Developers Workshop 2006

The workshop logo was created by WiZard

The OS/2 and eComStation Developers Workshop 2006 will take place the weekend of 8. and 9. April 2006 in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland.

News Items

13. April 2006	Streams and presentations are online! Get them at the ftp server
7. April 2006	Added the Live Streaming information & the news that lunch is sponsored by SSI!
3. April 2006	Added the schedule, also the address (see Location). BTW we have some non-EU compliant power plugs, see here
21. March 2006	Added information about lunch & some more details about the program
23. February 2006	Added registration information & first overview of the topics
21. January 2006	Added hotels and some information about Biel/Bienne.
2. January 2006	Initial website online.

Registration

The registration is open at Mensys now, we provide the following tickets:

• netlabs.org Developers Workshop 2006, Saturday and Sunday: 45 Euro
• netlabs.org Developers Workshop 2006, one day: 25 Euro
• netlabs.org Developers Workshop 2006, students: Free

You can register at http://www.mensys.net/DeveloperWorkshop2006/

Workshop Program

One of the main topics we will talk about is Voyager, beside this we will for sure talk about current projects, like Genmac, ACPI, Everblue and so on. There will be quite some time for discussions, in a workshop form, also known as sitting around computers and hacking some code :)

We will provide enough space, wired or wireless network connection and a lot of bandwith.

Live Stream of Presentations

We will stream the presentations via an ogg 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://borg.bfh.ch:8000/stream.ogg to it. To start playing simply doubleclick 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://borg.bfh.ch:8000/stream.ogg (in a commandline 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.

The first presentation starts at 10:15 Swiss time which is 8:15 GMT. If you need to know your local timezone 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 :) Note that there is quite some noise on the stream, I think that's the line in of the laptop used for digitising, we will hopefully clean that a bit for the ogg downloads after the workshop.

The webcam can be found here. It will automatically reload the picture so don't click reload please, that just kills the webserver :)

You can also ask questions live during the presentations if you join the netlabs.org IRC channel #netlabs on eCS Network, see the following URL for a list of servers:

http://www.ecomstation.com/chat.phtml

We will most probably have a user called dws06 or something where you can ask your questions.

The details about the ogg stream will be announced as soon as it is working  ;)

To get ogg streaming on OS/2 and eCS check the page from , if we are lucky we will also get an ogg dll which works with Z! the current one does not support ogg streaming yet.

Schedule

The following presentations will take place:

Start: We start with the Developers Workshop at 9:45 (Registration). The full shedule can be found here.

• Cairo
  • General overview of Cairo, its structure and its API.
  • Showing the Cairo API in live through a lot of examples.
• IOProc replacement
  • Introduction to a new modular playback engine concept.
  • Showing what's ready, what's to be done, what are the ideas.
  • Discussing future possibilities (recording, transcoding...).
• The Voyager Object Model (was SOMH):
  • Why not using C++, Objective C, ...
  • Implementation details
  • Compatibility with SOM/DSOM
  • Desktop
  • Using the object model for more
• Everblue
  • Importance and Significance of Everblue (with and without Voyager)
  • Current State and Problems
  • Compiling and Running
  • Demo of Working Applications
• Voyager - A coder overview about the project
  • OpenGL as backend for Voyager - current options and problems
  • Voyager components - where can you contribute
  • OS/2 & PM compatibility - some crazy ideas worth discussing
• A WM based on Cairo
• Coding for WPS and Voyager
• How to organize netlabs.org Software Projects
• Translating Software

Each presentation is done once, there are no sessions in parallel.

Lunch

We will provide lunch at the workshop, like this we can talk together during that time as well and we don't spend too much money for something to eat :-) The lunch will be prepared by two professional cooks.

To be able to calculate how many people will attend it's important that you register yourself for the workshop! Please do this as soon as possible so we can plan correctly.

Speakers should register as "Students" so they don't have to pay but are counted as well for lunch.

News: Lunch is sponsored by Serenity Systems, thanks a lot to Bob St. John for the kind sponsoring!

