Haiku Down Under 2012 Report

If anything could go wrong – it did go wrong at the Fifth Annual Haiku Down Under Conference for Users and Developers, held at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia on 19th August, 2012. At least, that’s how it initially played out.

What could go wrong

With it being a lovely August Winter Morning in Brisbane, I thought what could go wrong until realizing that our local transport service would be late and wouldn’t get to me to venue on time. I’d be 20-30 minutes late. No biggy, I thought. I updated the web site and made a short video explaining the issue. However, other obstacles were coming my way in the form of the conference room’s power extension cord was missing, network ports weren’t live and needed to be patched up in the communication cabinet, switch VLANs had to be dealt with and then uStream’s broadcasting software would only recognize the webcam and not the desktop (via ManyCam). I fired up Firefox - same problem. I then ditched uStream and went head first into Google Hangouts. Boy was I sorry ;)

Firstly, not only was the video on the hangout of a lower quality than uStream, but it was also reversed. I couldn’t expect people to hold up a mirror for hours, so I found a setting in the software to flip the video. Nice, now to invite my Haiku circle and the Public.

Here comes the randoms

We had 19 people in total … foreigners just wanting to hear you talk, kids (a couple of them) I don’t know why, people playing terrible music hijacking the audio for all and then we couldn’t get Mark Patterson (BeMark), who was on the other side of the desk from me into the same Hangout. The idea was that his machine will monitor the feed, so he can tell me if the audio levels or video has dropped out, etc. So, without him being able to get in – I threw in the towel on Google Hangouts.

I then made a last ditch effort using Chrome with uStream and thankfully it recognized ManyCam as an input source and away we go …

As you can see

This year it seems that the video wasn’t as good as last year, looking pretty damn fuzzy. I took the precaution of using local screen capture software to record the event and then I added the sound from the uStream video to produce a Higher Quality Version on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

Still with the late start, HDU2012 ( #hdu2012 ) was then kicked off by me, Sikosis (Phil Greenway) doing my State of Haiku keynote, as I do each year, highlighting some of Haiku's achievements over the previous year. After that, we showed the Haiku GIT Repository Visualisation by Phreadom (Justin Stressman) put to music by Turjan Aylahn / Sikosis.

We then did a brief overview of setting of Haiku from downloading the ISO to then using in this case, VMware Fusion, to get a shiny new install of our favourite OS up and running plus showing how to get optional packages. Then the CodeJam began …

I then went through the basics of a project, the software life cycle and the various bits and pieces (APIs and Classes) that we'd need for building - hdrop - a Dropbox client for Haiku. The chat room was very adaptible to the idea and provided a few alternative names along with helpful suggestions including one user - Justin Stressman providing the 4 icons that the project requires.

At this point things started to wane, it was very late for our European friends and due to the delays eating into the time, it was decided to call it quits and have some pizza.

Conclusion

All in all, it was a mixed day but I still felt good overall about the event. The hdrop code is live on SourceForge and I’ve made a few adjustments this past week and will continue to do so. Anyone else wanting to get involved is more than welcome to. Please also compete the Survey found here. This will help us to shape the event for next year.

Until then keep on Haiku-ing.