The roads I take...

Some of you might remember that I was planning for an OpenWebCamp in Vienna - that was planned for October 27 but it was downgraded seriously due to not having a real Mozilla community around here yet and me not being able to organize the event myself when driving a major release at the same time. Still, the guys from quintessenz planned to have us on board for a track of the Cyber Liberties Conference, and so I did sit down with them for a while this week to work out what we actually can get into this track (speakers still wanted, if you can come around to talk on open web topics in Vienna on short notice, please tell me, travel costs can probably be reimbursed).

In any case, I told them that we're planning to release SeaMonkey 2.0 final right on that day, and the guys were suddenly cheering! We could do an official release event right there, they claimed, we could add this into press releases - and, above all, this could finally the topic they have been looking for as a label for the party on Monday!

In the end, what we decided there is the following:

• October 26, 20:00: q/Treff Spezial @ q/uintessenz - Museumsquartier Wien: Seamonkey 2.0 Release Party
• October 27, Open Web Camp/Track @ Cyber Liberties Conference, with a number of talks on Mozilla and the open web - and with an official SeaMonkey 2.0 Release Event

If anyone reading this is from or near Vienna, I'd be very happy to meet you at any of those events next week!

Yesterday, I held a talk on Linuxwochen Wien, a local Linux and Open Source conference. My talk was right before Brian King took the stage (who talked mostly about the add-on ecosystem), so it fitted well that my topic was "The Open Internet and Mozilla". My slides (in German) are online at kairo.mozdev.org.

I included a number of the HTML5 demos from Paul Rouget to show what open web technologies can do, but for showing the power of JIT, I showed a demo I quickly did myself:
Ripped out of the code for my Mandelbrot XULRunner app, I put up a <canvas> and some JS code up on a website, with a small HTML form for selecting coordinates, etc. - and the Mandelbrot-Web demo was done!

It's not too beautiful, just a fast hack, but running the default image calculation in both Firefox 3.0 and a current 1.9.1-based nightly, I could show how the time needed for calculation (and display in the canvas) dropped from 7.3 to 1.6 seconds on my laptop due to the TraceMonkey JIT engine.
A number of people seemed impressed with both that and the stunning video+canvas demos from Paul.

Finally, I could even announce a whole one-day event on the Open Internet right here in Vienna! As both Mozilla and the local quintessenz association (who also organized Linuxwochen) have agreed to work together in organizing this, I could point people to the MozCamp Wien taking place on October 27, 2009.
We are in the very early stages of planning, not knowing much more than the date, the topic and the format (MozCamp in the way it has been done in Utrecht in March), but stay tuned here for updates on details as we get them figured out!