Without a Traceroute

Monday were some “harder” tech talks and also my own presentation.

A guy named Paule Ečimović gave a talk about “Hacked Varieties of the Pong Computer Video Game Experience,” which was really cool. He showed the original version of pong, some of the later ports, and then some modern “hacked” versions, including my personal favorite, Plasma Pong. It used to be hosted here, before the author was sued by the withered husk of Atari (who somehow still have a legal department?), but you can still download it here and I highly recommend it. You’ll need a medium-decent computer though, Plasma Pong re-imagines the game of pong if it were played on a colorful, fluid field of plasma. It incorporates a pretty heavy-duty fluid dynamics model and fancy graphical effects.

I really liked this talk because it was one of the techiest/most hackerish of the presentations. Paule is a true old-school computer nerd. He’s Slovenian originally, but has lived and worked in the Bay Area in the US for many years. Later at the conference, we talked for a while. I told him about the electromechanical pong rig, which he hadn’t heard about, and is, as far as I’m concerned, the definitive pong hack (at least until somebody makes a pong game using actual plasma). We also talked about the Clock of the Long Now, which I think is one of the coolest projects ever. I kind of want to work for the Long Now Foundation.

Andraž Sraka talked about Kiberpipa.net, an attempt to build a free, self-contained wireless network in Ljubljana using ad-hoc mesh networking and packet radio technologies. This is very similar to what the freifunk.net group is doing in Berlin, the Kiberpipa people are actually using some software developed by freifunk. The tone of the presentation was actually sort of melancholy. According to Sraka, the group had all the hardware, bandwidth and technical expertise they could need, but what they really lacked was interested participants. He said their network had stopped growing, and it was tough to find people interested in helping out or even willing to let people install an access point for them. Apparently high-speed internet service in Slovenia is very cheap and widely available, so many people don’t see the need for a free wifi network.

My own talk was mostly just an explanation of who I am, what the Watson Fellowship is, a recap of my travels to date, and a few of my armchair sociology observations about the different groups of people I’ve met. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ve already been exposed to a much more detailed version of everything I covered in my talk. If you’re a true Brendan McCollam Completist (please seek help now) the slides from my talk are available here, and the video of my presentation is supposed to be up on the Kiberpipia site at some point. I would appreciate critiques/suggestions on presenting style. I have to give a much more involved, formal version of this talk next year when I return from the Watson.

Tuesday evening was a round table discussion of “The Hacker Ethic” as a concluding event of the festival. I had planned on simply observing, but found myself sucked into participating. I also found myself reluctantly playing the role of the voice of geekdom defending the concept of the “hack” from co-option by the artists. There’s video of the discussion here. I thought I did a medium-alright job of laying out my views, but I probably could’ve done better. There was a point where somebody raised the question of “does a hack need to be hard in order to count as a real hack?” and I was pretty emphatic that it does, but most other people seemed to disagree with me. On further reflection, I think what I really meant is that a true hack needs to be non-trivial. The difference between “non-trivial” and “hard” is perhaps a subtle one, and I did a rather poor job of communicating this distinction during the round table.

Another random fun fact about Slovenia. Despite how much I like this city/country, I could never, ever live here. The “normal” working hours for Slovenian people are from 7 am to 3 pm. Absolutely brutal for a nightowl like myself. Since joining the EU, some companies are now working “European hours” of 9 to 5, but it’s still an exception to the rule.