The Dude abides.

Barcamp.my, Day 2

So Day 2 of Barcamp started off late again for me. Or if you have been following my twitter messages, perhaps you may argue that it was early for me. Oh toh-mah-toh, toe-mae-toe. In any case, I was in time for my talk at 11am, “The Malaysian Free Software Community”. Well, almost. While I was driving to the venue, I realized my X.org was b0rked. Fortunately, a call to @allenpais assured me that I could use his laptop for the presentation.

So, I was late to my own presentation, but no matter, most people were still in the WiFi-cracking talk. There was no projector, but @sweemeng quickly procured one. Then, we realized @allenpais’s X.org config was unfortunately b0rked too thus resulting (in true open source fashion) having four laptops out in the open with geeks trying to fixor the problem (thanks @kagesenshi, @allenpais, @sweemeng). I decided to step out for some much needed vitamins and apparently the problem was fixed when I got back. As an added bonus, the mostly empty room filled up with a number of people by then.

The talk was well received, which was awesome given how nervous I was (@aizatto would be able to attest to that). The high levels of nervousity came about to some extent due to me being out of the FOSS speaking circuit for the last 18 months, and that the last talk I gave with this content was a FAIL (of course, me nursing an extreme hangover then did not help matters).

I had hoped that the net result of the talk would be having various interested people get involved more actively in Free Software in Malaysia. I wasn’t disappointed as several people indicated some interest in getting stuff started within their own spheres.

A sad bit was that my slides got messed up and I actually missed out giving due props to @kagesenshi for the most excellent work he has been doing in the Fedora project. Rock on, dude!

After a suitably timed break, I attended another talk on “Hidden Impact of Higher Mathematics on the World Wide Web”. I was slightly late for this talk, but I did catch a section where the speaker attempted to guess the missing number that the audience would hide from him. He got it right almost each time. Thanks to sitting beside the ever algorithmic @angch, I was informed by @ngch that the speaker was using a cyclic redundancy check algorithm. Heh

Lunch was served (and many thanks to the organizers for providing vegetarian food!).

Post lunch were lightning talks, which I thought @aizatto was supposed to run but which apparently got forked by @fadzil. Heh. In any case, a re-merge quickly happened and the results were … amazing! Participants speaking on all topics, from hardware hacking to free culture to why-yum-kicks-ass to couchsurfing.com (that would be yours truly :p) to efficient methods of hiding pr0n[0].

The lightning talks were not strictly run (ie not strictly 5 minutes), but most people kept it short and sweet. Fadzil’s energy and enthusiasm were very much appreciated (he should be barcamp.my’s resident lightning-talk-host!). There was a talk by @mengwong on “Who’s Fucking Who.com” which was easily, in my opinion, the best talk at barcamp.my as a whole! Fucking aye, that talk was just absolutely brilliant!

Anyways, with that barcamp.my pretty much came to an end. Here’s a review of barcamp.my as a whole:

The Good:

1. Vegetarian food.
2. Great organization (fantastic work, froods!).
3. Awesome organizers.
4. Women! Heh.
5. Amazing participants.
6. Warm welcome (on both mornings!) by the girl at front desk.
7. Lightning talks.
8. The cute “welcome” girl at front desk [1].
9. The great people and conversations met and had in the stairwell.
10. Awesomely cute “welcome” girl at front desk urmm … hmmmm … oh yes, “Mathemagics” was cool.
11. Everybody helping out in their small way in the organization (seeing participants help take out the trash was way cool).
12. Putting faces to twits, heh (hey @danesh_m, @rajaseelan).
13. Sweet sunny smile by welcome girl^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HWatching Dark Knight again.
14. Standing-only crowd at @yoonkit’s talk!
15. Possible fist fight (see The Ugly).
16. Waking up tomorrow, going to work, getting to torture the slaves (woo hoo!).

The Bad:

1. Wifi. Lack thereof. Nuff said!
2. Talks with mostly pre-emptible content. Pre-emptible by thoughts of the bed on a Sunday.
3. Not getting to talk to the cute girl (fail, fail, epic fail).
4. Waking up tomorrow, going to work.

The Ugly:

1. Marketing talks. Sigh.
2. Losing any remote possibility of hooking up with cute girl, thanks to this blog post.
3. Getting beaten up by cute girl’s Significant Other. Hmm, a fistfight may be a cool experience tho. Adding that to “The Good”, heh.
4. Waking up tomorrow. Possibly.

In Summary:

“My two cents is that I’m going to go volunteer at the other barcamps, this experience was amazing enough to convince me!”

[0] A note for Windows users wishing to hide their pr0n: TrueCrypt has been b0rk3n.

[1] Dear Lazyweb, twit me the name of this cute girl would ya? My beer shall be yours.

[...] Ditesh Kumar Gathani - Barcamp, Day 2 [...]

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It was awesome eh? I especially liked your talk about couchsurfing and devan’s underground thai tour. I wanna go do that. It’d be the dog’s bollocks I bet.