link

BarCamp Boston is this weekend at Monster Worldwide in Maynard. Over 150 people have registered to participate, and I'm sure it's going to be stimulating and fun. I've been so busy working on it as an organizer that I've hardly had a chance to write about it… but keep an eye on Geeks in Boston for updates.

I spent this evening in a big room full of geeks. The room belonged to Y Combinator, Paul Graham's venture/incubator firm, and the geeks were assembled for the Startup School reception. Startup School is a chance for amibitious geeks to get together and learn about business from a number of experienced folks in tech companies, venture capital firms, law firms, etc. It's also not-so-secretly a huge recruiting event for Y Combinator's upcoming Winter Founders Program, which hopes to continue on the success of the just-ended Summer Founders Program. Most of the younger geeks are at Startup School because they want to build and work in startups. Most people over 25 (there aren't lots) — excluding speakers — seem to be there to recruit partners and staff.

The conversations you have in a party filled with geeks are much more challenging than normal party talk. First of all, virtually everyone there is male (maybe 5 women among the crowd of ~150) so flirting doesn't get you by. Secondly, the protocol for meeting a new person is to inquire about what they're doing with the most insightful questions possible. Thirdly, they ask you the same thing and you have to have a spiel about who you are and what you do that keeps interesting people wanting to talk with you.

In case you're wondering, here's my spiel in condesnsed form: today was my last day at a 400-engineer software firm where I started 2 years ago after college. I'm taking a week off and then starting at Renesys, a company that tracks internet router activity around the globe and assembles a minute-by-minute map of how the internet is structured. I'm not a networking expert— at Renesys I'll be working on web application development, making the huge pile of interesting data into valuable visualizations and analyses. This continues to develop my focus on usable, responsive, and pleasant web applications; a focus I've first learned in making Voo2do, a web-based to-do list manager that has grown to 3800 users in 3 months. I'm excited about my new job and also hope to someday found a startup.

Most other people have spiels of comparable complexity and room for conversation. The goal is to listen to what they say, explore those parts that are interesting from a technological or business standpoint, and ask some questions or make suggestions that will twist their brains around. The most interesting people to talk to will not only tell you about a spiffy project, but will also listen when you suggest they automatically extract metadata from RSS feeds and work that into further discussion. The least interesting people tell you how smart they are, and then state that they're finally solving natural language processing without giving any comprehensibly specific examples of what their system actually does. But even those people can be somewhat interesting, if as nothing more than studies in the sort of hubris required to create a company out of nothing but ideas and sweat.

I had about 6 or 7 conversations like this tonight. I met some fun and smart people. I told Joel Spolsky about Voo2do (which is inspired by his technique). And Joel told me how freaking smart my soon-to-be-boss Jim Cowie is. That's a pretty fun little coincidence.

link

Starting with a meeting six days prior to the start of Bar Camp, the crew managed to find free office space, design a logo, start a wiki, print free T-shirts for all attendees, convince Etheric Networks to donate and install a wireless hookup on a neighboring business's roof, line up enough sponsors to make the event free for everyone, and convince over 100 geeks to give up a summer weekend for hours of indoor geek talk.

link

Emacs comes with a handy mode for writing and editing structured text. You type things like this:

* Big Idea 1
Maybe we should sell fish over the internet, because who wouldn't want to cut out the middleman when ordering Chilean Seabass?
* Big Idea 2
Let's hire hundreds of people to go around town writing about things that happen, then put their writings into a two-pound stack of papers we can sell for $1.
** Pros
*** Sounds kinda useful
*** Can advertise for things like clothing and soda
** Cons
*** High capital expenditure
It is a lot of work to produce hundreds of articles a day, print them in the early morning, and deliver them to thousands of readers.
*** How would writing for an average/objective/idealized "citizen" make sense?
Would we be wasting a lot of people's time?

Outline-mode interprets the asterisks as heading indicators, and automatically colorizes them. And then you just hit C-c C-t and get a headings-only view:

* Big Idea 1…
* Big Idea 2…
** Pros
*** Sounds kinda useful
*** Can advertise for things like clothing and soda
** Cons
*** High capital expenditure…
*** How would writing for an average/objective/idealized "citizen" make sense?…

Of course, there are also shortcuts for jumping between headings, expanding and collapsing individual subtrees, and more. Best of all, outline-mode is packaged with GNU Emacs and works as a minor mode with other modes, so you can use it to navigate HTML documents or source code too.

More resources:

• GNU Emacs Manual, Outline Mode
• One enthusiastic outline-mode user's .emacs file
• Emacs Wiki: outline-mode
• Outline-magic extension mode (Emacs Lisp)
• Emacs Wiki: Allout (another Emacs outline module)

Kudos to the MIT student who wrote the Technology Review's order processing system at 4am after finishing a monster programming project.

link

Free wikis for workgroups.

How to set up streaming audio for a meeting using no-cost software

• What you'll need

• mic (omnidirectional) & laptop (windows XP)
• streaming audio server (fedora core 2 gnu/linux box in CA)
• test mp3 client (desktop machine with net connection & MP3 player)

Server setup

• prerequisites (libtheora)
• get & install RPM
• emacs /etc/shoutcast.xml
• ensure iptables are open
• start the server: icecast -c /etc/icecast.xml

Audio source setup

• get & install SHOUTcast DSP plugin for Winamp 5
• start Winamp
• configure SHOUTcast plugin
• connect to server

Listener setup

• http://myserver:8000/stream

Screencast of the above coming soon…

Yahoo is buying Flickr (Ludicorp), and Evan Williams (formerly of Blogger) is starting a podcasting company called Odeo. And it's a 60-degree weekend in San Francisco.

I meant to release alpha 9 tonight, but it's not going to happen. I found and fixed a couple of simple bugs, but then I found a much tougher one. I wouldn't normally hold things up for a bug like this, but since it affects studio pages created automatically when a user registers, I think it would be very confusing to new users.

Also, I tried to fix my computer with the fried motherboard and it looks like it was actually the power supply. Anyone need an Athlon motherboard for cheap?

link

Jeremy Zawodny describes a personal tagging system in the style of del.icio.us. It reminds me of Quicksilver, which absolutely knocked my socks off when Stefano demoed it for me at dinner last night.