Barcamp wrap-up

Chris Ball — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 03:31:00 +0100

Barcamp's over now, and was well worthwhile. I've missed the kind of environment where you can wander up to people, say "So, what are you working on?" and get an enthusiastic insight into an area you might not know anything about — Barcamp's everyone-should-participate mentality was just right for that.

The Touchstream turned out to be a big conversation starter, and I had fun chatting about alternative keyboards and UIs with smart and friendly people like j and Steve. I gave my first Dasher demos since leaving Cambridge, which felt good; reminding me how worthwhile a project it is, and that it deserves more of my time than I've given it.

My talk at Barcamp was 20 Perl modules in 30 minutes. After the talk we chatted about possible reasons for Perl being suspiciously absent from the rest of the talks, with people finally seeming to lean towards Ruby/Python/PHP instead. I've been hanging on to Perl partly because I'm paid to write it, and partly because of the mind-blowing awesomeness of the CPAN. When Ruby gets a module collection with anywhere near as much coverage, I'll be there.

The reddit guys came up with a hilarious talk on Web 2.0, and are going to upload the video of it to this page sometime soon.

Also: I was thrilled that someone came up after my talk and said he uses a Mac and wondered where I got the software to do cube flipping between two workspaces — I was swapping between one workspace containing my presentation and one with an emacs session showing example code and running it. The reason I was thrilled is that I wasn't using a Mac, but we must be doing something right if my setup can be mistaken for one! I used Linux with magicpoint for the presentation and compiz on aiglx for the crazy cool cube flipping.

Live from Barcamp

Chris Ball — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 18:06:00 +0100

I'll be blogging from Bar Camp Boston for the next day or so. So far I've heard Schuyler and friends talk about open-source Geo stuff -- they're working on a BSD licensed maps API called OpenLayers that sits at the layer above services like Google Maps and provides a consistent API to them; so, you can target your mapping app at OpenLayers and then back on to any data source that they have a plugin for. Interesting things:

Mapstraction
Boston Free Map
Openstreetmap
how incredible it is that we put up with governments using taxes to commission maps and then selling them for insane amounts of money.
it is amusing that Openstreetmap uses a Peter's projection while OpenLayers takes its data and makes a Mercator projection out of it. Go Cartographers for Social Equality!

I also saw Dan Kunkle give a talk on solving the Rubik's Cube; with 4.3 * 10^19 states, we couldn't even store a bit per state, but he's using some clever strategies to reduce the space into the double terabytes. He also solved the cube — "okay, now I don't need to look any more.. thirty seconds of fast flipping while he looks away and continues talking.. done" — for us. I bet solving Rubik's Cubes would improve my Go game.

They just brought out tens of pizza boxes, so sounds like time to eat. More later, with photos, which there's a Flickr group for.

Chris Ball: Tag barcampboston

Barcamp wrap-up

Live from Barcamp