I promised I would blog during Akademy(for some people it’s my trip to Ireland), but I had found no time and motivation to do so. Sorry, shit happens 
and better late than never. So I’ll try do a quick resume of each day at Akademy, loaded with KDE, peoples, Guiness, etc…
I arrived in Dublin the 22th September at 12h00 GMT after about 14 hours of traveling. At Airport I have met George Staikos, Jeff Tranter(Xandros) and his wife. We have take the cab together and I discovered the hostel. At the hostel I’ve met with some German KDE people and Ollivier Goffart, my Belgium colleague on Kopete. We went to the Trinity College to check our registration, discover the PC huts and eat. At the night, we went to the Kennedy’s Bar with KDE people when Johann payed me my first Guinness, and I was addicted ever since.
First day(Saturday 23 September) was the first day of the conference, the first keynote was done by Aaron Seigo about the KDE identity. See his slides to find out. I attended mostly all KDE4 tracks(so Plasma, Solid, Phonon, Akonadi, Decibel) and also Keith Packard from X.org demo’ed us the new hot plugging feature for upcoming Xorg 7.2 (it was about time !!). At night, we got a shitload of pizza and free Guinness from Nokia, one of the sponsors. We had a box of pizza per person.
Second day(Sunday 24 September) was the last day of the conference, I attended the KDE4 Dev Setup HOWTO and my life was changed. ZSH rocks, expect for non support for UTF-8. Download the David Faure and your developer life will be changed. The CMake, KJSEmbed(now called Jasmin according to the rumours) and Kross(which I want to be in kdelibs) talks were interesting. At the night,we went once again to the Kennedy’s Bar for the end conference supper. There I met the Telepathy guys, very nice guys. I hanged out with David Faure where he was doing the new KDirModel for kdelibs and a user pointed us a bug in Kopete and David helped me try to find out the source of the bug. The source is the f**** QObject timers that the smooth scrolling is using. To see, run Kopete with strace. This was really great experience, I think this is what they call the “Akademy effect”.
Third day(Monday 25 September) was a travel day for me and Johann and the KDE e.V meeting, well for the members of KDE e.V :P. We went into the city and we came back just in time for the group photo as seen of KDE Dot News. We were not aware of the group photo so we were very lucky. At the night, we were invited on a party to Google Ireland HQ. Free food and beer once again. We met a Kopete small contributor here working at Google. After we went to a bar with Telepathy guys and Robert bought me once again beer. But the moment of the evening was an anonymous young coder who got really drunk. He danced, singed, lunch up his laptop under GNOME(he’s a KDE guy) and started wrote a “patch” from GNOME.
Four day(Tuesday 26 September), first hacking session. I setuped my new KDE4 development environment using David Faure’s way. Icecream rocks, it compiled damn fast. We spoke about Kopete implication into Telepathy. I decided to do a testbed protocol that use Telepathy and QtTapioca to test if Telepathy is the way to go. That night, we went a couple of people to a Japanese restaurant, it was really nice. After we have done a Kopete IRC meeting to define the plan for the future. Some people asked if we were going to make available some of our widgets and about a frontend/backend split and about Telepathy. The plan is to have first a testbed Telepathy protocol and then try to make our protocol plugins available as Telepathy connection manager. This was also the last day for the Telepathy guys and time to say good bye. I’ve taken a picture of Rob while going crazy on git.
