First of all, sorry for taking so long to post this. Been a busy week but I must admit to lazyness as well. Guilty as charged. As usual, BeGeistert was great and I'm not saying that just for the sheep, honest. Click below for a (not that detailed) report.

This time I didn't go alone, my girlfriend went with me, for a geek-filled weekend... there were 3 couples at BG actually, a record I believe :)

BeGeistert for us started on Friday and didn't start that well. We arrived without a problem at the Dusseldorf airport, problem is, our luggage didn't. Second problem, it was quite cold, around 7C and my warm, nice jacket? In the luggage... So after we arrived at the Hostel, Charlie kindly lent me his jacket and we went shopping for some essentials, jacket included. At night there were around 17 of us there already so we went for dinner at this very nice restaurant, not far from the hostel. Everyone had a good time and the food was delicious, what more can you ask for? During the dinner our luggage was delivered to the hostel, so all's well that ends well. By the way, Jonas from Sweden also had his luggage lost during his trip to Dusseldorf, sheeesh...

Saturday started with the "Auckland Presentation" (which I didn't attend from the start, regretfully), named as such because it was done remotely from New Zealand. The presentation was done by Christof Lutteroth and the subject was ALM, the Auckland Layout Model. The bit I did see was about HaikuHelp, a way to automatically generate help information by "analyzing input messages and state changes in a GUI". It was very interesting and it could be a nice addition to Haiku.

After lunch the French group (which arrived around 6am after driving all night) took over and we had presentations by Maxime Simon on his Google Summer of Code project, the webkit port, and Adrien Destugues gave a presentation on his GSoC project, the locale kit. Maxime didn't have any slides, so his presentation was more of a Q&A session about his and Ryan's work. They're making progress but the webkit project moves so fast they wouldn't mind help from coders wanting to dip in.

Adrien's project is progressing quite well and is now integrated into the Haiku source (happened sometime after the Alpha release). According to Adrien some of the work still needed is, among others, to convert apps to use the locale kit and also a font overlay for japanese characters for example.

After the presentations some of the devs (with a little coaxing from Charlie) got up and the last 6 months of Haiku were discussed. The Summer coding spring at Axel's and of course the Alpha release were the highlights. It was then time for a little celebration, to celebrate Haiku, the Alpha release and all of the devs working on the project. It was a very nice moment of which we posted a photo during that same night as I'm sure you recall.

Saturday night there was a big group dinner which... we missed. Charlie and the gang (could be a band name) left and left the two of us plus Rene Gollent and his girlfriend back at the hostel. The four of us ended up at an Italian restaurant with HUGE coke glasses (their grosse cola really was grosse) and delicious pizza, along with nice live music, jazz. On the way back to the hostel we took a taxi and it was a fun ride since the driver, a turkish guy, spoke portuguese!

Sunday rolled around and in the morning there was a presentation done by Nicholas Blachford (over who's Canon I drooled on Friday, it's a 5D MKII) on Haiku Distro Guidelines. This brought on an interesting debate on the subject with many sharing their point of view.

In the afternoon it was time for Colin Gunther's presentation on bringing WLAN to Haiku. It turns out there are more drivers than the Atheros one that Colin's working on, including the Intel 2200BG (the one I have, yay). In the next 6 months or so he intends on porting over from BSD more drivers, an enhanced ifconfig and have repository integration. Before R1 is out a GUI for WLAN will need to be done as well. In the next 12 months Colin is aiming at encryption and ad-hoc support. (Sunday morning I had a nice chat with Colin and am anxiously waiting for an e-mail with a certain driver to test)

Sunday afternoon was also time for a "class" on coding for Haiku which was held in another room (smaller one, next to the main room) held by Stephan and Jan. Though Stephan tried to lure me in (sorry Stephan :)) I didn't attend, coding isn't for me. But from what we heard it was definitely interesting. In fact, Charlie had the idea to, beginning with next BeGeistert, have an extra Tutorial Day.

I should say that the room was packed! A lot of people attending BeGeistert including all presentations, except Colin's since several people had to leave for home after lunch. Also noteworthy was Rudolf Cornelissen's presence back at BG. It was great to see him again after several years and we had a very nice chat.

All too soon Sunday was over, after another group dinner at yet another Italian restaurant (following a brief passage at a brewery) and it was time to hit the sack, Monday morning we had to get up at 5am for our plane, but there were several people still up, talking and coding, coding and talking, including the devs staying for the coding sprint.

As always BeGeistert was great fun and this time it was special due to the recent Alpha release. You could sense the excitement in the air and the fact that it was crowded didn't hurt either. Even if I won't be able to go, the next BeGeistert can't come soon enough. And mark your calendars, BeGeistert 022 "Return of the Cola Coder" (talk about pressure) will be held over the April 10th-11th weekend and... a tutorial day will be premiered on Monday the 12th! Start boooking your flights.

I can't end this report without one very special mention to Charlie. He's not the only one involved in organizing and hosting BeGeistert of course but he's the "face" of it. His diligency and attention to everyone and everything make BeGeistert for us attending, a pleasure. Charlie, you should have had a glass as well on Saturday :) And the invitation we made still stands of course. Till next time.