Side Channel

Meta: A bit late, wanted to do this as a one parter, but haven't finished Day two. Publishing this first.

Attended BarCamp Malaysia. It's still a blur, but overall had a blast.

Day One

BarCamp's barely 5 minutes away from office, just need to remember which junction to turn into. Missed it the first time, had to circle around. Bah. Plenty of parking, but picked the wrong one. Ended up having to walk a fair distance to the venue, and having to pay 23 bucks for about 9 hours of parking. wtf ripoff.

Walk-in registered, because I could never remember to sign up for anything. Still arrived earlier than three of the guys coming over. Place was packed, which was both a good and bad sign, as I ended up sitting on the floor for quite a few of the popular sessions.

First up was Google Android, by Gavin Bong. Interesting stuff, though I'm not into mobile apps. Really need to check out Yahoo's geocoding services that was mentioned. And oh, enkin "Augmented Reality" was frigging cool.

OpenMalaysia Blog. Yoon Kit did a bang up job on narrating the fun, fun, fun times on promoting ODF in Malaysia. Good response, though it's hard to get the geeks joining in the song at the end. Can't sing, can't dance, can code a little.

Did the Drupal track for a couple of sessions, essentially a mini-Drupal camp in BarCamp. Najib introduced Drupal's CCK (Content Construction Kit), Joeri Poesen introduced internationalization and localization in Drupal. A little preaching to the choir, I think, since we've been abusing Drupal for everything except as a CMS over the years. Snuck out to check out Yahoo Search Monkey instead. Sorry, guys. Running the Drupal track as a Drupal BOF might be a better idea.

Caught the ending of Yahoo Search Monkey presentation. Very odd sense of Deva Vu with Google's OneBox, though with a much different focus and target market. For one thing, you can use PHP to muck around with the data. Go Rasmus!

Mohan's talk on AtomPub was the one talk that really stuck with me. I have been a firm supporter of the Publish/Subscribe model of data integration for sometime, but have been trailing in the actual implementation of it in the real world. AtomPub, the publishing protocol as opposed to just the Atom Syndication format, does seem to be the answer to some of our headaches. Mohan's an excellent speaker and kept things interesting on an otherwise dry subject matter. Shame about the topic though: "How to build a web API". Probably scared away a number of people.

Hung around a bit after that, then went to watch Dark Knight in Pavilion. Again. Totally worth it, best movie in years.

Day Two

... to be continued ...

Random

• Show have when ahead and set up the 3G Modem + wireless AP combo for mobile wifi-internet station. Had the hardware with me all the time, but was too into the talks to set them up properly.

• Still not a believer of twitting, but BarCamp got me on board. I blame peer pressure.

See you all next time.