Yesterday evening I came back from Montreal, where I was giving my talk on the virtualized server infrastructure of the TikiWiki community at the annual PHP Quebec conference. There were only a couple of people at my session, but people in there looked rather satisfied. Got informed today by the organizers that I scored pretty well in the surveys done with the audience. Probably the audience was so small because it was the last day and I had strong competition. Doing AJAX with JQuery vs. server virtualization - where would a PHP programmer go?!? Tough call, hm? ;)

Before the conference there was TikiFest Montreal 2009, where we released the first Beta of the upcoming Tiki 3.0. This will be one nice peace of software and good looking, too! I wasn't too much involved with the coding as I was concentrating on the servers, but still it was again a very good TikiFest. It's always great to see the guys live and this time I met chibaguy for the first time in real life, too. :)

The TikiFest was hosted at cgcom, which is a great partner for the Tiki community. They are really nice guys and their office makes a great location for a TikiFest.

I didn't see much of the city as the events took lots of time and so I mostly just saw buildings from inside. I'm not sad about that though, as I met lots of nice and interesting people, learned a lot and had lots of fun. And we were at Montreal's "white night", which is an event where all the different museums and other public institutions are opened. Seems like I am one of the rare people to understand modern art, especially monochromatic sculptures - or the others just didn't want to invest as much energy as Olaf and me. ;)

CU at one of the next TikiFests, definitely at PHP Quebec 2010 and go grab a download of the Tiki 3.0beta1 from sf.net.

I'm very happy to tell you that we are starting a new platform for LivingLogic's F/LOSS projects.

• http://flloss.livinglogic.de

So far we had everything at http://www.livinglogic.de/Python and the public repositories at http://hg.livinglogic.de. No bugtracker or any easy way to collaborate with us. Now we are going to move the stuff over to the new Trac at flloss.ll.de.

FLLOSS is a rather cheesy joke, I have to admit. As all our open source packages are named something like ll.orasql, ll.make and so on, we spontaneously decided to name our new mailing list flloss@livinglogic.de. Well, that "LL" just stuck and Free LivingLogic Open Source Software is more a backronym. ;)

I'm a bit sad that we didn't use TikiWiki for the public website and collaboration space, but we wanted to get started quickly and the tight integration of the source code repositories with the wiki and bugtracker that trac provides are a killerfeature! No time to code that for Tiki right now.

This was the event I was looking forward to the most. It all started when some friends told me.. no, let me start at the beginning!

In 1999 I started my studies and in the beginning of 2000 Rage Against The Machine had their Battle of Berlin. A fellow student of mine asked me to go there and as I was a RATM fan ever since, I agreed. But then the exams came and we were reasonable students telling ourselves that 'we need to learn and that we will have the chance to see Rage some time later'. Well, yeah, right - they dissolved the band about two months later! Which became my biggest artistic trauma in my still young life...

... and then some friends told me - ah, here we are again - that RATM will be at Rock im Park. Well, they have to know, as they are in the business of promoting music (http://franzgrosse.de/) and they also organized the marketing for germany's milkproducing farmers - but that's another story.. ;)

Long story short: there was nothing to stop me from finally seeing the most political band alive(and they make great music, too ;) )! I was the only guy on the camping site with an old german army tent and afterwards I also found out why: My tent was flushed away by the rain! Luckily I could then sleep in the food-tent of my neighbours - who afterwards called me 'warehouseman' as I knew exactly where stuff was. ;)

On the second evening then was the RATM concert and it really payed off! Mosh-Pit, first row - and I'm still alive! I'm lacking the words to tell anything more.. it was just one hour of awesome live action!

After the concert then, I was sitting on the lawn, totally exhausted and writing my bro an SMS to tell him how great it was when suddenly I heard a female voice: "Did they leave you alone?" I looked up and there was Bärbel squatting beside me. I just stumbled: "Err, ehm, no - I'm here alone anyways!" - "Do you want to be part of something bigger?" - "Well, yeah, sure!" :)

And that's how I met some really lovely people, having a great evening with them, discovering that there even is a discotheque on the festival area and wasting the rest of the evening. They live close to Nürnberg and we decided to meet the next day again. The last day of Rock im Park was really relaxed then: lying on the lawnn of the center stage, talking, the beer-guy came every now and then to refill, smoking, chilling and having the best bands of the world play for us. I was mainly sitting there with Frank while the others went looking at other stages, too. And then he told me that he is having a party at every friday the 13th - something that emerged from a stupid idea and now he has to do it.

• "You know when the next friday the 13th is?"
• "Uhm, nope.."
• "Next weekend"
• "Heh, funny!"
• "Wanna come?"
• "Uhm, sure!!"

And this way the second unplanned partyweekend of my after-thesis time was fixed, too! ;)

For the time after my thesis I had planned two thirds of the weekends - only interestingly the first one was still free. And as luck would have it something turned up just in the last weeks of my thesis. Hörschaden planned to have a party in Berlin with a nice boat cruise before. As I know the Hörschaden guys from Ilmenau and always liked what they did, this was the perfect thing to start my party season.

And this really was the perfect start for it! First a nice, geriatric style sight-seeing cruise on the Spree in Berlin - but with the added value of some DJs providing us with electronic music. And then we continued to Kiki Blofeld, where the party continued until the morning. Awesome location, I can really recommend it! It's a former boat bunker of the GDR with windows towards the river and lots of natural real estate outside.

Somewhen in the morning we got thrown out because of some misunderstanding, but I guess we figured that out with the staff, too. ;)
And actually at this party I got to know Anke, who then later offered to take the pictures I currently use on this site as avatars.

• Image Gallery: hoerschaden.de boot 2008

... yes, I did - I'm probably just a bit slow with realizing it as I finished them already on 26th of May 2008. After that I just wanted to wait to get my diploma certificate to start believing it and have some good parties in between. Porto was one of those things that I already blogged about. But there were some other dedicated parties that I didn't blog about because of lack of time and major procrastination. But it's never too late, so let me do it now! ;)

• 26th of may: Finished my thesis
• 31st of may: Hoerschaden @ Kiki Blofeld
• 6th to 8th of june: Rock im Park
• 13th of june: Friday the 13th party @ Frank

And some more little stuff afterwards. Basically there was something on every weekend for about two months, but those were the most memorable things. So, before I forget everything and delete the photos I made - I'll blog about all that for me to remember and look back, when I'm old.. ;)