Heipei

Who said you cant do useful stuff at the Congress? While we were there Flo was checking out his powerbook and the installed os, Mac OS X.4. He wasnt satisfied with a lot of stuff, and so was I. In general you can say that a lot of configuration options are simply missing from critical problems. Another big problem imho is that you just cant maximize windows so that they take up the whole screen (also the space where the menu bar uses to reside). Using terminal, its quite annoying to switch between windows sometimes, even if you have something like Witch installed.

So he started checking out screen some more. Screen is described as ‘screen manager with VT100/ANSI terminal emulation’. Up to this point my only use for screen was to run irssi and maybe a download in it, attaching and detaching it was the sole purpose. Boy, was i wrong. On our trip home Flo read the _complete_ screen manpage and while i was navigating through the snowstorm in Germany he told me all the neat stuff you can do just using screen.

Now thats all good, but somethings still missing. Im missing the simple look of a fullscreen terminal, without any buttons/decorations and without having to use the mouse. I knew i had an X11 Server installed, and i havent used it so far. So i started by updating my fink installation to the cvs unstable version (which takes a lot of compiling, felt like back in the gentoo days) and installed ratpoison, a window manager, which behaves very much like screen does. I still havent figure out most the things, but already it feels great. Why, the OS X lovers here might ask? Well, OS X is cool, no objection, but something is missing. Everything just works, which as good as it sounds can be pretty boring and contra-productive since you never get to fix anything or go deeper in how software works. Also for pure text usage, e.g. programming, doing things over ssh, a slim and leightwight shell is much more appropriate than any graphical terminal emulator.

For the next version of OS X i would wish for a fullscreen function for Terminal.app, like the windows client PuTTY has. Ill write more as i get deeper into the whole subject.

As we are approaching the final day of this congress there is a little looking back and summarizing to do for me. Since there is still one day left this isnt final, ill probably do another examination later on. To begin with, i wanna point out this blog-entry where some crucial things that went wrong this year are mentioned. The author talks about missing “spirit” and i can only agree, although im not completely sure about what caused it yet. Ill try to give reasons i think led to this:

1. What The Music??? There was no music from the Lounge anywhere in the building. I remember listening to the cool electronic music in the Hackcenter, walking up the stairs and still grooving to the very same music while taking a dump. This killed most of the atmosphere for me and a lof of people. Thats why this is at position 1.
2. Fewer congress participants, which is thanks to the increased entrance fee. This meant less stress during rush-hour, but also less party during the nights.
3. A new way of assigning hackcenter space, combined with point 1. and 2. led to a much less crowded (almost empty) hackcenter this year, and especially at night you felt pretty much lost there.
4. The shift from real-world events to the internet layer. What i mean that one is much less likely to run around and scream “free beer” or “hack the planet” or whatever but will instead create a neat and tidy wiki entry, link it and wait for something to happen. Of course I myself as an active blogger am part of this problem, and i would trade it all in if i could
5. Some more conservative opinions on certain matters. Now, this point can really be argued about forever, but in the end i sometimes miss stupid stuff like defacements, people being bonded with eth cable, frequent network failures which result in people actually talking to each other, and other stuff that one can only experience while attending. (Think humppa)

I know the congress grows, and also grows up, so do the people organizing it. Maybe everything i mentioned will only lead to a shift in the average visitors mentality, maybe it was just this year, maybe its just me and everyone else thinks this congress was exactly the same like every year. But maybe, and thats something i want to avoid, the congress might lose popularity although everything done wasnt meant to come out that way. I really dont know, you give the answers.

So, this is gonna be a somewhat longer entry, i hope. See, the problem with the Congress is that you see/hear/read so much, want to do and try so much and finally end up forgetting 90% of what you wanted to do. Short-term memory loss at its best.

We spent the night on today in the Hackcenter, my back can tell you a story about it. Then Flo and i took of to get something to eat and to find a bank to unlocked my EC-Card which i was returned to me yesterday. We ate a 30cm sandwhich at a nearby Subway, which seemed to be the equivalent of 3-4 burgers at your favorite fast-food-chain. After that, and after not having found a bank, we took of for our hotel to get a shower. This was the first time riding subway in Berlin for me for years (only did it as a child). Although the stations are really filthy and the trains feel like they gonna fall apart any minute its really something everyone staying in Berlin should do imho. Long story short, we stepped out at Potsdamer Platz and took the wrong route to our hotel. But thanks to that we saw a lot of German Government Buildings and even wandered through the Holocaust Memorial which was impressive, though not really fitting its purpose. Imho the designer should have built it like a maze, so it isnt this easy to look outside once your in.

After a really good shower we took the short way back to the subway station (boy, did we go wrong before) and headed back to the BCC. There we bought ourselves the Congress Shirt (looks really cool btw) and went to listen to fd0’s talk on Atmel AVR for Dummies. I think the presentation was really good, you could see that it was a lot more than just reading points from a sheet. Unfortunately I, not having done any assembler programming before, didnt understand that much, and for the people who had already programmed assembler it was to basic (so i was told). But thats no surprise, and having to go from 0 to explaining something like this sure is complicated.

Another thing i have noticed is that more people than i would have guessed are reading my weblog. How? Well, it offen happened to me that i talked to people (sometimes even strangers) and they mentioned something they already read here, or that im being linked, like by the 22C3 Konferenzblogger. Since we moved the apache to a chroot environment recently, thus eliminating perl scripts (i know its possible, but havent had time yet) i miss my awstats and really have no way of telling the popularity of this blog. So please: If you like/dislike the entries here, use the comment function.

Yes, the forecast was accurate. We have about 10cm of fresh snow here, and it doesnt look like stopping at the moment. I just woke up from a somewhat uncomfortable night in the Hackcenter, and still didnt have breakfast, so thats my priority right now ;).

I hope I wont forget to watch some lectures today. Especially fd0’s talk on Atmel for Dummies.

“Use more bandwidth” still seems to be the motto around here, but Flo and I have all our HDDs (local and remote) already completely used, so we have to count on people from the outside to generate some traffic. Please dont leave us with the shame of not exausting the uplink.