Entries from July 2003 ↓

Karen found a picture of me on O’Reilly, so I’m returning the favour.

It’s not often I want to thank Microsoft, so wanting to do it twice within a month feels a bit strange. But, I’ll do it anyway.

Today and yesterday Microsoft provided lunch for OSCon. Fortunately /I spent the last few years building up immunity to iocaine powder/.

I was never really a frequent MUD player, but I always enjoyed developing: it’s an enjoyable doubly-creative process when you can write code and storylines at the same time. That’s one reason why our extreme programming tutorial uses a simple MUD-like game as the sample project.

I haven’t thought much about MUDs in a long time, but this evening I was chatting with two of the FaerieMUD developers and noticed some /morphic resonance/ when I remembered some of my old ideas. As I listened to the plans for FaerieMUD, they started to sound very familiar. Some of the ideas could well have been copied verbatim from my notes, if I had ever kept any notes. I mentioned this to the guys, and they were amused. I then went on to tell them some of my other MUD thoughts, and it became their turn to feel the resonance.

It was all quite strange, but it’s not uncommon; that’s probably why there are weird theories to explain it.

http://martian.org/marty/img/xpday-oscon-2003.jpg

Our Day of Extreme Programming tutorial was extremely stressful before lunch. When everyone arrived we realised that the room was too small, so we moved to a slightly larger one.

Then we encounted another one of the now infamous OSCon wireless network problems: about half of the laptops could not connect to the CVS server. They were receiving incorrect IP addressed from a dodgy DHCP server. We spent too much time trying to work around this.

Despite the problems, most of the attendees seemed to enjoy their day as extreme programmers, and that’s really what matters. It would be great if they also learnt something as well.

/Picture � D. Story & J. Blanchard, O’Reilly Network/

This afternoon at OSCon I presented my Playing Together tutorial. I was happy with how it went; I hope the audience liked it. Some of the useful information was in the talk, not in the notes.

Tomorrow will be
A Day of Extreme Programming.

I had read that San Diego had a free public WiFi network operating at the bay end of Broadway, so I went looking. I discovered lots of open networks, but I couldn’t find any info to tell me which one was deliberately public access. I think they need to WarChalk themselves, or at least put useful technical info on their website.