Back from HAR2009 last night, and obviously I loved it.

HAR2009 was quite wonderful, I usually run arround helping out where I can, but this year decided to take it easy and be a ‘visitor’. I can only say it was only slightly more relaxed. I still volunteered a little and still hopped from A to B to C to D. I managed to actually build something though, an Arduino based MIDI-controller, simple but for some odd reason anoying to get it to actually work. Also got to meet and talk to a lot of familiar and unfamiliar people and had overal quite a lot of fun.

I’ve got mixed feelings about the 4 yearly event this time named HAR. It’s big and that creates a paradoxal feeling for me.

I love how it brings people together, and with that how I get to see lots of people again. I also love the atmosphere these events bring, I’m almost always sorry that it’s over. Something about such a lot of cool/like-minded/fun people in one small space. IT’s like the ‘perfect’ town/village.

There is a downside on it though. Or some actually, and it all comes down to size. It’s only a short event and I never get see and talk to everyone there, and for me that ends up usually in lots of short contacts with lots of people. Not ideal, you never get to be really talking to anyone. And if you do, you miss out on quite a lot.

Big events are also expensive like hell, both in time and money. It’s I think always worth it, but because of it, you end up with a high entrance price which font fit everyone’s budget and raising the threshold for joining.

I think events like WTH, CCC-Camp, HAR, etc have a good place, I also think it’s good that they’re not every year. That way there is space for smaller events, sometimes more specialised, ususally a lot easier to join.

Events like ETH0, EasterHegg, ICMP, Opencommunity Camp, Hackmeetings, Megabit, and many more.  They often only have a few hunderd people max, but contact is closer, it’s easier to have a longer event, more intimate and higher impact. And mainly you can have more of them, making the overall experience even longer and diverser (although many people still have the problem with having to work and all that crap ;).

So I’d love to see more people organise more smaller events, and I love for people to work on CCC Camp in 2 years and build another Dutch event in 4 years. Maybe with even more people.

So see you in 4 years, 2 years or maybe in 2 months.

And also Special Thanks to:

• Organisation & active volunters: You’ve done a load, and by far the most work in getting this event pulled off.
• HARdware village for providing a great place for hacking on hardware and providing kits.
• Geraffel village for helping out with my midi project by providing tips, connectors and a synth for testing
• Arduino village for providing the arduino and help debugging.
• C-Base for a nice place with nice people and nice food :)
• Everyone for making this again another wonderful event.

Sadly the Dutch Perl Workshop or Nederlandse Perl Workshop is over. :(

Even though I was very tired to begin it all with the event was a lot of fun.

The workshop itself was just on friday, but on thursday evening we worked until 01:00 to get the network working. At the event location, Hotspot wireless was provided by the ‘StayOkay’, but this only allowed traffic over port 80 and 443, and was just crappy. So we connected a spare laptop to cisco switch + accespoints we could borrow and let that route all traffic over a OpenVPN link to a freshly setup Virtual Server. Worked like a charm.

On friday the day started early with the first talk at 9.15 (10 minutes late, as was planned :). With a few breaks for coffee/tea and lunch in the afternoon, we had one full track of talks ranging from 5 to 20 minutes. Topics where diverse aswell, from in-depth perl hacks to generic coding strategies and application showcases. A lot of fun, but quite intense.

At the end of the day we had an auction for the Perl Promotion foundation, which organises the event and a fun quiz featuring obscure Perl issues.

Dinner was included and tasty, and the rest of the evening was filled with discussions, playing fluxx and drinking whiskey or beer.

I’d say I can’t wait until next year, but since I’m quite exhausted from this one, I can now :)
I took some pictures with my Practica MTL3, as soon as the film is developed, I’ll post some here.

Beetje laat, maar aanstaande vrijdag de 6e Maart 2009. Is dus de Jaarlijkse Nederlandse Perl Workshop. Meestal boeiend, altijd gezellig. In middels is het programma ook redelijk vol en online te bezichtigen.

http://www.perlworkshop.nl/nlpw2009/schedule

Verder geef ik dit jaar zelf ook een praatje over m’n HealthMatrix, waarvan ik voor vrijdag nog hoop een release te doen. De huidige release is niet heel optimaal.

Mocht je vrijdag dus nog tijd hebben, schrijf je dan nog vooral in!

This weekend I’m hanging out on Fosdem which is quite fun, although mainly from a social point of view.

The ADA talks where intresting and I might take a look at the language. I felt they left out a lot during the talks. Which made me a bit confused as to how abstract the language really is. It looks powerful, but also very limiting.

Koen gave an small overview over a migration from Informix to PostgreSQL. This talk was again followed by a intresting talk on how to run ’software meetings’ in a somewhat centralised way. And currently watched a talk on ext4 which was fun and now watching a FreeBSD performance talk.

Overall I’ve mainly running into familiar faces and enjoying nioce belgian beers in de evening. The talks aren’t bad, but I do see it more as a social event. The network on the otherhand is quite crap, with ports being blocked, accespoints requiring users to press buttons on pages before you get any routing, and just entire parts not working.

On anoter note, the Dutch Perl Workshop is comming up soon. On the 6th of March this year you can spent an entire day following cool perl related talks, talking to fellow perl coders and playing Fluxx. A program isn’t online yet, but it’s bound to be fun anyway.

Ext4 talk at Fosdem 2009

The Follow-up of WhatTheHack2005, HackingAtLarge2001, HackingInProgress1997 and many more was announced a few months a go already. Hacking At Random, aka HAR2009.

As per today, we have a location and date!

Hacking at Random 2009 will be held near Vierhouten, The Netherlands from 13-08-2009 to 16-08-2009.

The exact location is called the Paasheuvel, an old camping/park in the middle of nowhere. A big area but quite spread-out.

So put the date in your agenda, and I’ll see you there. :)