2006-December-09

For those who haven't noticed and don't get the news via our ScreenSaver module: The session transcripts are downloadable from the sessions page (well, at least almost all of them, 4 are still missing). Note that the ScreenSaver module will still be updated for some time, although WSE2006 is over...

2006-November-24

The show is over! Thanks to everyone who participated and helped in the making, thanks to our speakers and thanks to our visitors of course! I'm working on the final statistics and a financial report for the event. Will be published as soon as available.
Also, we have started to publish the session transcripts. They are available (not all yet!) via the according links below the session descriptions on the sessions page.

On Friday, right after lunch, Jan van Wijk had an accident while talking a walk at the river banks. He slipped, fell down onto the rocks and broke his leg. Fortunately, he didn't lose conscience and was able to call for help and tell the ambulance people to notify the youth hostel staff. We then went to visit him and were able to provide a little help, bringing stuff to his hospital room and so on... by intention, we didn't publish this on the web before so he was able to get in contact with his family first instead of making them get the news from the website without being prepared (who knows...) oh, by the way... here's a picture from the hospital:

Jan, we wish you all the best - get well soon!

2006-November-17

Yesterday (Thursday) was a quite busy afternoon and evening for the event team (and for some speakers also a very busy and short night...)
Today (on Friday) we had everything in place but didn't expect that much people so we had queues at the registration - sorry for this! We started with a slight delay of about 10 minutes and managed to work out the backlog during the breaks until lunch. Also, as a little celebration of the opening (and to apologize for the queues) we had sparkling wine and/or orange juice for free. What a (hic!) good start!
And here's for the Friday statistics:

• 113 people in all
• 77 lunches, 43 dinners

2006-November-15

Major update for travelling tips: The descriptions for travelling by airplane and also for travelling by train now show detailed new information and photos for getting to the Youth Hostel from Central Station where major constructions have an impact on the public transport.
Also, for travellers by car we have added a new detailed map for the inner city part of travel, photos that show how to access the Youth Hostel parking and also for accessing the additional parkings if the YH parking is exhausted.
The final missing descriptions for both the PHP session and its speaker Arne Blankerts were added... (phew: just about time...).

2006-November-14

Henrik Heigl of CACert had to cancel his presentations at Cologne! As we were unable to find a replacement speaker from the CACert.org team, we decided to fill the gaps from the lack of INT07 with the two sessions from Sundays last slot. This allows us to return to a short Sunday that has its closing session from 16:30 to 17:15 (like we originally planned). The only BIG change was the relocation of ALL03 (Evgeny Gorbunov's "community perspectives 2006-2008" from Sunday to Saturday. See the schedule page for a closer look.

2006-November-08

Morons! After having talked with them on several occasions since February 2006, the youth hostel TODAY (November 8th) has made us aware that warm lunch and warm dinner would always mean two identical meals. Funny people. So prepare for a warm lunch and a "German family home dinner": Breads, cold-cut meats, cheese, and perhaps a warm side-dish or salads (if we're lucky). I'm already preparing a list of alternate places that one can go to for dinner. Luckily, we didn't collect money for the meals but only reservations! This way, if you prefer to NOT have dinner at the YH (but have already reserved for it), simply tell so at the Warpstock Europe registration desk... the full "dinner issue" story along with more information is on the accommodation page.
Next on the list: No change in the schedule for today! Hooray! Instead, I have added the list of Sponsors and Supporters of this years Warpstock Europe on their very own subpage. Kindly notice who has contributed and keep that in mind when you want to buy or donate something next time... ;-)
ARGH! Constructions EVERYWHERE! Half of the parking lot of the YH was conquered by the City of Cologne's construction department to stack material for the flood protection improvement measures. This means: Less parkings. If you're in trouble, either turn around back in direction of the Zoo (parkings, not free) or continue towards the bridge and take the first next exit right for the street called "Kuhweg"... according to the YH staff, chances are that you will find parking spots there.
Constructions (continued): Also, the public transport at Cologne has decided to improve the stations around the railways central station. For doing so, the north/south-connection below Central Station is cut from now until summer 2007! This leads to severe detours and temporary creation of new lines. The Youth Hostel has prepared information sheets to take away. But what does it mean to travellers by train? You will have to exit the Central Station completely different! I will try to find a good route and description tomorrow in town. Stay tuned!

2006-November-07

Again a small change on friday: APP01 (Clipview) and APP04 (DFSee) which are subsequent sessions are now arranged in reverse order. And we're back to where we were with Evgeny's "Community Perspectives" session (ALL03). This is one of the starting trio on Friday and one of the closing ones on Sunday. And it will not be combined with someone elses session. See our schedule for details.
We've added some information concerning public internet access in the Youth Hostel - have a look at the rooms information.

