A payment on a flight story

“Three beers and three chicken sandwiches, thanks” – I said, graciously handing over my VISA card to the flight stewardess to pay for everything for me and my two Haxx friends Björn and Linus. 20 something Euros. Neither of us were carrying any cash.

We were happy that we had seats in the 7th row on the way back to Stockholm since when we flew down to FOSDEM Brussels just two days earlier we were in the 18th row and by then they had ran out of sandwiches. Brussels Airlines on a direct flight.

The lady inserted the card into her handheld card-reader, messed around a while since it wouldn’t “take” at the first attempt and then she handed it to me to enter my PIN. So I did.

credit cardsMs stewardess pressed some buttons or something and then she said, “no it doesn’t work” and continued to try inserting my card in basically every variation you can (especially having the chip side turned out has to be a very clever way) while repeating to me that it doesn’t work. This is the same card I’ve used numerous times during the weekend and I used it several times at the airport less than an hour ago. I know it works.

“OK let’s say you’re right”, I sighed as I really didn’t think I nor my card were to blame but I also didn’t feel like just causing trouble. I handed her my second VISA card. “Here, try this instead then”.

“No it doesn’t work either”. This certainly wasn’t right.

Linus reached over and offered his MasterCard. Perhaps there was a VISA problem with the device but “Sorry sir, it doesn’t work” came back. We’re now at farce level. Björn joins the fun and offers a 4th card, another MasterCard.

By this time we’ve eaten most of the sandwiches and were enjoying the beers.

The lady continued to struggle and it still didn’t work. She was starting to act a bit troubled about this and I asked her if she really insisted that all our cards are broken and she admitted that she suspected the machine wasn’t working quite as it should. Then she leaned towards the male steward who was serving drinks a couple of steps away. They fiddled a bit more and then she came back to us.

“That worked, I swiped it” she said without much further explanation and returned with Björn’s card and the receipt for the purchase. I felt quite done with this by now so I didn’t ask nor pushed her why she didn’t do that earlier. I was glad it finally was fixed. So much for me paying, now Björn did it instead. Oh well, truly fascinating that they would do like this on an airline where people have to do purchases with credit cards all the time.

Then Björn looked at the receipt he got back:

Pringles and a bottle of water, 5 Euro.

It made all three of us burst out in uncontrolled laughter. It was then followed by some contemplation what it actually meant. What exactly did Björn pay for? Did he only get the wrong receipt or did he pay for it? If so, who paid for our food and drinks?

It is 2014 and we haven’t come further than this.

(Update: Björn reminded me that we did verify the last 4 digits of the card number on the receipt and it didn’t match any of our cards…)

My FOSDEM 2014

I’m back home after FOSDEM 2014.Lots of coffee A big THANK YOU from me to the organizers of this fine and totally free happening.

Europe’s (the World’s?) biggest open source conference felt even bigger and more crowded this year. There seemed to be more talks that got full, longer lines for food and a worse parking situation.

Nothing of that caused any major concern for me though. I had a great weekend and I met up with a whole busload of friends from all over. Many of them I only meet at FOSDEM. This year I had some additional bonuses by for example meeting up with long-term committers Steve and Dan from the curl project whom I had never met before IRL. Old buddies from Haxx and Rockbox are kind of default! 🙂

Talk-wise this year was also extra good. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Embedded room but this year there was fierce competition for my attention so I spread my time among many rooms and got to see stuff about: clang the compiler, lots of really cool stuff on GDB, valgrind and helgrind, power efficient software, using the GPU to accelerate libreoffice, car automation and open source, how to run Android on low-memory devices, Firefox on Android and more.

I missed out the kdbus talks since it took place in one of them smaller devrooms even though it was “celebrity warning” all over it with Lennart Poettering. In general there’s sometimes this problem at FOSDEM that devrooms have very varying degrees of popularity on the different talks so the size of the room may be too large or too small depending on the separate topics and speakers. But yeah, I understand it is a very hard problem to improve for the organizers.

As a newbie Firefox developer at Mozilla I find it fun to first hear the Firefox on Android talk for an overview on how things  run on that platform now and then I also got references to Firefox both in the helgrind talk and the low-memory Android talk. In both negative and positive senses.

As always on FOSDEM some talks are not super good and we get unprepared speakers who talk quietly, monotone and uninspired but then there’s the awesome people that in spite of accents and the problem of speaking in English as your non-native language, can deliver inspiring and enticing talks that make me just want to immediately run home and try out new things.

The picture on the right is a small tribute to the drinks we could consume to get our spirits up during a talk we perhaps didn’t find the most interesting…

This year I found the helgrind and the gdb-valgrind talks to be especially good together with Meeks’ talk on using the GPU for libreoffice. We generally found that the wifi setup was better than ever before and worked basically all the time.

Accordingly, there were 8333 unique MAC addresses used on the network through the two days, which we then can use to guesstimate the number of attendees. Quite possibly upwards 6000…

See you at FOSDEM 2015. I think I’ll set myself up to talk about something then. I didn’t do any this year.