The
BarCamp
Zurich 2006 is over. On the way there I thought about what I would
do during time slots with no interesting talks. But when I tried to
make up my personal schedule, I noticed that I rather would have the
opposite problem: Too many interesting talks at the same time… Well,
to many interesting talks at all, although I only went to tech talks
and left out the biz talks.
I first went to the
Podcasting & Co. talk by Timo Hetzel,
since I never heard or made a podcast, but was curious about podcasts
in general. Besides statistics and rankings he spoke about where
people listen to podcast (most listeners seem to do that during
commuting), what people like in podcasts, why companies podcast,
etc. And that a very big share of all podcast listeners use iTunes as
podcast client and except juice (never heard of it before) all other
podcast clients seem to be irrelevant.
My conclusion: I haven’t missed anything not having listened to or
made podcasts neither do I need to listen or make podcasts in the
future. They’re irrelevant. To me.
:-)
Then I had to choose between the talks
AJAX@localhost (
PDF) by
Harry Fuecks and
Realtime Collaborative
Text Editing and
SubEthaEdit by the
Coding
Monkeys. I heard about realtime collaborative editing once know
that it’s a challenging task for the developer. I also know what
AJAX
is (and that I would only use or recommend it for bells and whistles,
but not for content in general), but “
AJAX@localhost” sounded like
writing normal applications using
AJAX. It sounded interesting and
evil at the same time. I had to go there!
;-)
Others had similar expectations after reading the talk’s title, so I
was quite surprised that it was about something completely different,
namely about debugging
AJAX on the localhost but under conditions
usually only appearing if you’re running
AJAX application
not
from localhost but from somewhere on the net: You may have different
lags with every request, so some requests may reach the server before
others, which may screw up the whole
AJAX application, if the
developers didn’t think about it and only tested it on
localhost. (Hence the talk’s title…)
My conlusion: I will use and recommend
AJAX even more seldom, since
there seem to be even more design misconceptions than I thought
before. But I’ll once have a look at the
Webtuesday meeting, he mentioned.
For the third time-slot, I didn’t need long to decide where to go: I
already knew a little bit about
Microformats and I wanted to
know more.
Tag Trade also sounded interesting, but the
second part of the talk’s title,
Paid Learning sounded like
business and so I had no scruples to cold-shoulder that talk. I
probably didn’t learn anything really new in the microformats talk,
but my knowledge about microformats is now more concrete, and after
talking with
Cédric Hüsler later during a
break, I would even trust myself to start and define a new
microformat.
Then I went to the
HG Caféteria together with
Gürkan and two German guys. While waiting in the queue, we
were talking about our jobs and our favourite
Linux distributions. I
got some rhubarb pie and a rum truffles, assuming that the
Caféteria uses no alcohol in their products like all other
SV restaurant I
know. But this one seemed to have quite a lot of alcohol, since it
felt like my breath was burning… Well, this resulted in my second
SV
feedback form submission…
Next I went to
Alex Schröder’s
talk about multilingual websites,
Oddmuse and the
Emacs Wiki, although
also the talk
A-Life about simulating evolution sounded
promising. Alex asked the listeners about their experiences with
multilingual websites and showed what Oddmuse offers as partial
solution to the general multilingualism problems. But regarding the
comments from the auditorium, there probably won’t be a perfect
solution until computers can translate perfectly…
The next talk I visited was
Gabor’s talk about
his
master
thesis Organizing E-Mail which resulted in a soon to be
released
Mozilla Thunderbird extension called
BuzzTrack. From the
other concepts he showed, I found Microsoft’s
SNARF (Social Network and Relationship Finder) and
IBM’s
Thread Arcs most interesting as well as the fact that there is no
e-mail client seems to have a majority at all.
Directly after Gabor I had my own talk about
Understanding Shell Quoting, so I
also couldn’t go to
Adrian Heydecker’s talk about
Learning with Hypertext and Search Engines. I had only about
three and a half listeners of whom several to my surprise where here
because they didn’t know what “shell quoting” is.
I really didn’t expect that.
But that seems to be one of the differences between a BarCamp and a
Linux Conferences: People come here to see something new, something
they haven’t heard about before. On Linux events most people come,
because they already heard about some special topic and want to know
more or learn something about it. On Linux event my shell talks
usually were attracting many visitors while at a BarCamp, talks
presenting an idea, a concept or a tool seem to much more interesting
for the attendees. So for the next BarCamp I perhaps exhume my
Website Meta Language talk which
never seemed to hit the nerve of Linux event attendees, since it tried
to “sell” a different concept of generating website than most were
used to.
At least one listener excepted the talk to be named “shell escaping”,
but
IMHO escaping is only one quoting technic and it’s not only used
for quoting. But perhaps I should take the word “escaping” in the
title though for the next time.
Happily most of the listeners seem to have learned something new from
the talk and
Silvan Gebhardt was really happy about his new knowledge
about ssh ~ escapes, although I mainly talked about how to quote them
than how to use them.
:-)
During the last slot I visited the session about the upcoming
BarCamp Alsace
2 and the yet to be planned
BarCamp Rhine, a BarCamp
to be held on a ship traveling from Basel in Switzerland down the
Rhine, stopping in Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Rhein-Main-Area and perhaps
even Cologne and Amsterdam.
Contrary to my initial thoughts, the day was over very fast and I had
no single boring minute during the BarCamp. Wow!
After we’ve been kicked out of the building by
ETH janitors, we joined
again at the Bar N-68. On the way there I met
Urban M ller
who attended BarCamp Zurich, too. We talked quite a lot and it was
very interesting to see behind the scenes of e.g.
map.search.ch. Later I joined the
French speaking table, talking with
Gregoire
Japiot from
WineCamp France and Alex Schröder.
Around 9pm I left the N-68 as one of the last BarCampers, tired but
with new knowledge, new ideas, new acquaintances and a new hobby:
BarCamping. What a luck that BarCamps aren’t that often, otherwise I
couldn’t afford this new hobby.
;-)
As a relaxing end I met with Alex Schröder and
Christophe
Ducamp on Sunday morning for brunch in the restaurant
Gloria in the Industriequartier. When we were leaving
the Gloria I noticed their book board with a lots of
BookCrossing books and I took
“The Da Vinci Code” with me, since I saw the movie and people were
telling me that the book is much better. I’ll see…
