I've been attending the Akademy-es 2011 at Barcelona last week-end, instead of protesting and making the Spanish Revolution 2.0. It was a pleasure to meet Antonio Larrosa face to face again, after 5 years. We met the first time at Akademy-es 2006, also in Barcelona, where the idea for KMid2 was born. Hugs, Antonio!
My presentation was rejected. I've offered the same paper ("MIDI en Linux") used at the IX Jornadas de Software Libre. As an alternative, they proposed a lightning talk about KMid, but I wasn't interested in this format. My project is not KMid, but KMid is a piece of my project: providing Linux and KDE the MIDI tools that are needed, and this includes KMid, KMetronome, KMidimon, Drumstick, and some more programs.
About the conferences. Some talks were recycled, year after year, like the Valgrind talk by Albert that anyway deserves to be repeated even more times because it is a key tool to enhance the code quality of our projects. Other topics were brand new and interesting, for instance the half-rolling release and bundle system of the Chakra distribution, presented by Manuel Tortosa.
After the meetings, supper and drinks. This is the so called "social program". Everything is social, of course, when a couple of geeks meets to do things together. Saturday supper, I was shocked by a question of one of the attendees. He said to me something like this: Who wants MIDI at 2011, anyway? The answer for this question was in my paper, but he didn't bothered to read it. To summarize: MIDI is not an alternative to MP3, like drawing is not an alternative to photography. Who thinks that every program related to drawing should be banned from KDE? After all, it is a technology invented in the paleolithic era.
I'm just a user (mostly), but I follow Planet KDE on my RSS reader, so I caught your post.
ReplyDeleteWell as a user I can assure you that MIDI is very much in use and in demand. Do not let people with so narrow a view that they only see what they think is *important* as actually being so inclusive that all else is unimportant.
Unfortunately for me, I do not read Spanish, but even so I managed to extract from your MIDI en Linux PDF that you covered that it's not just for music --one can control about anything using MIDI (and over Ethernet too!). A very useful protocol indeed.
And so many major projects use and even depend on MIDI --I know that you mentioned several in your paper.
Anyway never let dullards get you down. There are people out here that understand and appreciate your efforts.
@dhensley, thank you very much for your support.
ReplyDelete