I’m actually working on a new version of Facebook Fresh, the award winning* GreaseMonkey script that magically removes all your friends’ annoying Facebook applications. In the meantime, you can still get the old one here. (will not work unless you have GreaseMonkey, which is an extension for Firefox, installed)
(*Did not win any actual awards. Yet.)
So, BarCamp Sydney 3 is over. I attended yesterday, but left in the early afternoon after feeling decidedly “camped out”. Maybe it was the free beer and pub meal the night before, or maybe the free pizza at lunch yesterday sent me into a food coma. Either way, I found I had lost the energy to continue in any productive fashion.
In the morning I did, however, show lft’s Craft, an amazing demo written for a 20mhz microcontroller. (I insist you check it out, if you haven’t seen it already.) The reaction was really positive, despite my initial uncertainty that people would actually get why it is so amazing.
Overall, my BarCamp experience was great. I really enjoyed presenting and interrupting people contributing to some really interesting discussions. What I liked most of all, though, was meeting so many interesting and enthusiastic people. I thought that maybe 2 full days was a little much for me, but perhaps next year there will be more attendees that will justify the extended time.
Thanks to all the unorganisers, who worked tirelessly to make everything ran smoothly. Well done.
Day one is over, and it was a lot of fun. I gave my presentation and it went really well. There were a few people who commented on having enjoyed it, and at least one or two who will definitely go on to play with Processing. Mission accomplished.
The other presentations were mostly very interesting. One that sparked particular debate was on “web 3.0″, and whatever that’s supposed to mean. I really enjoyed the format of the conference: interruptions are not just permitted, they are encouraged. You can see a photo of me making some sort of important point on Flickr (plus a couple of other embarrassing shots).
During the day a couple of guys and I set up a “Rick Roll” presentation, which was exactly what you would imagine. Surprisingly at least 20 or so people came, I still have no idea why. I think a lot of this Rick Rolling business is just a cover-up for the fact that people seem to just like the song.
I’ve just registered to attend BarCamp Sydney 3, which is taking place at UNSW in a couple of weekends’ time.
I’ve said that I’ll be presenting on “recreating old-school demo effects in Processing“, which is what I was doing last weekend. If anything, it’ll give me the impetus to develop something a bit more concrete in Processing before I present. I’ll probably go back and look at some of my favourite older demos, and see which effects can be comfortably reimplemented in the 5-10 minute timeslot provided. (At the moment, I’m thinking of something from Second Reality by the Future Crew or, possibly, Bill G Force by Complex.)
I’ll also take some photos while I’m there, and post details on some of the discussions here.
Do come along if you’re in Sydney. It should be good fun!
For those of you who’ve listened to Zappa’s Overnite Sensation and been mystified by his references to “Zircon Encrusted Tweezers”, wonder no more:
“…by placing a pair of zircon-encrusted tweezers in the hands of his dental-floss-farmer-to-be in `Montana’, Zappa is displaying an intimate awareness of the culture of the Wild West, now vanishing under a carpet of fast-food joints and auto dealers.”
Read the full explanation in this Usenet post by Dan Rabin.
My server suffered a complete hard drive failure, and I didn’t have a backup of the SQL database, which included all my blog posts. Oh well.
I hadn’t backed up my dpkg list, either, so reinstallation of all the services was a bit of a nightmare. (mysql and postfix somehow ended up switching uid’s, which played mayhem on the existing config files.)
Everything seems to be back to normal now, though. I have now implemented MySQL backups and performing a “dpkg –get-selections” to a remote site, nightly. This should shorten the recovery time should a failure like this occur again.