Fifth day(Wednesday 27 September), Duncan came in 
The Kopete team at Dublin was complete. I started doing the CMake files and the protocol stub for Telepathy. Johann did for me a temporary icon, which cause me some trouble after. I misnamed some icons(ie svn delete then svn add) so I’ve got problems when trying to commit. So trying to fix it, I reverted the stub I just have done. So at the Chinese restaurant, I rewrote fast that stub. Phew, that was close. Also at the hostel we met two pretty girls
Sixth day(Thursday 28 September), still a productive hacking day. I started the Edit account UI for the Telepathy protocol. At night me and Johann went to the Kennedy’s bar for supper because it was close to not loose time. I also assisted the first round of Lightening Talks where people presented their stuff in a 5-10 minutes presentation. Marble, Kerry and KFormula SoC(and others) were presented. Also the presentation of KLDraw by Korean dude Junkyu Park(aka segfault) amazed the audience and that same audience say the same thing I told him some day earlier, to release his software
Seventh day(Friday 29 September, on the hacking side, I finally read and write the settings for the Telepathy account. Another round of Lightening Talks. Albert and Pino presented the state of okular. Friedrich Kossebau presented his contacts applet framework. And 5 minutes before the talks(it wasn’t planned that I present Gamefu), I started setting up emulators and ROMs on my laptop to demonstrate Gamefu to the audience. It was well received and I’ve got some questions about Gamefu the next days :). At night we went to a “Korean” restaurant which was in fact a Chinese restaurant. Cho and Park(the two Korean guys at Akademy) were with us so they could confirm that this restaurant wasn’t a real Korean one. After the restaurant, we found a real Korean restaurant nearby. It was funny.
Last day(Saturday 30 September), last day of Akademy. This experience of my life was awesome. Except for the hostel, I liked every moment of it. So I still hacked on the Telepathy protocol and just before the close of the PC Huts, I got the protocol plugin to work and commited right after. Gof left in the day and it was the last night with Johann and Duncan. The night was awful, but awful. Me and Johann tried to sleep, but with the heat, the noise of the bars nearby, the clicktety of 2 laptops in the room, it was near impossible and we wanted to woke early in the morning. This pissed us and we cursed about the hostel.
First return day(Sunday 1 October), so we finally woke up, still cursing about the hostel. We got our cab to the airport. There I found out that my flight was delayed. Great 
I said goodbye to Johann and I went to my gate. My fight was supposed to depart at 11h30 but actually we left the airport near 13h00. And we needed to disembark at Shannon, Ireland, another little delay. I was afraid that I could miss my correspondence at Toronto airport. At Toronto airport I needed to take my luggage to pass the customs. I ran to my departure gate and arrived just in time for the begin of the boarding. Phew that was close ! Between Toronto and Montreal, my eardrums started to hurt so in Montreal so I started to have a weird effect when hearing. In Montreal I meet up with a friend I haven’t seen in a long time that live in Montreal, it was really nice After a week in a cheap hostel, the night at the 4 star hotel was awesome. I got an overjoy
Back home(Monday 2 October), I’m finally home. Went to the Cegep to meet friends there and try to be ready for the next day of school Man this is really heard going back to school after a KDE conference.
I would like to say hi to all people I met in Dublin. This was really nice and I’m looking forward to speak to you next time. Maybe not next year though :(. People I remember: Kopete Team(Duncan, Will, Olivier, Johann), Kevin Krammer, David Faure, Tobias Hunger, Gavin Paterson, Tobias Köning, Friedrich Kossebau, Aaron Seigo, Adriaan de Groot, Rainer Endres, Sebastian Kügler, Richardo Iaconelli, Lubos Lunak, Junkyu Park, Reinhold Kainhofer, Hubert Figuière, Josef Spillner, Kévin Ottens, Martijn Klingens, Jos van dan Oever, Dirk Müller, Pino Toscano, Adam Treat, Sebastian Sauer, Matthias Kretz, David Vignoli, Robert McQueen, Rob Taylor, Olaf Jan Schmidt, Cho Sung-Jae, Knut Yarvin(Trolltech Community Manager), Richard Dale, Johnathan Riddel, Bartosz Fabianowski, Thomas Zander, Waldo Bastian, George Staikos, Jeff Tranter, Jakob Petsovits and much other people. If you remember me(and mostly if you are not on this list), please me say hi on IRC(nickname: DarkShock)
Some photos of the first day at Akademy 2006
One Response to “ Akademy resume (better late than never) ”
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We left 3 hours late from Shannon due to a mechanical problem on the aircraft. Most people got rescheduled for their connection. I was just late.