FSCONS 2011

I recently attended the FSCONS conference in Gothenburg. As usual, my friend Måns (blog in Swedish here) graciously allowed me to stay at his place. There was hardly any time outside the conference but we had a really nice, long dinner at the vegetarian restaurant Solrosen in excellent company. Thanks!

This was my third(?) year visiting the conference but the first year I held a presentation. I presented my window manager, mcwm and the X Protocol C-language Binding. 17:15 on a Sunday might have been an unfortunate time slot, perhaps, but there were still some 20–30 people attending my talk.

Of course, given my slight social phobia and the usual stage fright that comes with that, I was really nervous. I was especially nervous about doing the presentation in English. I think it went reasonably well in the end. Thank Goddess for beta blockers.

The talk was filmed. You will probably eventually find the film linked from the FSCONS schedule slot for my talk.

My slides weren't that interesting but you can look at them anyway if you like. Most information was given orally. I have to clean up my notes for the talk a bit before publishing them. Stay tuned.

I attended many other talks. The most interesting talk was the OpenRISC presentation, about a small MIPS-like CPU that can be used on an FPGA and or be synthesized on an ASIC. It's available under a free license at OpenCores.

The OpenCores repository itself is now managed by Swedish company ORSoC. They have more information on their own web pages about the OpenRISC 1200 Platform.

ORSoC also sells FPGA development boards. They showed us a new board at FSCONS based on an Altera FPGA, with SDRAM, Ethernet, USB, SD, JTAG and UARTs. It seems a really complete little board to do lots of cool stuff with. Really cool and pretty cheap.

I also enjoyed Jose Marchisi's Algol 68 talk. He has done impressive work writing a Brainfuck frontend for GCC in Algol 68! The next step is, of course, to write a real Algol 68 frontend in Algol 68. That's a brainfuck if I ever saw one.

After FSCONS I was really washed out and needed some time by myself or close to my family. Naturally, I also succumbed to a case of the common cold. This prevented me from using the free ticket to .SE's yearly Internet Days in Stockholm. The ticket went to my friend Martin. I'm waiting as I write for some report on the conference and especially any poster sessions not listed in the schedule.