Folks: We had a Hack Fest as advertised on Friday, December 14. Ryan and Kieren (sp?) showed up at the appointed time of five o'clock, but nobody else did. It was too bad that there wasn't an audience yet assembled to see Ryan's presentation on db sharding, but on the other hand the champagne went farther because there were fewer people to share it. Ryan and Brian Warner engaged in high-bandwidth mindmeld about the architecture of the allmydata.org tahoe decentralized filesystem.
Later in the evening -- perhaps around 7 or 8 ? -- more people showed up, we turned on music, got live bidirectional audio and video conferencing into Second Life, and watched the music video "Here Comes Another Bubble". We had a lot of fun with virtualized video feedback in which we pointed our Second Life avatar's eyes at the virtual giant-screen-teevee which was displaying the live video feed from our Real Life video camera. Make sense? Maybe you had to "be" "there". Pavel claimed that I had invented the whole story about him having a Python decompiler. No Python code was decompiled that night. (As far as anyone knows.) Nejucomo demo'ed Conway's Second Life, and his spiel was full of amusing facts, such as that he has to carefully limit the rate of evolution of the life cells or else they trip The Grey Goo Killer which comes and turns off their scripts. We saw this happen. Unfortunately the Second Life Grey Goo Killer does not appear as a giant being of justice and light which zaps grey goo particles with lightning. Instead, your object just stops moving and a little exclamation point icon appears to let you know that the script terminated. Another funny (but sad) story was how when he had written the first version of Conway's Second Life, he had the cells with the program in his inventory, and he placed them out into the virtual World to test it out, and the script automatically started up and ran, and the cells all died off and deleted themselves, taking the only copy of his implementation with them. There may have been other events that I missed, because I think I fell asleep on some beanbags for a while. Sam Stoller suggested that Friday might not be the best day of the week to arrange for people to show up and to show up at the same time of day. There was some agreement on that point, so for the next Hack Fest (which is predicted to occur sometime in 2008), we will probably have it on Thursday evening, and name an official starting time closer to 7 o'clock PM than to 5 o'clock. Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
