Hello. I'd like to discuss some ideas for talks with you, before sending more official invitations to project mailing lists asking if a speaker is available.
Personally I'd really like: * A talk about the new GNU/Hurd distribution and/or recent developments (I think Samuel Thibault is working on SATA DDE, for example); * A talk about the new Guile virtual machine; * A tutorial talk on writing GCC frontends (if the topic isn't too hopelessly wide). As a more vague idea, I'd like one or more talks showing how great hackers work. Let me explain: I'm a command-line guy. I use Emacs, I do shell scripts, I use a tiling window manager; I have a very personalized setup on all my machines. I'm sure the same is true for many of you: to a beginner what we do is magic. I've been asked questions about my setup many times by some stranger in awe who happened to be looking behind my shoulder. However I'm not a master at most of the things I do. With Emacs, for example: not at all. I've seen real masters at work, and they're maybe as far away from me as I am from a beginner. Is it possible in your opinion to do something concrete to shorten this distance, on some topic? Just a 45-minute list of tips sound too unstructured, but maybe an expert could perform some interesting prestidigitation for us in 30 seconds, and then redo the same thing in slow motion during the following 45 minutes, explaining every step. Emacs, GIMP, whatever. -- Luca Saiu Home page: http://ageinghacker.net GNU epsilon: http://www.gnu.org/software/epsilon Marionnet: http://marionnet.org
