foss-north 2017: Call for Papers

The Call for Papers for foss-north is open for another week (until the 12th). This gives you an opportunity to speak in front of a great crowd. Looking at the results from last year’s questionnaire, more than 90% are users of open source software and more than 50% are contributors. One thing that surprised me, is that more people actually contribute as a part of their profession than as hobbyists. Looking at the professional vs hobbyist proportions, 45% of the visitors stated that they had their ticket paid by their employer/school, while 42% paid them out of their own pocket.

The topic of the conference is free and open source – so anything related is much welcome.We do not even limit ourselves to software – hardware, patents, community and much more is also appreciated topics. Last year we had speakers talking about timing synchronization over vast networks, patent issues, working as a designer, linguistics and must more.

As always with these things, crowd dynamics means that me as an organizer has to work on my stress management abilities. Almost 30% of the tickets to last year’s event was sold in the last two days before the event. The same goes for Call for Papers – nobody registers a talk in good time before the deadline. So if you want to help an ageing developer keeping the pulse under control – submit your talk proposal now! ;-)

kdenlive, audacity and lessons in audio sync

During the last foss-gbg meeting I tried filming the entire event. The idea is to produce videos of each talk and publish them on YouTube. Since I’m lazy, I simply put up a camera on a tripod and recorder the whole event, some 3h and 16 minutes and a few seconds. A few seconds that would cause me quite some pain, it turns out.

All started with me realizing that I can hear the humming sound of the AC system in the video. No problem, simply use ffmpeg to separate the audio from the video and use the noise reduction filter in Audacity. However, when putting it all together I recognized a sound sync drift (after 6h+ of rendering videos, that is).

ffprobe told me that the video is 03:16:07.58 long, while the extracted audio is 03:16:04.03. This means that the video of the last speaker drifts more than 3s – unwatchable. So, googling for a solution, I realized that I will have to try to stretch the audio to the same duration as the video. Audacity has a tempo effect to do this, but I could not get the UI to accept my very small adjustment in tempo (or my insane number of seconds in the clip). Instead, I had to turn to ffmpeg and the atempo filter.

ffmpeg -i filtered.ac3 -filter:a "atempo=0.9996983236995207" -vn slower.ac3

This resulted in an audio clip of the correct length. (By the way, the factor is the difference in length of the audio and video).

Back to kdenlive – I imported the video clip, put it on the time line, separated the audio and video (just a right click away), ungrouped them, removed the audio, added the filtered, slowed down audio, grouped it with the video and everything seems nice. I about 1h43 I will know when the first clip has been properly rendered :-)

foss-north 2017

After much preparation, the tickets for foss-north 2017 is available at foss-north.se – grab them while they are hot!

The call for papers is still open (do you want to talk – register!) so we do not have a final schedule, but you will find our confirmed speakers on the web site as we grow the list. Right now, we know that have the pleasure to introduce:

  • Lydia Pintscher, the product manager of Wikidata, Wikimedia’s knowledge base, as well as the president of KDE e.V.
  • Lennart Poettering, from Red Hat known for systemd, PulseAudio, Avahi and more.
  • Jos Poortvliet, with a background from SUSE and KDE, he now heads marketing at Nextcloud.

The conference covering both software and hardware from the technical perspective. The event is held on April 26 in central Gothenburg located between Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm with an international airport.

This is a great excuse to visit a really nice part of Sweden while attending a nice conference – welcome!

foss-gbg on Wednesday

If you happen to be in Gothenburg on Wednesday you are most welcome to visit foss-gbg. It is a free event (you still have to register so that we can arrange some light food) starting at 17.00.

The topics are Yocto Linux on FPGA-based hardware, risk and license management in open source projects and a product release by the local start-up Zifra (an encryptable SD-card).

More information and free tickets are available at the foss-gbg site.

Welcome!

gbgcpp

Another interesting weeks has passed by. We held our first Gothenburg C++ meetup with a nice turn up. We met at the Pelagicore offices in Gothenburg (thanks for the fika) and decided on a format, the cadence and future topics for the group. If you want a primer in C++ and Qt in the next few months, make sure to join us! All the details are on the gbgcpp meetup page. For those of you not based in Gothenburg, there is a Sweden C++ group based in Stockholm.

Some other, more work related news: Pelagicore are changing offices in Gothenburg and it will be an Upgrade with a capital U! We’ve signed for a really nice office space just across the street from the opera and less than five minutes from the central train station and the Brunnsparken public transport hub of Gothenburg. And as always – we are looking for developers – hint, hint ;-)

Finally, do not forget that fosdem starts in a week. I’m going, so I’ll see you in Brussels!