2006-November-06

Some speakers have already confirmed the schedule. Two however have found some glitches that just slip your attention when you're working on a schedule. While one speaker was forced to do his presentations always in parallel of the session on Voyager (which he didn't want to miss), another speaker was scheduled to do two presentations at the same time. Oops. This is corrected - we had to swap two sessions on Saturday (all04:logfiles with dev02:wdsibyl) and two on Sunday (APP03:ecsmst with APP02:maul). I hope we didn't mess up someone's travel plans with that... we tried to make changes with as little impact as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience.

2006-November-03

The schedule (which almost caused sleepless nights to Christian Langanke - big thanks!) is now finally online.
And again, we've added sessions. Take a look at the sessoins page: Typo/3, PHP, servlets on Tomcat and WDSibyl have joined the incredible amount of presentation topics. And still, there's one session to come...
Please note that the online shop at Mensys will be closed on November 10th. After that date, you'll be able to get tickets only at the registration desk at the event site.
Evgeny Gorbunov (who has just received the papers needed to get to Cologne from Russia today!) kindly has created a black'n'white and a grayscale logo for our speakers to include in their presentation slides or transcripts. Check the support page if you need one...:-)

2006-October-31

Happy Halloween everone! On Sunday we found out that there's more sessions than time slots. Okay, we knew about the risk. Instead of starting to think about cancelling sessions, we tried to get another session room at the Youth Hostel... and... well, we succeeded, although the room named Mauenheim will be only available on Saturday and Sunday. But at least, it's on the same floor and it enables us to offer more contents to choose from for the vistors. See the room plan for more information.
At the same time, to stop us from doing the same errors again, we have closed the call for presentation as of today. Feel free to ask us, but be aware that we might simply say "sorry".
To the visitors this will mean, that we're gonna have a session schedule ready within the next days. I will drop an announcement into the usual places to notify everyone...

2006-October-27

Again more sessions! Seems like you're getting a hell of a bunch of good stuff in return for your entrance fee (of only 10 Euro a day BTW). This time, I've added 2 workshops (about eCS translation by the Dutch eCS tranlation community and programming using the Unicode API by Alex Taylor) as well as the CAcert organisation that will explain us what CAcert and certificates are about. CAcert will also be providing a booth to get certificates "assured" - read more about it on the sessions page. Last but not least, Bart van Leeuwen will tell us what the future of printing on eComStation might be: CUPS for eComStation (or short: eCUPS). This new project at netlabs.org tries to make CUPS (the Common UNIX printing system) which already serves as the core printing facility of MacOS X and most Linux distros link to the eCS printing system.

2006-October-26

More sessions! (And we still have some more waiting in the background). Adrian Gschwend will come to Cologne from Switzerland to give us the pleasure of two sessions: One about Voyager (one of the hottest topics in OS/2 and eCS community today - if not even THE hottest one). And talking about community: The second session is about 9 years of experience in open source projects for OS/2 and eCS at netlabs.org, the lessons learned and what the community can do to improve the current situation.
Aley Taylor will come from Canada to do a workshop about programming with the Unicode API and a session about DVD authoring. Details will be published on the agenda pages as soon as possible.
The ticket shop at Mensys will be available until November 10th. This is two weeks from now (as of today) so better decide fast! :-) Oh yes: We are starting to glue the session schedule. There should be a first version within the next week, I will announce it here (and in the news module of the ScreenSaver) once it's available.

2006-October-22

I have removed the session transcripts. I don't know what drove me to the idea of putting them online. What a stupid idea... sorry.
An internal, personal note: This night, our second child was born. It's a boy named Vincent and he and his mother (my beautiful wife BTW) are both well and okay. ;-) Greetings to everyone. Thomas.

2006-October-21

Joachim from Mensys told me that the link to the tickets page of the Mensys shop isn't too apparent. I must admit he's true, but as no one did complain, I didn't feel the need to change it. Okay. I have changed it by now, ;-)
I've added the session transcripts (which we have received by now) to the desciptions on the sessions page. So far, that's only two transcripts... but I guess the rest will follow.
Oh yes - talking about sessions - I am pleased to announce another promising presentation: Thorolf Godawa will explain how to set up an "OAMP"-server (in case you don't know: That's short for an OS/2-based webserver with Apache, MySQL and PHP...).

2006-October-18

Roderick Klein is back from Canada and besides his sessions about eCS 2.0, OpenOffice 2.0 for eCS and the os2news system, he might also have brought some news with him for presentation at Cologne.
For some reason, the news module of the ScreenSaver sometimes displays garbage or rather 'artefacts' (apparently from its buffer). Sometimes it happens, sometimes not. We'll try to fix this once we have enough time - say, after November 19th... :-)

2006-October-9

A lot of work has happened under the hood since the last update. We have fixed some things with the Youth Hostel (sigh) and in matters of organisation. And for the website: I've added a bunch of sessions that were confirmed during the last week and also speakers like Evgeny Gorbunov and Christian Langanke.
There's still more sessions in the pipeline, but I'm waiting either for a definite YES by the speakers or the session descriptions...

