For the past year or so I’ve been working with Mirko, Sebastian and Karl together at Agile Workers UG. In this time things have gone really well. From the beginning we had plans to grow the company and now we’re there.

Mirko and I have both had experiences working in software consulting companies and, thus, we inevitably developed ideas and values that we wanted to feed into any new company we’d found. One of the most important of these was that employees that invest their time and dedication should be given a strong voice in, and a share of, the company. In our current form (UG) this is not possible and was always considered a temporary solution. Thus, we are currently taking the final steps through the German bureaucratic forest to form a share holders company (AG) which allows us the flexibility to offer employees both a share of the company and a legally binding voice. Expect more details once we’ve finished the process.

Oh yeah, WE HIRING! We’re currently looking for C/C++ developers with a strong skill-set in system-level Linux. We are working on full-stack Android development and would like to build a team around that. Expect to work on the entire Android stack from the application layer, down through system services (written in C/C++ and Java) and into the device drivers (user-space and kernel).

We’re located in Berlin and, for the time being, need people to be here on location. It’s a great time to come to Berlin. The city offers a huge variety of opportunities for the technically inclined. More immediately, the weather has just turned nice and there are few places I’d rather be than Berlin in the summer time. As for winter, let’s just say it provides ample time for hacking.

You can find more information at our careers page.

If you’re in Berlin with some free time this Sunday at 7pm and have an interest in Free and Open Source software, we’d love to see you there. Till then!

Here are the details:

• Location: Prater beer garden
• Date: Sunday September 30th
• Time: 19h till whenever

Head over to the event page and sign up if you intend to go so we can get a good idea of how many folks will be coming.

Look forward to seeing you all there.

One thing that I think many of us regret is that we mostly only got a chance to chat with a small segment of the people present. I’d have liked to chat with more people but as we occupied 4 seperate tables inter-table conversations were rather rare. I did manage to hop from table to table more than most but with the number of people it’s probably impossible to have meaningful conversation with everyone.

For this reason, and the fact that we had a lot of fun, we’ll probably be organizing another of these in a month or so. Sunday seemed to be an alright day and Prater was also quite nice, save the 30+ degree temperature were having in Berlin at the moment.

Regarding the format of the Meetup, several people expressed surprise that it was really no more than having beer and conversation. The extent of our organization was to set a time and place, throw up a Google+ event and get to Prater to claim a table. There was no hidden agenda other than having drinking your beverage of choice and chatting. However, the fact that some folks expected there to be a little more structure and planning involved may mean that we should organize such an event. I’m just throwing this out now, and it seems that would be something we could discuss at the next meetup.

I was happy to see a number of people involved in open source web technologies attend but I’d love to see more of those folks attend the next meetup. My current circle of friends consists mostly of Linux (KDE & GNOME mainly) developers so I’ll largly have to rely on encouraging other attendees to inviting them. Consider that a nudge.

In summary, it was fun and we’ll do it again soon. Prost!

As was often commented on during the conference, the GUADEC organizing team did a great job with the organization of the conference. I can’t think of anything that didn’t run smoothly, including, astonishingly, the network. There were times when the wireless was slow but it was never down and there were tons of cables to connect with if one really needed. So, congrats to the GUADEC organizing team. You did a brilliant job.

The talks
There were a number of notable talks. I was probably most interested in The crowd funding GNOME Development talk as I’m working on a tangentially related project. The Yorba guys, Jim and Adam, did a really nice job presenting the current situation that many Open Source projects find themselves; if you need funds you throw up a donation page and wait for the money to start rolling in… or more frequently, not. They also explored why the current and past crowd funding sites are inadequate for the needs of open source projects. Hopefully they, or someone else, can figure out how to harness the many users out there who wouldn’t mind donating small amounts to various projects they use every day.

Then there was Lennart‘s talk. Lennart’s talk called on those working at the user interface layer to help drive development of the entire system, all the way down to the kernel. He acknowledged that this is not always easy (using the experience of those trying to get DBus into the Linux kernel) but chalked most of these issues up to politics. And like any good politician you’ve got to know the procedures to follow. He offered his and Kay’s help to anyone wanting help in this process. For a more detailed description of this talk the german-speaking folks can checkout Andreas’ article or the always-accurate Google translation.

Another great talk was the History of GNOME talk given by Jonathan Blandford, Federico Mena Quintero and Dave Mason. Passing around what seemed to be a small baby swaddled in a blanket, they told the story of the early days of GNOME and how it’s gotten to where it is today. It’s always interesting to reminesce but I think the talk had an even more important meaning. Much of the talk focused on how the project had often found itself in trying times or moments. In light of some of the press coverage the GNOME Project received during the conference, this seemed to border on motivational speaking for GNOMErs, which the project may very well have needed. In the end, the ‘baby’ was unswaddeled to reveal our friendly 5 legged goat, GEGL.

Bird of a Feather
After the main conference days, the BoFs were up. The one I attended was the GNOME OS session. Slowly it seems, the groundwork is being layed for the often mentioned, rarely defined, GNOME OS. However, it looks like Allan has taken some steps towards defining it by summarizing what was discussed.

Social networking
It was great to meetup with everyone again, especially many of my former Openismus colleagues who’ve mostly dispersed themselves throughout Europe. The RedHat party at the aquarium was definitely one of the social highlights. Also, thanks to the Collabora folks for supplying drinks to us freeloaders at the impromptu beach parties.

Thanks
A very big thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my trip.

The Google+ event is public, meaning you can add yourself to the attendee list and invite others. There’s plenty of room, so spread the word. We look forward to seeing you at…

photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dansloane/564091256/

I’ve been head down in a couple interesting endeavors for the last few months and am looking forward to having a good chunk of time to devote to GNOME System Monitor. But honestly, I mostly look forward to defending my goal, and my title from the Desktop Summit.

See you there!

I’ll be moderating a few sessions and, from tomorrow to Friday, manning the GNOME booth along with Muelli and a few others. Stop by and say, “Hi”.

Krzesimir Nowak has worked on improving the C++-bindings in GNOME for some time know. He’s very familiar with both C++ and how to create GObject C++-bindings.

Aidan Delaney is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton in the UK and uses Cluttermm and Clutter-box2dmm for teaching.

I’ve added them as maintainers in the DOAP files for Cluttermm, Clutter-gtkmm, and Clutter-box2dmm already. I guess that makes it official.

Thanks for agreeing to take over, guys.

• A US-hosted server with ssh access
• A browser
• ssh

I’ll assume you have the last two. The easiest way to get the first is in the form of a web host. I use Dreamhost which offers unlimited bandwidth for a pretty good price.

The first step to getting things to work is to login to the US-based server using the following command.

ssh -D PORT_NUMBER username@example.com

For the port number, it’s best to choose a number between 1024 and 49151 while avoiding any commonly used ports. Basically, avoid those listed here. In this example, I chose port 8421.

What this does is setup a SOCKS proxy on your local machine at the port given that can be used to tunnel traffic through to a remote machine, in our case a US-based server. Obviously, this connection needs to be maintained the entire time you want to send traffic through to the remote machine.

Now we just need to tell our browser to send all traffic through this port. In Firefox, go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Network->Settings. You should be presented with a window similar to this…

You’ll notice the 127.0.0.1 (localhost works too) and 8421 in the SOCKS host fields. That’s all that’s required. If you later want to revert just chose ‘No Proxy’ again.

Now you can close the preference dialog and should be able to enjoy surfing the Interwebs as an American. Fuck yeah!