Building communities

As some of you might know I’ve been involved in the foss-gbg group for a long while (more than 3 years now). Last year I helped starting the foss-north conference, which is really about taking what foss-gbg is and turning it into something bigger. We had a great turn-up – over 100 guests and ten great speakers.

This week, I finally got time to start pushing forward with this year’s edition of foss-north. It will be held on April 26 in Gothenburg and it is a great opportunity to visit Sweden and Gothenburg and mingle with the FOSS community. We’ve already confirmed Lydia Pintscher and Lennart Poettering as speakers. If you want to speak the call for paper has just opened and will run until March 12. Tickets sales will open shortly too, as well as the call for sponsors.

By a random chance I got involved in the organization of yet another group this week. The C++ meetup community in Gothenburg has been inactive for almost a year, so a group of people decided to pick up the ball and try to get something running. We’ve renamed the group to gbgcpp and the next (our first) meeting will be held January 26, and then we will take it from there. Hopefully this can turn into something fun!

Summary of 2016

So, 2016 has been a great year to me. Interesting in many aspects, but most has turned out to be for the better. I’ve gotten to know a bunch of awesome new people, I spoken about open source, Qt and Linux in Europe and USA, I’ve helped hosting an open source conference in Gothenburg, I’ve learned so much more professionally and as a person, and I’ve really enjoyed myself the whole time.

2016 was the year that…

  • … myself and Jürgen where Qt Champions for our work with the qmlbook. It feels really great getting recognition for this work. I really want to take QML Book further – during 2016 both myself and Jürgen have been too busy to do a good job improving and extending the text.
  • … I had to opportunity to visit the Americas (Oregon and California) for the first time in my life. Felt really nice having been on another continent. Now it is only Africa and Australia left on the list :-)

  • … I picked up running and has run every week throughout the year, averaging almost 10km per week. This is the first year since we built out house and had kids (so 11 or 12 years) that I’ve maintained a training regime over a full year.
  • … foss-gbg went from a small user group of 15-30 people meeting every month to something much larger. On May 26 the first foss-north took place. This is something some friends of mine and myself have discussed for years and when we finally dared to try it was a great success. We filled the venue with 110 guests and ten speakers and had a great day in the sunshine. In the events after foss-north, the local group, foss-gbg has attracted 40-60 people per meeting, so double the crowd.

  • … Pelagicore, the start-up I joined in 2010 when we were only 6 employees, was acquired by Luxoft. We had grown to 50+ employees in the mean time and put Qt, Linux and open source on the automotive map. It has been a great journey and I feel that we being a part of something bigger lets us reach even further, so I’m really excited about this.

2017 will be the year that…

  • … I make more time for writing – on qmlbook, this blog and more.
  • … I improve my running and increase my average distance per run as well as distance per week.
  • … foss-north will take place again. This time with double the audience and dual tracks for parts of the day. I will share more information as it develops. This time, the date to aim for is April 26. In the mean time, foss-gbg will have fewer, but larger, meetings.
  • … Qt, Linux and open source becomes the natural choice in automotive. I will do my best to help this turn out true!

Even as 2016 has been really good, I hope that 2017 will be even greater. I’m really looking forward to learning!

foss-north follow-up

The time to summarize the foss-north event has come. I’d like to start by thanking everyone – speakers, sponsors and visitors – you all made it a great event!

After the event I sent out a questionnaire which made for some interesting reading. About 30% of the visitors have replied to the questions, so I feel that the input is fairly representative.

First of all, everyone who joined the event seems happy with it. Almost everyone are likely or very likely to come next year and the same goes for recommending a friend. This sounds like a great starting point for the 2017 event.

foss-north-will-you-come

When it comes to the scheduling, the results are a bit ambiguous. It seems that everyone wants more contents, but it is harder to tell if two days or two tracks is the way to go. I am also a bit torn on this subject. Two days mean that some people might not be able to make it due to it taking too much time, but two tracks means that everyone, even those who have the time, will miss half the contents.

foss-north-how-many-days

All this data and much more will be incorporated into an event summary report that will be made available soon. We are also looking into the details of setting up next year’s event, so stay tuned for a date and venue.

foss-north – Schedule available

Just a short update on foss-north – the schedule is up. We have a whole list of speakers that I’m super excited about and tickets are selling well. I still don’t know what to expect, but more than 1/3 of the tickets are gone and the sales numbers are actually even better for the full priced tickets than the early birds.

Speakers will cover everything from design, methodology, licensing, embedded tech, networking, IoT, start-ups, innovation – a broad spectrum demonstrating the versatility of free and open source.

To sum things up – it looks like we might actually pull this off and I still can treat my family with a vacation instead of paying for unused catering ;-)