Workshop Location

Beside famous watch companies like Rolex, Omega and Swatch the city of Biel in Switzerland is the home of one more cool company: netlabs.org! This means that the Developers Workshop 2006 will take place in the city where netlabs.org was founded in 1997. I'm proud to do the hosting at the Berne University of Applied Sciences, the place where I did my studies and where I work now as a system administrator and teacher.

Biel is a small but cute city close to Bern, the capitol city. It's the boarder to the French speaking part of Switzerland so people in Biel speak German and French, at least most of them :-) If you have some more spare time I recommend you to do a walk in the beautiful surroundings of Biel, for example the Jura mountains or around the lake. There is plenty to discover and with a bit of luck we will have a nice spring time in april.

Links:

• Drei-Seen-Land - a nice page with a lot of information about our region.
• Biel/Bienne at Wikipedia.org. Available in many languages.
• Old town of Biel - some pics from the old town in my gallery

Hope to see you there!

Adrian Gschwend
founder of netlabs.org

Getting to Biel/Bienne

Biel is the gate to the French speaking part of Switzerland, located in the western part of Switzerland. It is well connected to the railway system in Switzerland and easy to reach from about everywhere.

By train:
There are night trains to Basel, called CityNightLine, this is mainly interesting if you want to get to Biel from Germany, Holland or Austria (it works from Denmark as well some days). You reach Biel within one hour from Basel by train.

For other train connections consult your local train office, if you have to travel to Biel from an airport check the homepage of SBB, the railway company in Switzerland. For Geneva and Zurich you have to add Airport in the search field. For Basel and Bern Belp you need to take the local airport bus anyway.

By plane:
There is no large airport close to Biel but in Switzerland almost everything is close anyway. So you can choose one of these airports if you want to get to Biel:

• Zurich (ZRH) - The biggest airport in Switzerland, quite good connections to Biel (every 30 minutes). Takes about 1.5 hours by train.
• Geneva (GVA) - good for Easyjet. There is just one train per hour to Biel, around 1.5 hours by train.
• Basel (BSL) - also good for Easyjet. There are bus connections to Basel and from there it's one hour by train.
• Berne Belp (BRN) - this is a small local airport, close to Bern but you still need to get to Biel and that's probably not much faster than Zurich because the Bus connections from this airport to Bern are not that great. From Bern it will take 30 minutes to Biel.

The local airline in Switzerland is Swiss, which offers quite good trips from bigger cities.

By car:
The address is Quellgasse 21, 2502 Biel, Switzerland. There are paring places in front of the building, ask at the registering desk about how to open the locks for the parking places. You can get a map here, it's number 2 on the map.

Accomodation

There are several classes of hotels available in Biel:

• Lago Lodge - nice backpacker hostel directly at the lake of Biel. University is quite easy to reach by bus and the walk is not that far either.
• Hotel Continental - 3-star hotel close to the lake as well. The road is quite busy, so make sure you get a room towards the lake.
• Hotel Metropol - 3-star hotel, 15-20 minutes walk to the University or bus.
• Villa Lindenegg - a very special and cute hotel in an old villa, 2 minutes away from the University, you can't get closer than that :)
• Mercure Plaza - 4-star hotel in the middle of the city
• Hotel Elite - 4-star hotel close to the railway station. Takes less than 10 minutes to the University.

If you can't afford a hotel we offer a room at the University where you can sleep with your sleeping bag and your mattress. The room is in the old manufacturing of Rolex and there are showers available too. It's probably not really comfortable but you don't have to pay anything for that :-) Please contact Adrian Gschwend if you want to do that, we have to know how many people do it like this. Email: ktk [at] netlabs.org
Update: I made some pictures about the location: http://ktk.netlabs.org/gallery/HTIBiel

Gallery

There are some pictures online, check http://ktk.netlabs.org/gallery/HTIBiel

Some of the workshop's participants published pictures of the event on their homepages.

Jan van Wijk	http://www.dfsee.com/gallery/mg2/
Warp5	http://warp5.dyndns.org/DeW2006/index.html

Contact

If you have comments or want further information about the workshop, you can always reach us by sending an eMail to:
DevelopersWorkshop [at] netlabs.org
Adrian Gschwend is mainly responsible for organizing the workshop.