Behdad Esfahbod's daily notes on GNOME, Pango, Fedora, Persian Computing, Bob Dylan, and Dan Bern!

My Photo
Name:
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Ask Google.

Contact info
Google
Hacker Emblem Become a Friend of GNOME I Power Blogger
follow me on Twitter
Archives
July 2003
August 2003
October 2003
November 2003
December 2003
March 2004
April 2004
May 2004
July 2004
August 2004
September 2004
November 2004
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
July 2007
August 2007
September 2007
October 2007
November 2007
December 2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
May 2008
June 2008
July 2008
August 2008
October 2008
November 2008
December 2008
January 2009
March 2009
April 2009
May 2009
June 2009
July 2009
August 2009
November 2009
December 2009
March 2010
April 2010
May 2010
June 2010
July 2010
October 2010
November 2010
April 2011
May 2011
August 2011
September 2011
October 2011
November 2011
November 2012
June 2013
January 2014
May 2015
Current Posts
McEs, A Hacker Life
Saturday, October 08, 2011
 In Montréal for “Boston” Summit

After a crazy Oktoberfest party in Kitchener last night, I woke up at 6:45 this morning, drove back to Toronto, took the ferry to the Island, took a Porter flight to Montréal, took the 747 downtown, took the 165 up to Queen Mary, walked up the hill to Polytechnique to arrive at the GNOME “Boston” Summit. Found Matthias, Owen, Ryan, and Andreas in the hallway, shook hands and received hugs, and felt right at home!

Inside, saw Colin and Marina among a few other familiar faces and many new ones. Marina explained that the reason she looks so sleepy is that she was blogging Ada Lovelace Day last night at 3am. Which of course reminded me that it was Finding Ada yesterday. So I thought I hereby list my own pick of women that I have had the pleasure to work with, and who, in my opinion, have made a lasting contribution to GNOME. Now I don't have to preach these awesome women to this crowd, so I'll just summarize my own experience with them in a two lines. In no particular order:

Marina Zhurakhinskaya has been critical to the Women Outreach Program success and happening in recent years, so for that alone she deserves a special mention. That's independent of she being part of the every-awesome GNOME Shell team. Plus, she's so nice and great to hangout with in person.

Stormy Peters wrote in her job application for the GNOME Executive Director as part of her responsibilities to be the "mom". And she delivered! It was a pleasure being on the board when she was in charge. Plus, she's so energetic she brightens everyone around her whereever she goes!

Karen Sandler is awesome in spite of being a lawyer! I have not had the opportunity to work with her in her new role, but at the Software Freedom Law Center, she was a great resource to the GNOME board, and much easier to get hold of than, well, other Free Software lawyers. Now, I did not actually know about her DJ hobby (check her website!) and wedding invitation until today. Waiting to run into her here to learn more :-D.

Rosanna Yuen is hard to find on Planet GNOME, and that's a shame. Many may not know her, she's sometimes better recognized as zana. Fortunately she's been making more regular appearance at GUADEC. Anyway, it's hard to imagine anything in the Board / Foundation level getting happened without her back-office work. She moves the money, she keeps the book, she knows what happened in the board five years ago! Plus, sometimes researches and books the venue for Boston Summit too.

At GUADEC this year, and at the Summit today I had the opportunity to meet a few young ladies rather new to the GNOME family: Pat, Kat, Meg, and Nohemi: you girls rock! I hope I blog about you for the years to come!

Went for lunch with Marina and Owen, had a great Thai chicken green curry, and talked food. I was thinking about a small project to hack on while at the summit and I thought I pickup rewrapping lines in vte / gnome-terminal upon width change. It's a well-defined well-contained problem, I have a design in mind, and one of the most common requests against vte. I passed my design past Owen, we agreed that it should work, and I hope that's what I'm going to hack on. Stay tuned!

I want to close by a picture of my favorite GNOME artist with the coolest hair style:


[Woah, long post! Been a while since I last did that...]

Labels: , ,