Francesco Crippa

As usual Red Hat Partner Summit was great. Pretty “institutional”, but really funny this year with a dynamic team-building session with drums, dancing and much more.

Also the party at the disco was good, but (unfortunately) only few girls attended the party (opensource + business = very few girls :-/ ), so my dear friend Kanarip had to “climb” the cube and entertain the audience… (red hat: please, next time in disco invites more girls and keep away Kanarip from alcoholics…)

Jim

Kanarip

Malta bus… crazy cars…

Actually, I’m ready to leave to FOSDEM (Bruxelles), and only now I’ve realized I haven’t written a post about FUDCON11 (Boston) yet

So, here I am (as usual) with some photos and a little review about the event.

First of all I have to describe my adventure with the Air France flight (Milan-Paris-NYC) during a impressive snow storm… My flight never took off… I changed two different flights in Milan, to get in Paris just in time to miss my flight to New York.

Very good start!

I spent a night in Paris (Air France voucher was for a night+dinner+breakfast in a hotel closed to Euro Disneyland! Very cool! …but pretty useless.. I got to the hotel near 11 PM… to late for a trip in the park…), then a 8 hours flight to New York.

I love New York, and I got the opportunity to spend a night in the Big Apple.

Then I took a bus (4.30 hours), and I got in (a very cold) Boston on Thursday evening.

Friday was dedicated to different hack sessions (puppet, infrastructure team meeting, etc…), and Saturday, as usual, was proposed as Bar Camps event.

In the afternoon I’ve presented a session about FUNC and SYMBOLIC, and I’ve found a couple of guys really interested to be developers of these two very exciting projects (fudcon rocks!!!!!)

On Friday evening I, Kanarip, Sthepan and Jonathan went to a “very-expensive” (discovered when it was to late….) steak house. Very good meat, and probably the best cheese-cake I’ve ever eaten in USA.

On Sunday I left fudcon for a while with Simo Sorce and his wife to visit MIT Museum (a nerd really can’t miss this place!). Next Christmas I want to give as a gift to Lucia’s little nieces the “DNA Lego” series (basically a magnetic Lego that simulates a DNA chains…)

Then, unfortunately, I had to left Boston to get home by Logan Airport (probably the best organized airport I’ve ever seen in my live).

As usual FUDCON is a place where you can feel yourself at home, where you find always new contributors for your projects, and where you see new exciting projects that you want to contribute.

It’s something like work, holiday, training, vacation and social networks mixed all together to create new, exiting method of collaborations.

I’ll surely be present to next fudcon! and I’ll try to get some friends and colleagues with me!

See you then

I’ve been a bit too busy during this “post August Holiday” period (yep, very long period!)… so my blog is affected by an evident obsolescence… (and my “email-in-queue-to-be-answered too…)

Now it’s time to fix some promises I took some weeks ago.

In particular, I’ve promised to condor team to publish online my photos taken on European Condor Week in Barcelona.

So, here you are:

All of us

Zach and Todd

Davide (why he’s hearing music? dunno…)

The wonderful location for the event. Really cool!

See you next-next year in Poland.

OK, I’ve got to spend more time on my blog. My previous post was more than three months ago… But I’d like to make a little comment about my flight and show you some photos taken during my little holiday in Ireland.

Flight from Milan to Dublin was really comfortable, the problem was when I and Lucia tried to come back: AerLingus move ourselves through 5 (five!!!!!) different desks (with their own queue) before let us to make our check-in… and, finally, we tried to check-in when flight was closed (only 3 minutes, but it was enough).

AerLingus said “sorry, but we can’t make a check-in 3 minutes after the closing time (37 minutes before the take-off… without any baggages to send…), but this problem is an AerLingus problem, We’re so sorry about that. We’ll pleasure to get you at home with the next flight to Milan…… TOMORROW!!!”.

The problem was that “tomorrow” was to late for me. My flight from Milan to Prague (to attendee FUDCon in Brno) took-off 3 hours before AerLingus flight… so it was impossible for me to be present in Brno… Thanks to AerLingus organization….

