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Here’s some scriblings about the presentations at BarCamp Brussels 2006 from 10AM till 12AM I attended.

picture by pietel

“When old web meets web(x.x)”, an informal discussion on resistance and buzz (based on real (but disguised) cases) led by Gunnar Langemark

We arrived a little too late for the introduction but right in time for the first presentation to start. The ‘Passionate Users’ room started off with a presentation about the buzz & hype around Web 2.0 and how to react to eg. clients asking to sprinkle some web 2.0 over their site – “you’ve got 150 to 200 pixels”. It’s obvious to me the whole social aspect of the web associated with the term 2.0 is something that ideally has to grow bottom-up or eventually involves lots of education top-down. These points were also raised in the discussion (well, maybe discussion is a big word, it was still early for most of us).
It was interesting to hear someone speak about a project in Germany where the project manager obliged the different projects to start a blog and write about what they were doing. While at first lots of people involved got scared (“Won’t they blog about secret things?”), it quickly went the good way and the project manager for the first time had a good overview of everything going on, right there in his rss-reader. Another interesting topic this guy raised was his experience with a social media project in Africa and how they launched this blog platform. The problems and difficulties they had to tackle were of another kind; electricity being one, analphabetics being another one … but he did say something that could be extrapolated to all social media applications; you often don’t end up with a community/product you intended when setting out your concrete plans and intentions.

• Langemark Social Media

Source control with Subversion by Bert Heymans

Next up was Bert, the author of this clear howto guide for Subversion, sharing his experiences with this version control system. I’ve been using Subversion when working on my thesis too (a joy!), and now at work we use the other system; CVS. The last few days some of my colleagues had a deeper look at these two systems, because we really need a good way of dealing with different versions of our application and an easy way to work on different features and checkout these features seperately. ‘Say hello to branches and tags!’ But in Subversion there’s apparently no really easy way to rollback to previous versions (eg. take one feature -branch- offline while keeping newer updates to other ones still online). So for that reason we’re stuck with CVS and some of its odd sides.
TortoiseSVN was mentioned as a great client for Subversion and I can only second that. It nestles itself in the Windows Explorer and makes using Subversion very easy. Someone else asked if it would be possible to combine a OS Save-operation with an automatic commit to the Subversion repository and apparantly there is a way to do that. For simple home use, two other source control tools of which I unfortunately can’t recall the names, were mentioned … Help me out, please!
The mindmap Bert used to structure his presentation seemed like a good way to quickly make a sketch of a talk you need to do, but don’t really have the time to turn into a nice ppt. Good tool for brainstorming sessions, I think.
Oh, and isn’t Apple going to put a versioning system in their next Leopard OS? Forgot to ask …

• HowToForge: Subversion, Bert’s HowTo
• Heymans.org, homepage
• Subversion Mindmap, the mindmap used for the presentation

Eco-awareness in Data-Centers by Frank Louwers

Third and last presentation in the morning was done by Frank of openminds.be. He had the difficult task to be in the same slot as the ’10 things we could learn from the prOn industry’ – presentation. But what’s there to learn about porn we don’t know already?
This topic was interesting for us since we deal with exactly these problems; our fast ‘n’ shiny servers with lots of processing power need lots of amps, too much in fact. A regular rack in a data center normally has 16A (220-230V) available, but we had to move to specials racks who can serve up to 32A. Needless to say this involves money. So, apart from the eco-awareness, lowering the amount of consumed electricity would obviously also be a good thing for cost effectiveness.
This presentation adressed the new trend for lowering the wattage high end servers need these days. He talked of set-ups using up to 40% less power, and said the new Dell 1U servers are less promising: 1.9A to 2.0A, so a 5% increase instead of decrease. I’d like to see some people confirm this, cause if so … ?!

• Openminds.be
• eco-awareness-in-todays-datacenters.pdf, pdf of presentation
• thegreengrid.org, a suggested great resource
• EasyNet en XS4ALL gaan voor milieuvriendelijk

back to the Barcamp Brussels 2006 overview