OSNews

Sunday
Blasted by Music again on Sunday morning though this time I managed 5 hours sleep.

More Python
I didn't attend the talk on encryption in Zeta but myself and Giuseppe Gargaro managed to get an introduction to Python from Charlie.

I've seen bits of Python before and I very much like the concept of a powerful but easy to use language but never really been introduced to it. Many of the concepts are very similar to Perl which I've used quite a bit but the syntax is completely different and much easier to understand. Like Perl, Python is generally considered as a scripting language and can do much of the same stuff in much the same way but can and is used for bigger projects as well. I think one of the biggest differences between Python and Perl is the readability, Perl is a nice language to use but it's very easy to make code completely unreadable, I know one person who once described it as a write-only language! Python on the other hand is designed to be readable by people who don't even know the language and this is very good for readability.

OpenBeOS Media Kit.
Marcus Overhagen gave us an update of the Media kit he's been working on. Things have obviously moved along here as we were shown movies being played with different codecs including MPEG 4 and Ogg. Movies can also be played simultaneously.

One thing I was not aware of was the addition of support for 6 channel sound schemes so you'll be able to play DVDs complete with 5.1 surround sound. There's lot of work gone and going into the Media Kit and Marcus is doing excellent work. OpenBeOS is moving along, it's no easy or short progress but they have some very good developers working on it.

Marcus has however had his own share of controversy recently when he decided to charge for a gigabit ethernet driver he's recently developed. Some have asked why it was not free but Marcus's reply is that it took him around 40 hours work to develop the driver and wanted to earn something back for it, he's not exactly going to sell truck loads of licenses so it's not as if he's going to get rich of this.

People seem to be under the impression that drivers are free, this may be the case for open source stuff but the majority of drivers have been developed by paid developers, you pay for this as part of the hardware or OS cost so you don't generally see this. Marcus is perfectly entitled to charge for a driver, if people don't want to pay for his hard work perhaps they should try working for free and see how they like it.

Digital Annoyances
As ever I had annoyed everyone by taking pictures of them but this time I had a better camera so I was a better quality annoyance at 6 times the resolution. Everyone seemed to have a digital camera this time so it'd be pretty hard to avoid having your picture taken.

Of course with film cameras when you run out of film you just reload, no worries about needing to download your pictures or recharge your batteries. My CF card was nearly full on Saturday night but not having a computer with me I had to get the pictures off it. I knew Macs could recognised my camera without any special drivers so Peter and Nadia Stegemann allowed me to use their iBook to download the images. Then I had to find a way of keeping the images but their iBook didn't have a CD-Burner so I transferred the pictures to Marcus' PC, he didn't have a burner either but he did have a FTP server so I could then move the pictures to anywhere else. Eventually I found Francois had a burner so I got the pictures transferred again and finally burned to CD.

Why am I telling you all this? Because on Sunday afternoon I got talking to Jan-Rixt Van Hoye who had written a plug-in for Exposure (an image downloading program) which happens to speak PTP. PTP is a recent protocol for communicating with digital cameras and it turns out my camera speaks it.... aaaarrrrrrrrrrgggggg!!!

Another developer I got speaking to is Oliver Tappe who wrote the Beam (BEware Another Mailer) mail client. Having recently switched back to BeOS I needed a new client as BeMail can no longer log onto my mail server. Beam works fine in this regard and also handles multiple mail accounts which BeMail couldn't. I was wonder why it couldn't send Word attachments and he suggested that BeOS had not correctly identified the .doc and gave it the wrong mime type, when I got home I tried changing the mime type and low and behold it works fine.

Closing
Sunday afternoon most people started to pack up and go home, in the evening those remaining moved to a smaller room and stayed there for a while. Some of us went for a meal at a nearby restaurant which, like Saturdays meal was plentiful and absolutely delicious. Eventually most of the rest left for home leaving only those who were remaining for Sunday night (our car and the YellowTab guys). As usual we sat up most of the night chatting though I was a lot more talkative than usual (I can be after a few drinks), I think one of us remaining had a few too many drinks though - you know who you are :-)

Eventually even us stragglers went home the next day, I slept most of the way back and Jerome managed to deliver me almost to my door. Once I was back I went back to sleep, then I got up had something to eat and went back to bed again, think I tired or something? Thankfully though my dinner didn't try and kill me this time.

All in all BeGeistert was a fun and informative event, as indeed it always is. It is also becoming increasingly international with I think 7 nationalities present this time including groups from Italy and France.

By physically getting people together you find they get on and discuss things much more rationally than on-line where the lack of emotional content means comments are very often taken differently from the way they are intended. Many developers attend BeGeistert, these are the real backbone of the community and are not the people spreading rumours. You have people from YellowTab, OpenBeOS and users and developers of various systems all in one room and it's a very productive and fun environment.

The Pictures (6 pages)
As mentioned I took quite a few pictures at the event, I actually took around 200 but don't worry, I've since selected the best, sorted, cropped and generally tweaked them. I even tried to name people this time (Thanks to Marcus Overhagen for putting names on his site!) - Enjoy!

There are quite a few other sets of pictures and reviews out already and some of these proved rather useful for remembering the details of talks etc - Thanks!

Other Reviews:
French
English
German
Turkish (with Pictures)
Itialian (with Pictures)
Jerome Duval (pictures)

Other Pictures:
Marcus Overhagen
Begasus
Don't know who took these

By Nicholas Blachford