command with which to operate the launch_daemon (as in, getting information, etc). The name that ended up being picked was launch_roster. Here's a photo of the occasion:



As is also the norm on Saturday, most of us went into town for dinner, this time to a Spanish restaurant. Dinner was fun and it was, of course, followed by a nice glass of Killepitsch! A glass which, being small and shot-like, I like to drink like it was a shot, though others (looking at you Charlie) prefer to sip it slowly. Amateurs...



Sunday was presentation day and things kick off early with Julian (aka jua) presenting his work on the app_server, intended to improve not only the rendering speed of WebPositive, but to extend the app_server's capabilities. It was a very interesting presentation and the demo at the end, impressive, though Julian is the first to say there's still further room for improvement and adding even more functions. His goal at the time was to merge his work by the end of the Sprint.

After Julian's presentation, it was Axel's turn. His presentation was, of course, on his launch_daemon work, comparing it to the current setup in terms of, for example, flexibility, and also on how he would like to improve it further, in the coming weeks. Following each presentation there was a QA session which as usual, led to further discussion about the work they're doing.

The final presentation of the day (and of BeGeistert) was François' slide-fest (132 if I remember), where he went over a list of most (but not all) of his porting projects. I didn't take any photos during the presentations because I was filming them, along with Humdinger, who should have the videos up on his YouTube page in the not-so-distant future. I did take some other photos though, which you can see below, including one of Haiku's newest (in more ways than one):



And here are some more photos, ending with a nice pano shot from the Rhein, near the hostel:

   

 


(the lights vertically aligned on the tower above, are actually a clock, showing hours, minutes and seconds, from top to bottom respectively, showing this photo was taken at 22:30:52)



As Sunday moved on, people started leaving and about mid-afternoon it was my turn, only those attending the Sprint staying behind. Overall, it was a fun, though not particularly busy BeGeistert and I'd like to thank Charlie, Humdinger and the HSA for once again making it happen.



More Informations

Photos by miqlas
Coding sprint report

Made available by BeSly, the Haiku, BeOS and Zeta knowledge base.