So, Prague! The UDS itself was good. I mostly listened in on the mobile tracks, as I’m not embedded enough to usefully contribute. But I certainly learned a lot of face/irc-nick pairings.

UDS notes:

• I liked the decision to move the browser default home page to a simplified layout — much more akin to the default Firefox home page.
• UME sounds like it will make tentative motions away from the poorly-maintained Hildon framework and toward a GTK+ library that has been patched for mobile-usage (maybe like the Hiker Project) with some Clutter for glam (which is where GNOME seems to be heading as well).
• The “lower boot time for mobile devices” session was interesting. We got Scott from the kernel team in the room and he proceeded to open a can of whoop ass on the boot time. Using iterations of bootchart on a live piece of hardware, he just pointed at seconds of the timeline and they scurried away. A lot of improvement came from not running modprobe so much, since the hardware is known in advance. Plus, some backporting of boot-time fixes in newer kernels.
• I thought it was cute that Jono rickrolled the big social gathering at the end.

Prague notes

• Their toilets are variable-flush, which made sense to me. You just hold it down for as long as you want it to flush. Not all toilet trips are made equal.
• They seem to like to put some weird vinegary sauce on their corn. Didn’t like that at all.
• “Nonstop” means “24/7.” This was interesting because you’d see signs like “nonstop karaoke” which sounded like a threat of torture, not an enticement.
• The hotel bathroom was odd. Not only did they have a dial to turn on muzak at varying volumes, but the shower door didn’t close and only covered half the tub. So you just had to get real close and comfortable in the front, and not splash about. A real cramp in my style.
• I had absinthe for the first time. I had it straight rather than the complicated water-over-sugar-then-flames bit. It tasted not pleasant, but it did get me reasonably drunk and left a pleasant burning sensation in my throat for a good length of time. Typical liquor experience.
• The buildings were beautiful. There were details, decorations, and statues adorning every nook and cranny of them.
• Soda was expensive. 0.2 liters cost as much as 0.5 liters of beer. You couldn’t just get tap water either. You had to order “still water” (differentiated from “water with gas”).
• I really, really liked what seemed to be a standard feature on Czech (European?) menus: every item had a measurement for it. Food items would say “200g” or “300g” depending on how big the portion was. Drinks would say “0.5l” or “0.1l” (for shots, say). It was a great help in figuring out how much food came with each plate, especially when reading translated menus.
• They used metric and 24-hour clocks. It was awesome.