Even this morning I didn't wake up early because I still felt sick (I already know this sore throath won't abandon me untile I go back home).

I had a light breakfast at 10:30 and then I finishes uploading some pictures and published articles on my blog I already had written before.

While waiting to attend a session, I found Mark Shuttleworth around and I congratulated with him for the effort he is putting into Ubuntu. Without a similar distribution, I'm pretty sure that Linux would not be so popular today.

We had lunch at 13:00 as usual and after that I attended a couple of presentation. The first one on Eucalyptus, then "Cooking Recipes" for Ubuntu and another one dedicated to Wine. The Wine session was so funny! They had a little problem with video projector and all the images appeared with a blur effect so that you could think to be drunk ;)

After these sessions I had to go back to my room since I didn't feel very well, but I was able to attend "Unity's relations and dependancies on GNOME" thanks to audio streaming, IRC for asking questions and etherpad to take notes.

I attended also "desktop-dx-o-unity-a11y" where there was a discussion about the state of Unity and what can be improved before Oneiric release. Lot of work has to be done yet, in particular about accessibility.

Last session of this day, a Q+A with Mark Shuttleworth. The session was very interesting! He replied to all questions coming from the public and from IRC.

This day at UDS started a bit late for me, since i woke up pretty sick (damn air conditioned!!!). I did not follow any conferences in the morning. I relly wanted to follow the Wayland one, but when I arrived the room was already full and it was almost impossible to enter, so I decided not to enter.

I attended "What's wrong with UDS and how we can fix it" session before having lunch. We discussed the possibility to improve all the session in general, for example giving them a proper order so that a team can first discuss some API interface, then another team can discuss how to design them.

We had another wonderful and tasty lunch, even if I didn't eat so much, but food was very good anyway.

During the afternoon I followed an interesting track: "Recommend music based on current song playing or on users media library". We discussed the possibilities to implement a music suggestion service, based on user's tastes.

I spent the rest of theconference time writing these blog posts and uploading pictures.

After the sessions we had the Linaro Showcase: lot of demo running on Linaro and ARM processors. I was really impressed by a robot with Kinect that was able to follow people recognizing their faces. During the showcase there was a very nice dinner.

After dinner I went out with my friend Manrique Lopez who is here in Budapest for another conference, so we decided to meet for a good beer.

Before coming back to the hotel me, Marco Trevisan and Andrea Azzarone had a nice talk with Jorge Castro. He really make us feel part of the Ubuntu family!

I left from Firenze with my friend Marco Trevisan, to go to Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest. We changed flight in Rome where we met also Andrea Azzarone. Unluckly Alitalia losts Marco's baggage, so he's still waiting for it.

We arrived at the hotel at 20:00 more or less where we met other people of the community. There are lot of italians at UDS. Most work for Canonical, other were sponsored by.

I met Marianna Raffaele (one of the UDS organizer... yeah, she's italian too!), I had to explain her a little problem I had with my booking (nothing bad) and she managed to help me. She also gave me a very nice guitar plettre with Ubuntu logo. Thank you Marianna for this!

We went out with Jorge Castro to drink some beers (he offered me one, thanks Jorge!!!) and we met lot of other Ubuntu people. A really amazing start!

During next Maemo Summit we will have at least 2 hours (one on saturday and another one on sunday) of lightning talks, about 20 talks where people will try to explain or present something in just 5 minutes.

Last year, during Maemo Summit 2008, I did a lightning talk too and I must admit: even if I knew a lot about the subject of my talk and even if I had already done many other talks, I think it wasn't so good as I expected.

This year I've been selected again (more details will follow) to give a 5 minutes talk and with this great news the kind Dave Neary also suggested me a link with an article about some best practices when giving lightning talks. I'll try to resume the most important points, hoping this will be useful for people who is going to give a short presentation at Summit.

Go straight to the point

Five minutes finish sooner than you can expect. You have to talk about the main topic of your talk within the two first minutes, else you risk to talk too much about the rest and you couldn't have the time for the most important thing.

Leave details away

People will never remember too many details explained in so little time. It's better to leave them away and put them in a more detailed blog post that you can link within your slides.

Slides

For a five minute talk you can avoid preparing slides, but if this can help you to concentrate on points you have to talk about, please prepare them. Two or three slides can be useful to introduce yourself, to write any reference of what you're talking about many other things. Another important thing, make sure your slides are ready before starting your presentation: people don't want to wait 20-30 seconds it takes to start Open Office or any other similar application.

Consider any eventuality

The presentation file could be damaged (be sure to have a copy of it, better in PDF format), your laptop could have no more battery (make sure you've a copy of your slides in a USB key), aliens could take you away, ecc... (ok, this last eventuality is remote).

Concluding your talk

Don't worry if you finish one or two minutes before, people won't bother about it. It's better to finish one minute before than 30 seconds later. If you want to leave an URL where people can find more details, how to contact you, put it in every slide so people will be able to take note of it from the first minute.

I hope to have resumed the most important points of the original article. If you think there are any other important things to say, please leave me a comment and I'll add them. I really hope you will enjoy Maemo Summit and its lightning talks!