So on Friday and Saturday, with Parkyeri people, I was at the Free Software and Open Source Days at Bilgi University of Istanbul.

Well known faces of Free Software^TM Community were around. We had a lot of fun, took pictures, did little bits of hacking and discussed on patents and so on. But bad news today: EU adopts a common position on patentability of computer-implemented inventions -- which may prevent further development of free software by making it illegal! What the f*ck?! Anyways, I'm not going to write about that shit, many other people will do it much better than me.

At the mini-conference, we had famous guests:

• Louis Suarez-Potts from the OpenOffice.org Project
• Georg Greve from FSF Europe
• Miguel de Icaza from Novell

Erçin and Arda have a lot of pictures for your viewing pleasure, while I have only a few (until Miguel publishes his huge archive of touristic places in Istanbul):

Miguel, Gökmen, me

Peter, Miguel, Gökmen, me, Afşin

We had the history of Computer Languages printed out, and a AG6B demo. Fun, eh?

Miguel's presentation pointed out some crucial concepts like Mono, GNOME and Free Software which was great.

We had a quick and delicious dinner, we went over to Baltalimanı where GNOME-Turk team meeting took place. With Peter and Miguel, we had an in-depth discussion of ethnical, economical, political and social problems of mid-east people from very different aspects, with the touch of the history. I really enjoyed that a lot. Later the night, some of us were at Roxy for a beer, or five

With Sezgin, Miguel and Miguel's cameras and lenses and other power toys, we went over to see what Istanbul hides behind the streets on Sunday morning. We were on Galata tower, then we went to Ayasofia, Blue Mosque, Basilica Cistern, and although it was closed, to the Nuruosmaniye entrance of The Grand Bazaar. Awesome.

We crossed the Bosphorus and jumped over to the Asian side of the city, and enjoyed a short walk on the Baghdad Street. That was already too much for me, but what I can tell is the monkey called Miguel de Icaza Amozorrutia just didn't stop.

On Monday morning, we ran to the airport so our 32 year old famous hacker could fly over to Lebanon, Beirut to meet Robert Fisk, the author of Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon. According to the news the situation is a bit fragile, but he showed up on IRC a couple of hours ago, so I think everything is OK so far. To put in his words, "he has 32 years of experience in surviving" and he's probably going to stick with survivors. Anyway, I don't think it's all that serious

More to come soon,