Developers Workshop 2008

This page is dedicated to the netlabs.org Developers Workshop 2008  Please note: The schedule has slightly changed, the morning coffee break has moved from 11.15 to 10.15! This lets the opening session start at 10 o'clock am, and the 2nd session slot changes accordingly on both days 

Page History
16.05.2008 cla: moved morning coffe breaks to 10:15 16.05.2008 ktk: added live stream information 11.05.2008 cla: added note on closed online registration 03.05.2008 cla: completed schedule 02.05.2008 cla: added note on end of registration deadline 06.04.2008 cla: added sessions and timeslots to schedule 04.04.2008 cla: added link to english homepage of the Hostel 02.04.2008 cla: added links to hotel pages 02.04.2008 cla: modified infos on room booking information Hostel (room reservation period ended) 02.03.2008 cla: added important information on booking rooms at the City Hostel 06.02.2008 cla: added presentations 03.01.2008 cla: clarification on per-bed prices of the Youth hostel 05.12.2007 cla: updated info on room reservations for the Friday 02.12.2007 cla: updated info on room reservations 30.11.2007 cla: added link to ticket page 30.11.2007 cla: added information on booking rooms 30.11.2007 cla: applied date change to May, 17-18th 2008 09.08.2007 cla: Added first information on Place, Time, Booking etc. 11.07.2007 cla: Initial setup

What
The netlabs.org Developers Workshop once again is the hotspot and place to be to get all the latest news from and insights into the development community for the OS/2 and eComStation platform as well as for the Voyager Project, intending to build a successor to the current eComStation product. In 2008 the workshop is hosted and organized by Team OS/2 Ruhr e.V..

When & Where
This years workshop will be held from May 17 to 18th, 2008 in the new City Hostel of Düsseldorf, Germany. Please see the homepage of the City Hostel in the English and German language.

This Hostel is located right to the Rhine, and opposite the famous old town of Düsseldorf. Be prepared for a spectacular sight onto the Rhine from our conference room !

The hostel is brand new, so you can expect a fine location on a high level standard, both for the conference room and the rooms for overnight stay.

Getting there
On the web site of the Youth Hostel you can find a route description in the English and German language. The section 'Next public transport facilities' on the English page is not completely translated at the moment, please translate 'Flughafen' to 'Airport' and 'Bahnhof' to 'Station'.

Right in front of the Youth Hostel there is a bus stop - taking this you need to change the bus once to reach the city etc.. Approx. 1km away there is a subway station with a direct link to the city, old town and main train station. Tickets for both bus and subway are sold at the reception of the Youth Hostel.

Workshop Services
The following Workshop services are provided at no charge


 * Internet Access / Wireless LAN
 * We will provide internet access over a secured Wireless LAN, so have your WLAN-equipped notebook ready. As a fallback, we may also provide cabled access, of course.
 * Internet appearance / Taking part remotely
 * The workshop will present itself again via life stream. If possible, we will provide video streaming, otherwise it will at least be audio streaming.
 * The presentations will be made available online shortly before being held.

Saturday May, 17th

 * Sat 9:30-10:00 Registration
 * Sat 10:00-10:15 Welcome Session


 * Sat 10:15-10:45 Coffee Break


 * Sat 10:45-11:30 Creating basic WarpIN packages
 * Michael Oehlhof, Team OS/2 Ruhr e.V.
 * WarpIN becomes more and more the de-facto standard installer for OS/2 and eComStation software packages. This session covers the features of the WarpIN compiler and the basic used-cases of WarpIN for every day use.


 * Sat 11:45-12:30 Advanced installation procedures
 * Christian Langanke, netlabs.org / Team OS/2 Ruhr e.V.
 * More complex requirements for installation require more sophisticated solutions in terms of installation procedures. See all the bells and whistles within the WarpIN package of the new GenMac V2.20, to accomplish the mission of maintaining GenMac installations. This session discusses also how WarpIN could be extended to match even more requirements.


 * Sat 12:30-14:30 Lunch


 * Sat 14:30-15:15 Don't try this at home! - Adventures in WPS programming
 * Chris Wohlgemuth, netlabs.org
 * The Workplace Shell is a fascinating framework albeit with some rough edges. This presentation is not a HelloWorld-WPS-class-creation-in-10-easy-steps-hands-on-workshop. It features general hints, tips, tricks and workarounds for common problems. When traveling WPS land every developer may come to some obscure places where weird stuff is waiting for the innocent. Take the information given as your personal survival guide helping to get back home safely.


 * Sat 15:15-15:45 Coffee Break


 * Sat 15:45-16:30 Managing Open Source Projects: netlabs.org 2010
 * Adrian Gschwend, netlabs.org
 * After 10 years of netlabs.org it's time to move to new ways of interaction between developers and users. netlabs.org will provide many new services which will make planning and administration of our projects more efficient. This presentation will show the development of the past months.


 * Sat 16:45-17:30 Reserved for netlabs.org staff

Sunday May, 18th

 * Sun 9:30-10:15 The Voyager Project: Status & next steps
 * Adrian Gschwend, netlabs.org
 * The title says it all


 * Sun 10:15-10:45 Coffee break


 * Sun 10:45-11:30 The Voyager Project: Demo
 * Bart van Leeuwen, netlabs.org, netage.nl
 * Bart will demo possible GUI use cases for Voyager under eComStation


 * Sun 11:45-12:30 eComStation Developer Connection
 * Eugene Gorbunoff, eCo Software
 * This session reviews available libraries and toolkits, and shows how to manage memory, multimedia issues and debugging. Also new standards like ACPI and SMP will be discussed.


