[tahoe-dev] Hack Fest report from Hack Fest 3, December 14, 2007

[Zooko O'Whielacronx At Work]

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