Terrell Russell: This Old Network

So, a couple of my recent excursions up into the great city of San Francisco have involved rather nerdy things.

Tahoe Hackfest

A couple weeks ago I attended the Allmydata.org Hackfest (5th in a series, as I understand it). Zooko and Brian Warner hosted a few people at the allmydata.org offices and fed them pizza and code. Adam Langley spoke about his recent posting of Obfuscated TCP. Oskar Sandberg talked about his current work proving some of Freenet’s original routing code was mathematically efficient. David Molnar shared his current PhD work at Berkeley (metafuzz and catchconv), which are used to find bugs in programs.

I don’t pretend to understand all of what happened in front of me at the hackfest, but I know that I’m definitely putting the next Hackfest on my calendar and going if possible. The pizza was good and I really like having conversations with people who know their math.

DiSo / Drupal

Within a week or so of the Hackfest, I found myself headed back up into the city for dinner at the DiSo / Drupal meetup. The conversations were not as directed as I’d hoped, but I met some interesting people. Chris Messina, Will Norris and Kieran Lal held court at one end of the table, and I talked with Andrius Kulikauskas, Neil Drumm and Dan Kurtz down on the other end. I think DiSo is poised to become as big as microformats are today – and eventually become the standard for how we’ll interact as individuals (I’d say “online” here, but I think it’s more than that). I cannot wait to have my people in my pocket – XMPP and OAuth enabled – making recommendations and filtering out the noise. Please get here soon.

WikiDashboard

Unrelated to the city of San Francisco, I’ve been at PARC for two months now, and I’ve finished my first milestone. The WikiDashboard code I’ve been working on shipped today. This is a big deal for me since just a few short months ago I saw it on the internet for the first time and thought it was a really cool project. Now, I’ve contributed my own code – and even got paid! A neat trick.

Tags: allmydata - diso - drupal - parc - summer - tahoe - wikidashboard