 * Sun 12:30-14:30 Lunch


 * Sun 14:30-15:15 * Digital I/O with eComStation via the USB Interface Box meM-PIO
 * Uwe Hinz, OS/2 User Group Dresden
 * If eComStation needs to control devices that can do basic digital I/O, there isn't a real choice. The " meM-PIO " Interface Box (by BMCM GmbH Munich) can make it possible to access 24 digital TTL I/O lines via USB. How to use Wim Brul's device driver and how to put USB dataframes together, in order to use " meM-PIO " successfully, will be shown as REXX examples in this presentation.


 * Sun 15:15-15:45 Coffee break


 * Sun 15:45-16:30 User Interface of eComStation applications
 * Eugene Gorbunoff, eCo Software
 * This session contains a review of guidelines, standards, components, dialog windows, new PM controls and more.

Live Stream of Presentations
We will stream the presentations via an Ogg Vorbis stream! You can listen to that stream on eCS as well:


 * The straight forward method is to use the Audio-Stream object class in eCS 1.2, it's in the Multimedia Templates subfolders of the Templates folder. Simply drag the object to your desktop and add the URL http://stream.netlabs.org:8000/dws.ogg to it. To start playing simply double click on it.
 * If that doesn't work you either don't have Ogg Codecs installed or you have an old version of them. In this case the simplest solution is to get the Ogg Vorbis package of Brian Havard and use ogg123 to play it: ogg123 http://stream.netlabs.org:8000/dws.ogg (in a command line window).
 * Note that Z! doesn't want to play Ogg streams for some reason on my system, maybe it works on yours.
 * Russell O’Connor has some details as well about streaming on OS/2.
 * There is also a playlist available here.
 * If you are using Linux or Windows you should be able to listen to that stream as well for sure.

The first presentation starts at 10:15 German time, which is GMT+1. If you need to know your local time zone you can check that here:

http://www.timezoneconverter.com/index.shtml

Note that during the breaks we will most probably play some music so you will hear anything anyway :)

You can get a webcam picture as well at http://www.netlabs.org/dws08/. The quality is not too great unfortunately but it's better than nothing.

You can also ask questions live during the presentations if you join the freenode.net IRC channel #netlabs, see http://freenode.net/ for more information. You can simply join the network on irc.freenode.net.

Presentation Download
Within this section we will offer the presentations online, shortly before they are being held during the workshop.

Costs
This event is a great gathering and is being organized for the fourth time now, by volunteers. We try to keep costs as low as possible, but we can't make it for free, unless you are a student! Also speakers do not have to pay for attending the workshop.

Workshop Fee / Online Registration
The online registation is closed. Please ask for last minute seat here: [mailto:cla@clanganke.de?subject=DWS 2008 last minute registration Last Minute Registration]. As seats are limited, booking cannot be guaranteed.

While students don't have to pay, but need to register, speakers do neither have to pay nor to register.

Lunch / Dinner
The following meals are already included in the workshop fee
 * 2 coffee breaks including fruits, sandwiches, coffee, tea, cacao and cake
 * lunch buffet

Please understand that these meals cannot be excluded from the workshop fee, as they are integral part of the offer of the Youth Hostel that we booked.

At a later point in time we will include further information about the lunch on this page.

Please note: for those who would like to have dinner at the Youth Hostel as well, they can access the dinner buffet for a fee of € 5,- per person per evening.

Stay at the Youth Hostel
The period for room reservation at the Youth Hostel itself has ended on March 17th 2008. You may nevertheless ask for a room in case somebody has given back a room.

Compared with other youth hostels, we visited with Warpstock Europe, the rooms are of very good quality, due to the young age of the building.

Important:
 * We have reserved 15 double-bed rooms for the night of Saturday to Sunday, which need to be booked before 21th of March, 2008. After that deadline it cannot be guaranteed that you can still book a room.
 * If you arrive on Friday, you have to book as soon as possible, as for the night to Saturday only 6 double-bed rooms could be reserved. As a fallback, 3 four-bed rooms have been reserved for the two nights from Friday to Sunday.
 * When booking, make sure to specify the reservation id 47015 or the event name netlabs.org Developers Workshop 2008, otherwise you have to become a member of the German Youth Hostel Association (Deutsches Jugendherbergswerk) and pay an extra fee of ca. €20,- per person for that. While this may be of great use for you otherwise, this is not necessary for the stay at this Youth Hostel for this workshop.
 * When receiving an email for the booking comfirmation, this may include a remark that you need to become a membership of the German Youth Hostel Association (see above). Please ignore this remark! We were told that the emails are generated by software which currently does not allow to exclude that remark, even if it is not appropriate, as in our case.

The Hostel (from November 2007 on) offers
 * 25 2-bed rooms
 * 54 4-bed rooms
 * 17 6-bed rooms
 * Bistro
 * Internet Terminal ;-)
 * 54 garage parking lots
 * 1 cellar for bicycles

Prices for bed and breakfast (don't book lunch !) are per bed
 * € 40,60 single bed room
 * € 30,50 2-bed room
 * € 24,30 4- or 6-bed room

Hotels
For booking a hotel, please refer to the following web pages and search Hotels in Düsseldorf or Dusseldorf:
 * activehotels.de
 * English
 * German
 * www.hotel.de
 * English
 * German
 * www.hotels.com
 * English
 * German

Something missing ?
If you are looking for information which is not listed yet or have information that might be of interest to others then please mail us at: [mailto:dws2008@teamruhr.de dws2008@teamruhr.de]