OggCamp 12
18 - 19 Aug 2012
at Art & Design Academy, Liverpool John Moores University
Talk comments
Only caught the end on the Raspberry Pi talk, but what I heard was good.
The Stephen Fry segment was genius - well presented and funny. Who knew that Stephen has thought long and hard about what kind of dinosaur he would like to be! Well done Dan for getting Stephen to agree to do this - who can we expect next year? Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Robert Llewellyn, Linus Torvalds? :D
I left the talk at around the point paragraph 3 of the previous comment (20 Aug 2012 at 23:38) wraps up. I would agree whole heartedly with these statements up until that point, and then the last paragraph.
Ultimately, if you're trying to encourage people to use something which is already seen as being a bit edgy, don't start with pirated video content (and leave your screen showing a directory of other blatently pirated materials). Ensure you go in with a clear thought process about what you're trying to say, why you've got a good or bad feeling about what's going on and what you're talking about will do to fix/improve things and try to focus.
I had seen that the speaker intends to run a conference about this subject later this year, early next year. I can only hope that he gets his subject matter nailed down so it doesn't feel like he's so wildly out of his depth.
It was also a bit confusing when the speaker kept walking in and out of the mic's pickup range, so, as someone who was near to the back of the room, I kept not quite hearing everything and would suddenly get a burst of loud audio, then being muffled again.
All in all, it feels like Amir isn't comfortable giving talks about this. Perhaps get to some smaller events (like at a hackerspace, or a small tech user group) and do some short talks and work up.
Nathan gave a very informative talk on his private project, and discussed the future possibilities if taken forward commercially. Nathan is a true hacker of our time :)
This was the first talk I saw, and it was thought provoking. We're all doomed!
If executed correctly, this had the potential to be very good as a University Challenge type affair, but sadly this was not what we got on the day. Some of the bits were funny visually (Tux from above, Big Ron getting the scoring wrong) but I don't think even these bits will necessarily come across well in an audio podcast. Even the sound effect buzzers only worked once when they were introduced and the overall sound quality was poor! The questions were too long and complicated (both for the hosts, the competitors and the audience) and there was a general lack of understanding of what was going on - from everyone!
For me, I missed the podcast intro tunes introductions where we politely clap for uupc and roar raucously for Linux Outlaws; I missed Popey playing devil's advocate over some of the questions; I missed the audience participation in a Q&A session - in a nutshell, I missed the format that we all know and love as being the OggCamp live show. Please can we see its return at OggCamp 13?
I thought this was a really good talk by @jhugman (if somewhat scary)
He referenced some site that showed how to self build several essential machines including a tractor (anyone have the link?)
He also referenced a couple of acronyms from a zombie game that I can't remember either (anyone?)
My lack of recollection is not a reflection of the quality of the talk - I have a bad memory and there was nowhere to charge my smartphone at the venue (which is where I would usually keep notes).
Not quite as cheap and easy as LEGO, but certainly looks like one of the cheapest ways of getting wireless controllers deployed around a house :)
Really enjoyed this and also agree that there should be more. Perhaps this could be a set feature for next time.
There were supposed to be two sessions - one hour before lunch and an hour after. Unfortunately, there was a scheduling glitch (someone didn't anticipate there would be talks already locked into rooms when it was put in!) which meant we lost the morning session.
Regarding getting the lightning talks into CFM, it would have meant spinning up a new instance of it for the lightning talks. Not impossible, but at the short notice we had that the lightning talks were going on, it would have been a bit tough.
That said. I've created a ticket on the github ticket tracker [1] to see whether we can mark a session as a "Lightning Talks" session and do something useful with it.
[1] https://github.com/CampFireManager/cfm2/issues/128
With regards to the lightning talks themselves, loved the ScraperWiki talk... really informative, and I'll be looking into doing interesting (to me) stuff with that. Enjoyed @sil's talk on "don't write software for everything" even with the partial shoeing. Hope I gave a good response on behalf of CFM. Dauber's thing on recruitment issues was interesting, I hope he finds someone. That's not to say the other talks weren't good, just that those stood out to me.
One of the expected delights of the annual OggCamp event - the grand raffle (or should we call it Popey, the Running Man!). This year we had added excitement in a live auction of a Nexus 7, after the winner of it on the raffle donated it back into the prize fund and asked for it to be auctioned off. This created a lovely atmosphere with lots of audience participation, even for those of us who didn't do any bidding! It was a great end to the event, and everyone left on a high.