[tahoe-dev] hack fest report

[zooko]

Folks:

It was great fun having a Hack Fest in San Francisco last Friday.   
About 15 to 20 people showed up -- about five Allmydata.com and/or  
allmydata.org folks, at least five contributors to Twisted, at least  
three folks from bittorrent.com and at least three folks from  
google.com.  One person from sling media, at least four people who  
have posted to p2p-hackers, and all three of the Brothers  
O'Whielacronx.  Note that several of the people present fell into  
more than one of these categories, so the numbers don't add up.

Each person who arrived was offered a colorful balloon to write their  
name on.

There was music and video streamed from a Free Software p2p storage  
grid.  Some of the music was recorded by Justin Boreta -- mild- 
mannered allmydata.com employee by day, world-famous DJ by night.

The p2p storage grid was a "Temporary Autonomous Zone grid" -- most  
of the people who showed up with laptops installed a Tahoe node on  
their laptop, and people uploaded video and music files onto that  
grid, which we then streamed from the grid onto the speakers and  
projector.  At the end of the night, as people shut their laptops and  
went home, the grid dissolved and took the data with it.  That's why  
we called it a Temporary Autonomous Zone grid.  (Since the data is  
erasure coded with K=3, nobody can recover any of it unless they find  
two other people who were at the party and connect all three of their  
laptops together.)

There were many delicious and unhealthy snacks from the newly opened  
Potrero Hill Whole Foods.  There was root beer, ginger beer, beer  
beer, and coffee soda pop (normal flavor or mocha espresso flavor).

Priyanka Sinha showed slides of her attempt to simulate Chord's  
recovery from network partitions (motivated by the mobile ad-hoc  
setting).  Her attempt to simulate Chord attempting to recover from  
network partitions showed Chord failing to do so, but she seemed to  
be uncertain if this was a failure on Chord's part to recover or a  
failure on her simulator's part to simulate Chord faithfully.   
Actually maybe she was certain, but now I'm not certain.  Priyanka,  
can you explain?  I had previously thought that Chord would self-heal  
from any arbitrary partition and reconnect, given sufficient time.

Several people showed up, ate the pizza from Goat Hill Pizza, and  
then spent most of the time tapping on their laptops.  Other people  
spent more time chatting (with sound waves, I mean, instead of  
instant messaging or IRC).

Brian Warner's tahoe-centric report on the hack fest is on the tahoe- 
dev mailing list: [1].

Greg Hazel ported zfec [2] to C89 (from C99).  Did you know that  
Microsoft has no plans to ever get around to supporting C99?  That's  
just depressing.  Anyway, thanks to Greg.

There were probably other notable events at the hack fest that I  
failed to notice or that I am now failing to remember.

We plan to have another such party soon!

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-October/000214.html
[2] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zfec