So I bought a flight directly from Dublin to Prague with RyanAir, at 6.00 AM :-/, and Lucia came back to Milan with AerLingus “solution”

…and, of course, AerLingus didn’t pay the night that we spent in the airport hotel…

By the way, Ireland is an incredible beautiful country, and the people are able to make you at home. I hope to come back soon (maybe with RyanAir?????? ) to join again Guinness, Irish coffee and yummy porridge.

Irish Coffee and Guinness, Symbols of Ireland

Cliff of Moher

Awesome!

Amazing landscape

Too many places, to many people, too many photos… I can’t tell you how great this trip was (I can’t attendee RH Summit without spending a couple of weeks in USA…).

Here you are a link to see some shots taken during this wonderful trip

http://flickr.com/photos/fcrippa/sets/72157605997710938/

Just a “thanks” and “see you soon” to Marcelo, a friend of mine (from Argentina) that I see only during my trips in USA. I hope to meet you in Argentina next time, and I hope before next year!

After a couple of weeks, here I am to write a quickly post about RedHat Summit.

It was the first time for me in Boston (Great and beautiful city) and I really enjoyed the Summit, especially social events like party at Fenway Stadium or dinner at the 50th floor of Prudential Centre (see photos below). RedHat parties are great as usual!

On the square, food quality wasn’t every time so good… Definitely +1 for the Lobster Ravioli (have you ever tasted this kind of ravioli in Italy?), but surely -1 for the “welcome cocktail” or sandwiches served during meal… Sorry, but I’m Italian guy…

BTW, Summit surely represents the most important opportunity to keep in touch with lot of “remote friends”, colleagues and come out with new ideas and new business strategies.

Fedora is everywhere

Me and Jim

Fenway Stadium with the Boston skyline in background. Awesome!

Neon

Audience

To be in Malaga requires you a little trip in Granada, a beautiful city in the south of the Spain, where occidental and oriental architecture join all together to create something special: Alhambra.

Lot of sun and lot of funny after three days of really hard working

Last weekend I was in Brussels, during FOSDEM 2008. For me it was the first time at this event, but surely not the last!

It attire geeks from all countries over the world, and not only form the Europe: I’ve met a lot of people coming from USA and Canada (just to say that it really is a international event).

All the FOSDEM days were very busy. The event was very crowded. Location (Brussels University) was good, but the booth (actually it was a couple of simple desktops) were placed into a very small hall, and you know how many people Fedora attract!

Result is what you can see on this flickr photos set: a really crowded room …and without a free buffet!!!

Great occasion also to meet different developers from all kind of projects (especially thanks to Lillian and Thomas from RedHat IcedTea Java team: all information they presented is very useful for my job on JBoss and other Java related stuff. Really happy to join their session).

I’m so sorry to not having the time yet to fix “Fedora Ambassadors Stats Script” with Fabian. I hope to have enough time this week to publish a skeleton for new improvements and (maybe) start a project to make statistics abut Fedora Project easily.

But for me (and not only for me) this event represents something more important: with other European Fedora Ambassadors, we’ve founded “Fedora EMEA”, a NPO (non-profit organization) with the goal to improve support for fedora community in all EMEA countries.

After the event, Fedora Ambassadors had a dinner on Saturday evening (thanks to Kanarip to show me what is a “Steak Tartre” in the real world, and also thanks to the restaurant to have a lot of other things in the menu!), where we have signed the statutes of new Fedora EMEA NPO.

Really good trip where I’ve met new friends that I hope to meet again as soon as possible.

Performace tuning in Amsterdam this week! Nice city with lot of funny things…

Flowers….

People…

…and friends

California is wonderful! Especially San Francisco Bay… it’s great, trust me!

In particular MontainView is out of the world… Wifi and laptop everywhere. Working on internet (ssh, o yea!) during a little break in a quite  caffeterie it’s very strange for an Italian guy (in Italy there isn’t anything like this… just few  “pay-per-use” hot-spot , but not in bars or pubs:( )

Unfortunately I had not so much time to visit all places I wanted to see. I spent few days between San Francisco, Los Ageles and San Diego (and, of course, a night in Las Vegas!).

For the next time I’m planning to visit some national parks (in particular Yosemite) and Grand Canyon (to far for this time)

One of my prefered shots….

Los Angeles Skyscrapers

Golden Gate