2006-September-19

We are very pleased to announce that Peter Weilbacher will come to Cologne and talk about his experience in working with the Mozilla projects. Perhaps he will also give us an insight on the future of the OS/2 ports...?
Robert Henschel has sacrified some of his little spare time to bring us the 2006 edition of the event news module for Doodle's ScreenSaver: Ready for download here.

2006-September-12

We have setup an experimental wishlist for sessions. Actually it is a list of suggestions for topics submitted by... well, you. We can't promise to turn these suggestions into sessions, but we try. So if there's a topic you think is worthwhile to be presented in Cologne, tell us!
I've digged out a link to the google maps view on the Youth Hostel. You can use the hybrid view with map data (street names) and zoom in and out to get an impression where the youth hostel is located within Cologne. Link is availabe on the location page...
Robert Henschel kindly took over the job to create a 2006 edition of the Warpstock Europe news module for Doodle's screensaver. Currently he's waiting for me to give him a nice picture to build into the module. Once it's done, it'll be available via the support page.

2006-September-06

It gives us great pleasure to notice that we have the first travellers announcing their trips to Cologne from Sweden and Spain. If you have ANY questions regarding your trip, remember that we have prepared a contact adress especially for you!

2006-September-01

Recently I noticed that the ticket machines at the airport are operated differently from the "usual" ones in Cologne, because they are not run by public transport but Deutsche Bahn instead. Travellers need to enter a 4-digit code for the destination instead of choosing a ticket type. I have updated the page with descriptions for travelling by plane accordingly...
Also, I have started to publish information about the sessions and speakers that already have signed in so far. See the agenda page and the according links.

2006-July-17

Roderick told me that we forgot to mention that our visitors don't need to be members of the youth hostel foundation to be entitled to accomodate at the hostel. Good point - that's right! By booking the event with the hostel (and one of the organizers being a member) we are allowed to make all our visitors accomodate at the hostel (if they want). I've added a note accordingly on the accomodation page.
Big thanks to the person who told us (I don't know who that was).

2006-June-22

I have linked the Mensys shop and the tickets page is quite complete now. Also, it gives us great pleasure to announce that Roland Schmalenberg has officially joined the organization board that is now made up of Roland, Roderick Klein and Thomas Klein. Roland will take care of the onsite staff management, the technical issues at the event site and the user groups liason. Also, he will support us of course in other matters whenever Roderick is drowning in work or Thomas is busy with website stuff (or on holidays, hehe...).

2006-June-21

The contacts page is finally ready. Now you can start drowning us in mails... thanks to Mensys for providing the secure IMAP mailbox that helps us manage our collaboration!

2006-June-18

Okay, now we have a news page. Also, we're planning to provide both a newsletter that you can subscribe to as well as an event news module for Doodle's screensaver. Besides, of course, we'll use the "usual" channels for announcing changes or news (e.g. VOICE, OS/2 World, de.os2.org, CommTalk etc...).
I was made aware of the fact that the font size of the website pages appears to be too small if the Innotek fontlib is installed (it seems to render by decreasing the size). As most people with comtemporary browsers might have the fontlib installed, I decided to increase the font size. If that still doesn't match your needs, use your browser's "Text zoom" function. :-)

2006-June-16

Roland Schmalenberg (of Team OS/2 Cologne/Bonn) and Thomas Klein met at the Youth Hostel. Besides talking about organisational items like the registration desk, various possible pitfalls were checked: The number and fuse strength for the power sockets in the user groups / exhibitors room and the possible ways of having more speed / bandwidth for the internet connection. Also, we took a look at the last one of "our" session rooms that was in use during the last onsite meeting. Roland will take care of managing the onsite technical items.

Roderick began to prepare the ticket articles in the Mensys shop. Perhaps we're gonna have some minor fine tuning for the final prices but the main "work" is done...
Roderick and Roland seem to already have made some contacts with possible speakers. Although most people won't be able to plan that much in advance (six months), this looks quite promising...

2006-June-15

We're online. Roderick has sent out the official announcement. Most of the website stuff is ready. Wow - six months in advance. That'll give us enough time to do some small additions and changes which the website is missing right now in its first stage.
Roland Schmalenberg phoned me and mailed Roderick about involving the German Team OS/2 (Cologne/Bonn) into the event organisation. I'm sure we will find a way of doing that regardless of the fact that most decisions are already taken and fixed with the Youth Hostel in Cologne.

2006-June-13

Phew! Finally I managed to create the page for downloading the logo and link banners. So if you want, you can now put the preferred graphics on your website and link to these pages here.