Aug 30
Low Hanging Fruit
Today we held the first Perl 6 mini-hackathon. Ironically, there was another Perl 6 hackathon happening in California. A few problems cropped up but the end result was a positive experience. I’ve never been to or held such an event, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.
First, the location we chose, Borders changed their wifi system. Since Seattle’s Best is owned by Starbucks, they switch to the T-Mobile non-free service. We ended up moving next door to Market Street, the location of our usual Perl 6 Mongers meetings. Unfortunately, this location is much louder than Borders, but we made it work.
Then one of the attendees was unable to connect to the wireless network. We ended up spending about 30 minutes trying to help out but ended up having move on. Next time, I will make sure to bring Rakudo and Parrot on a flash drive.
fRew and I set up a fresh Rakudo build. I ran the spectest and subsequently, it crashed my machine. Yeah, it locked up my machine and I had to reboot it when I got home (remotely logged in to my desktop development system). I couldn’t find anything in my system’s logs and the test suite was run in parallel. It seemed to stop spitting out output while it was working on S05-named-chars.
Eventually, it was just Patrick and I. We came up with a system for labeling RT tickets that should be relatively quick fixes. First, you have to filter out tickets assigned to Jonathan; these are typically more difficult issues to fix. Then we decided that we would tag the tickets “LHF” to mean Low Hanging Fruit. For now, you can find “[LHF]” in the subject but we will eventually have a tag created similar to the tests-needed tag.
All and all it was lots of fun. Next time, I will make sure to have an install CD or two, Rakudo and Parrot on a thumbdrive, and find a quieter location with wifi. Next time, we’ll hopefully be able to spend more time working on the LHF tickets.
The next event will be next month, two weeks after the Dallas.p6m meeting. The next Dallas.p6m meeting is slated for September 9th and the next Mini Hackathon is slated for September 26th. We need to setup our website and a calendar.
tags: dallas.p6m, perl6, rakudo
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About that one attendee who couldn’t get on the web. Depending on the reason for this, they could have still gotten on by using one of the other attendee’s laptops as an intermediary. Often case with modern machines, the OS can easily share its internet connection with other computers, either also with wireless or via another connection like a little ethernet wire. Mac OS X can do this and presumably the other mainstream OSs could too. Unless the attendee’s problem also prevented this from working, that could have been tried.
Nice!
TO.pm ran into a few hiccups as well but nothing too major. Our biggest stumbling block was getting the SQLite3 DB interface working. A month or so ago I created a SQLite3 workaround that worked in Parrot 1.4 but seems to have broken in Parrot 1.5. It appears that we may have to dodge the early DBDI efforts approach and work with a thin OO wrapper on top of the existing SQLite3.pir in Parrot combined with the workaround. Rakudo was not building consistently as well. Nonetheless, the Hackathon was a lot of fun.
Darren, yes we probably did not exhaust enough options to help this person. We decided to move on because we had only 30 minutes left in the event.
Ultimately, I think future events will require that attendees be able to connect to a public access point. It ended up draining too much time from the schedule. Otherwise, they will have to just work from the last released version from the thumbdrive.
Also, I think his issue was a hardware issue, or at least a driver issue. I doubt a free AP would have helped.
I agree that it was good; and I agree, s1n, that the venue was not exactly optimal, but free wifi isn’t something that runs like water these days. I know of a couple down here in plano though, if we can’t find any ones in McKinney.
I think our best option will be to select a location with reported free service. I found this site to provide a semi-decent list of free wifi locations (try this for other states).
You say: “1. The university’s primary concern is to teach you core knowledge and how to obtain new knowledge in any field. 2. Computer Science is a division of Applied Mathematics.” You have no idea how wrong you are. The university’s primary concern is to increase its (e.g. USNews) ranking, and hence its price per student. Computer “Science” is a vocational school that can get funding to employ otherwise-unemployable second-rate mathematicians.