BarCamp Vancouver 2006

[robbat2]

BarCamp Vancouver 2006 took place August 25th and 26th. For those not aware of it, in plain terms, it's a geek un-conference without formal talk arrangements. You turn up, have a party, camp in an office building, have breakfast, come up with mostly impromptu talks, give said talks, have lunch, do more talks, go home. My talk was on CACert Assurances, and I was also a super-assurer for the purposes of the event.

The BarCamp party was held in the space that's going to be Bryght's new offices, in Gastown. I couldn't find a suitable sleeping bag originally, so I just went down with a laptop and my small backpack, planning on coming back home to sleep. I got there around 6.10pm, after phoning Richard (babykarret's guy) because I was lost in Gastown and the address I had was wrong. Registered, got my t-shirt, and made my name-tag. Tags indicated 'isoHunt' (my job), 'Gentoo Linux', 'phpMyAdmin' (both open source projects I'm involved in). Decorated it with coloured stars to indicate 'Geek' and 'Not single but still interesting' (the other options were 'Non-Geek', 'Single', 'Blogger', 'Podcaster' [and later somebody added 'Parent']).

Grabbed some of the on-tap beer sponsored by AdHack, and started to circulate. Said Hi to the folk there that I previously knew, and then tried to talk to new people. Not because the usual suspects are boring, but because part of the point of BarCamp is networking.

Eventually settled onto a spot on the floor and switched to drinking Jones Soda, chatting with blond-haired male around my age (sorry, forgot his name as I didn't see him on the second day when I was sober), and a female that appeared to be intently trying to get some code working on her laptop. Her name was Chani chani3, and she has the distinction of being one of the extremely talented students participating in Google's Summer of Code 2006. Similar to the SoC students working with Gentoo (I've had the opportunity to talk shop with several of them), she is exceedingly bright (also, there are very few female students in the Summer of Code, so by statistics, she's absolutely top notch in what she's doing), and was a lot more interesting to talk to than some of the older crowd at the conference. Chani was attempting to debug the Loki-based installer for a game related to Creatures3. The installer wasn't behaving much as the Loki installers tend to do, as I have been lucky to experience with Gentoo. It was failing due to stupidity in resolving a nested symlink using ls and awk *yuck*, as the nested symlinks pointed deep into her Gentoo partition. When prompted, I pointed out that readlink could provide said exact functionality without the mess. I did screw up and suggest readlink -f initially, to make sure every symlink in the path was resolved, but the installer didn't like that either, and just plain readlink.

After a dinner of hamburgers and smokies, the event got properly underway, with everybody getting a 5 second slot to introduce themselves. The plans were outlined, and the stuff about sleeping was specified. At this point, I decided to change my previous plan of sleeping at home, and then got a quick ride home with Gary (my boss at isoHunt) when he was going home, so that I could look for a different sleeping bag, and the single air mattress - because concrete floors suck badly. I also grabbed my bottle of sambuca from the freezer, and a bottle of our wedding-brand homemade wine. Got the bus back downtown, put my stuff down, had some wine while circulating more. Then did some of the party teardown, hauling stuff over to the WorkSpace building.

After moving everything, there was a photography expedition into the wilds of Main and Hastings, and since we were a reasonable group, I decided to tag along. First however, I got a double-shot espresso and made it into a Café Correcto with the addition of Sambuca. I should have brought my tripod, and my spare battery (that I later ran back for), but it was worthwhile. The photos that did turn out turned out pretty good. Headed back to WorkSpace. I had left my Sambuca on the counter, with a free invite for anybody to go for it, and a few were doing so. I got some for myself, in a little espresso cup, and found the couches to talk geek with a few folk as the numbers slowly dwindled.

Towards 3.30am, most folk were turning in for the night. In this case it ranged from somebody with a full tent and double air mattress, to a double air mattress with nice duvets, to sleeping bags on couchs, to some insane fool with just a thin yoga mat on the floor and a jacket over him. I had the exceedingly narrow single air mattress for myself, and after distributing lots of single-serving units of toothpaste, lay down for some sleep. Aside from a few snoring folks that were blocked out by my earplugs, I managed to sleep for nearly 4 hours, until the rail shunting yard behind of the building started up for the day, with tremendous crashes of trains. I got up, threw on a clean shirt, and tried to figure out some food. The coffee serving guys weren't around until 8.15am or so, so many of us wandered around very groggily. Breakfast ultimately turned out OK (you can't complain when one of the items available are butter croissants and Nutella).

Around 8.20am, I set out to find somewhere to do photocopies, as I needed lots of copies of the CACert CAP IV form. Turns out that finding somewhere to get photocopies that early, close to Main and Hastings your options are VERY limited. I looked for a long time before finding somewhere that was actually open, and then I had to pay $0.20/copy instead of there being any open places with rates like $0.07/copy :-(. Their photocopier wasn't the fastest either, so after that I high-tailed it back to WorkSpace, just in time to hear my name being called, and I did a 30 second pitch on my CACert presentation.

After the night on the single air mattress, I decided that I wanted to be comfortable, so I elected to attend whatever talks were held in the lounge area, which had 3 reasonable leather couches. Kinda a let the talks come to you kind of thing. Most of them were reasonably interesting, on subjects such as digital archival, good speeches for techies (see the next post for the notes I took), identity solutions and systems, and artistic elements and choices in movies and games. My talk on CACert went reasonably well, I think I should perhaps polish it a bit more, and present it at other events to help promote CACert here on the West Coast.

Between the talks, there was a break for lunch, with some absolutely first rate pizza. Of the vegetarian pizzas, the artichoke was supreme, and of the meat pizzas, the thinly sliced Chorizo sausage with mushrooms and onions was divine.

I gave up around 4pm, and got a ride back home with Gary - the pizza really decided it didn't like me at this point, and I felt under the weather. Got home, took a shower and took a nap before dinner.

Misc details cut for various reasons, but nobody got wasted, or lost their lunch, although I wouldn't be surprised if some of the other attendees were following the instructions to make out in the 3rd floor women's washroom.

Comments

[galaxychild.livejournal.com]

I read about WorkSpace a while ago...I want to live there!

Okay, not really. Work, yes.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

It's good, but not 100% right yet.
It still feels too sterile.
And they are redoing the carpets still (hence the concrete floor).

isoHunt

[siuyee.livejournal.com]

What do you mean you work for isoHunt? Isn't it....illegal?

Re: isoHunt

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

nope.

It's a fulltime job, and isoHunt is a registered company.

We do the same thing that Google did originally, just in a different medium.
They indexed the web, isoHunt indexes BitTorrent instead.

We comply with the same rules that Google does with regards to DMCA takedown notifications.

Re: isoHunt

[siuyee.livejournal.com]

Huh, so you are a true pirate then. Kudos to you!

Re: isoHunt

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

Nope, I'm not a pirate at all.

I'm argubly more legal than my co-workers, because I don't run anything except Linux anymore. I don't know the status of their Windows licenses, other than the fact that my boss likes OSX.

We index bittorrent, which does NOT require downloading any part of any software contained on BitTorrent. We go to strenous lengths to make sure that we don't download any of it, nor run any trackers at isoHunt. We simply point you to torrents and trackers that have the content you seek.