Like Xavier, I came back from Penguicon 7.0 this weekend to a mountain of work. Now I’m going to walk and talk like him (minus the epic growl) — guess that means I look like someone else here — and give my review.
The highlight was certainly the party. Friday night was phenomenal, Saturday night even more so. Where else can you be waylaid by a pirate ship at the top of the hotel lobby stairs, and told to drink rum and walk the plank to join the crew? Best Penguicon yet, on this basis. You have to be there to know.
The panels were good this year too, as usual. We could have attended a few more if it hadn’t been for a certain WTF line. Here are my thoughts on the ones I did catch:
Sustainable Computing (Jon “maddog” Hall)
A great forward-looking keynote by maddog. He deftly connected the idea of scalable distributed mesh networking for cities with providing free Internet access to kids (a la OLPC, but with fewer technical challenges), with benefits to everyone else too, and with environmental sustainability. And, naturally, he gave some highly compelling arguments as to why the sensible thing to do is use free software to implement it. A
Wil Wheaton Reading (Wil Wheaton)
Ensign Crusher, report to Penguicon. Ensign Crusher? Ensign Crusher, respond! F
Open Hardware Overview (W. Craig Trader)
A brief introduction to “open source” hardware. A big chunk of the talk was devoted to a few examples, which was surely a yawn-fest for anyone who reads hardware hacking feeds. The more interesting parts of the talk were the breakdown of the board prototyping process and the explanation of how projects apply licenses like Creative Commons to hardware design. A bit pedestrian, but not bad. B
Beginning Pygame Programming (Craig Maloney)
To be fair, I was very much looking forward to this one, so it had a lot to live up to. The talk consisted entirely of showing various stages of development of a Pong game demo. Much time was spent figuring out which revisions would actually run (blind commits are evil). A reasonable amount of Pygame functionality was used, but there could have been more explanation. Good concept, but tighter implementation necessary. C
Open Hardware with Arduino (W. Craig Trader)
This talk really made me wonder why Trader spent so much time talking about the Arduino platform in his previous talk. My main complaint is that he didn’t really contrast the advantages of the Arduino against other microcontrollers and evaluation boards, which probably left most people with a somewhat distorted perception. More original content, such as some clever uses and maybe a non-trivial demo, would have been nice as well. There was lots of good information about existing projects and add-on devices. I’ll give it a pass because it got the others interested. C
Rule-Based Programming in Interactive Fiction (Andrew Plotkin)
As an engineering grad student, I’m quite used to dry technical seminars, but I want Penguicon to entertain me more. That aside, awesome talk! I hadn’t really thought about how awkward it must be to program IF in an object-oriented programming language until this talk. Very interesting concept about how to attack the problem with a rule-based syntax model. Some of it brought to mind aspect-oriented programming. Bonus: Andrew really likes to talk about heads exploding. B
Looking forward to Penguicon 8.0! I’m hoping to get my Thousand Parsec talk in this time.