Dieter on the web

As of yesterday, Brendan 'bct' Taylor is the new Uzbl project leader / maintainer.
Yesterday I did the newspost on uzbl.org which explains the reasoning. I can add it feels pretty weird "giving away" and "leaving behind" a project you spent so much time on and which grew a large (well, for a FOSS side project with a hacker audience) base of users and contributors, and which served as inspiration for various other projects.

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I need a browser that is fast, not bloated, stores my data (bookmarks, history, account settings, preferences, ...) in simple text files that I can keep under version control, something that does not reinvent the wheel, something that I can control.

Well, I could not find it.
So I started the uzbl browser project.

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Froscon was great.

• It was smaller then I thought, I especially assumed more activity in the devrooms (I'm too used to fosdem which is much bigger), but hey nice conference anyway.
• It was great to meet (some of) my Arch Linux colleagues. Mostly the guys from Germany showed up, and Roman who is from Ukraine.
• We all got an Arch t-shirt/polo of which we could pick the color ourselves. Woohoo. Thanks donators.
• A few people also told me they had tried / were using uzbl (my browser project) so that was really cool.
• I had an interesting chat with Thomas Lange, the author of FAI (a tool to automatically mass-install systems, mostly Debian). I've used it in the past, liked it and was somewhat inspired by it when building AIF. (but some design goals are different).

Here is a picture of my "Arch releng partner" Gerhard (right) and I (left). We've done a lot of work together and it was great to talk face to face for once. Here we're showing (proudly) an Arch Linux Froscon disc (which is a slightly modified version of the 2009.08 core images):

Team photo:

Image gallery

I recently did two talks, for which the videos are now online.

• Uzbl lightningtalk @ fosdem 2010
• Open Source Monitoring tools lightning talk @ Kangaroot showcase 2009. This one is password protected. If you were a participant, you should have received the pass

If all goes well, I'll be at ArchCon this summer, where I'll be doing these talks:

• AIF: The Arch Installation Framework
• Uzbl – web interface tools which adhere to the unix philosophy. Whereas in the fosdem talk I had to focus a lot of information into a short timeslot, here I'll elaborate a bit more

We're not sure yet if those talks will get videotaped.


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• Arch Linux team interview @ OSNews
• Uzbl @ LWN.net

Apologies for only informing you about the second article now. I assumed most of you follow LWN (you probably should) or found the article anyway.
Of all the articles written about uzbl, no one came close to the quality of Koens work. So even though it's a bit dated it's still worth a read.

I'll be at fosdem - 10th edition - again this year.

I'll be presenting a lightning talk about uzbl.
Also, Arch Linux guys Roman, JGC, Thomas and me will hang out at the distro miniconf. We might join the infrastructure round-table panel, but there is no concrete information yet.

More stuff I'm looking forward to:

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