Amazing: that’s the best word to describe everything that happened during this last fisl. Everything was so great that it’s even hard to describe here using only words. So I’ll try to explain a little bit about each interesting topic that I want to talk about.

Arena

We had two levels for the programming challenge.

The first level was just like an arcade game: you had one task that was a “treasure hunt”, and while looking for the treasure (that was actually a number), the teams discovered more tasks. The teams that had more points at the end of the day could go to the next level (I can make another post telling the details about each level later). All the tasks were related to Python for S60.

During the second level they were asked to implement an ODF reader for the Maemo platform using Python. It was so great that at the end of this level (that lasted 24 hours) all the teams had an working ODF reader with different approaches. Some of them converted the document to HTML and used the embedded browser (microb) to open the file and other teams just parsed everything using an xml parser.

This second level was very special for everyone. The students could develop an application from scratch that was very useful and new and the community gained new developers and a new project as they want to keep working on their projects (possibly all of them will become just one project).

After all this hard time, the prizes for the teams: 1 n95 for the 3rd place, 3 n95 for the 2nd place (one for each member of the team) and 3 n95 + 3 n800 for each member of the 1st place!! Great prizes 😉 !

People

A congress only can be great if there are great people at it. And that was exactly what happened. We were able to meet so many good people, let’s start talking about each one.

First, people from GUS-BR (Slackware User’s Group Brazil). It’s very good to meet old friends from IRC that use the same distribution that you use =) . Also very good to buy some stickers and other stuff.

People from brazilian universities: Unicamp and UFPE. I was able to meet some classmates from Unicamp and remember some funny stuff and also ask help for UFPE guys (we needed to flash an n95 and they could help us!!! Thanks guys!!!)

Trolltech & KDE guys: we were able to watch a presentation from Andreas (Qt) and make some new friends like Knut, Kevin and Thiago. Also good to chat (again) with Helio. From Andreas we could understand a little bit more about Qt and show some of our work, very interesting and productive chat. Maybe we can submit some paper to akademy and show some of our ideas to kde guys !

ODF and BrOffice: it was awesome to meet Gustavo from BrOffice and Jomar from ODF Alliance and receive their feedback. This feedback just made the Arena Challenge even better, for us, students and the community !

Also, I would like to thank Fórum Nokia, Fernanda and Paulo from fisl organization as they helped us a lot. From the INdT side, thanks a lot to Silvia, Selma and also Carol for the “Jack Bauer” joke 😛

Special thanks to all the guys from Casa do Cinema de Porto Alegre that made an wonderful work and will make a video to show everything that I talked about in this post, so we can share with everybody.