Fastaval 2009 report

I loved it. This Easter I spent smiling almost all the time. People noticed, and told me. It was that great.

My scenario got played, and people loved playing it. Currently, it is only available in Danish. But, Luisa’s started a project to fix all that.

Her project Gnavpotveksler will translate roleplaying scenarios to new languages, which right now means letting the world know about the awesomeness that is the Danish scenario tradition. She also has a list of the Otto winners.

During the two last days of the con, my creative wheels turned faster, and I’m now in planning with two very different scenarios, with co-conspirators.

Warsaw story

Attended a Bootstrap.pl meeting in Warsaw, where me and Kugg from Forskningsavdelningen chatted about Hackerspaces in a couch on a stage. Hardware hackers presented their stuff, and everyone was kind and smart. After the meeting, one guy introduced himself as Tomek, and said “I’m an architect, and I want to help design packaging for your electronic devices.” Wonderful, wonderful. International creative collaborations.

Skipped going to the Warsaw Rising Museum. Sorry, Jason. I’ll be back in Warsaw soon, I think. When they have a hackerspace.

Bonus: Via Krzysztof, I got to see a designer of books from Netherlands talk about her work. It was a bit weird, but provocative (in short: unusable books). The museum of contemporary art in Warsaw is beautiful. Great books, too. Krzysztof lent me eighty zloty an R. Buckminster Fuller book. Thanks.

Saturday night beers on the town was interesting. Characters from Romper Stomper walked by every now and then, hammered and testosterone-crazed. Our host Marcin took care of us. We progressively switched bars to less loud ones.

Night. My taxi driver opted to just drop me off “anywhere” when it was clear to him that he was unable to find the address we’d agreed upon. Even after getting phone assistance. Got home very late. My cab driver to airport was trusting and helpful, though.

A bald Polish guy in his 60s totally pwn’d a line of people by walking up in front of the line. I pointed to the line, and he said a single Polish word, and shrugged, and kept on going to the counter. Swedes grumbled and shuffled, and I thought of it: social engineering. We got pwned.

Thorn presentation at JAOO

Perhaps your next programming language? Thorn. (A JVM scripting language.)

John Field’s talk at JAOO in Ã…rhus 2009 is about that. Here is the interesting blurb from that page:

Scripting languages are justifiably popular because of their support for rapid and exploratory development. However, scripts are notoriously hard to compose and to evolve. Additionallly, though more and more applications require concurrency – for example, to manage interaction with remote distributed services – support for concurrency in existing scripting languages is weak at best. In this talk, I will describe and demonstrate Thorn, a new concurrent scripting language being developed by IBM and Purdue University. I will show how Thorn’s module and type annotation features support the evolution of scripts into industrial-grade programs. I will also show how Thorn’s concurrency features can be used to rapidaly develop scalable applications, while avoiding many of the pitfalls of Java-style concurrency.

This is interesting, why? My buddies Tobbe and Johan Ö (out of DSV, Stockholm) have implemented it (as part of a team). They’ve been away so long to do it. I miss them.

If you were also at the Nordic Perl Workshop 2008, you could’ve seen the amazing “vaporware presentation” they did. Among other amazing details, they speed-implemented a design-by-contract feature from a previous presentation which had been presented on Day 1, so that they could show it in their Day 2 slot.

Re-reading the above, I can see it’s quite buzzword-compliant. Would be interesting to actually program a bit in Thorn.

Marriott Residence Inn LARP




Marriott Residence Inn

Originally uploaded by everyplace

Decorator/stage designer: “Hotel guests need the suburban comfort. Can we add role-playing to the mix?”

Hotel manager: “In your room, dear guest, you’ll be Mr. Tyler, insurance salesman. Your wife Clara and your daughter Rose will stay in the same room. They’ve requested a Southern accent from you, can you handle that? Safe-words are in the pamphlet. Happy stay — Mr. Tyler.”

That was the LARP/hotel. Scary. More scary when jetlagged. Is there an ARG/hotel?

Oresund JavaScript Meetup tonight

Quoth the Öresund JS meetup locally here:

18.00 - 18.15 Arrive, have some free pizza and soda 
18.15 - 18.30 Introduction of members and talk about the future of the group 
18.30 - 18.40 Mats Bryntse - How "global" are the modern Ajax frameworks 
18.50 - 19.10 Olle Jonsson - Building a Dojo application using Bespin (by Mozilla Labs) 
19.10 - 19-20 Fredric Berling - "Hello world" with ExtJS
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It’s tonight. Wanna come? I go from Malmö after work.

So, my title there, it’s a bit off, I’m going to show you how to become a Bespin hacker. What steps to take. Where to fix things. (Since there’s an ample list of things to fix – as in every healthy FOSS project.)

Flea market in Malmö

Update 2012: Thief Cellar? There’s been a flurry of media reports about new products sold at too-low prices in the location I mentioned here three years ago.

This is a hint about a flea market in Malmö.

Electronics flea market, we don’t have in Malmö, but I recommend “Tjyvkällarn” and Marknadsbörsen on weekends, the latter being the more interesting to the enterprising maker looking for a find in obsolete electronics.

Possibly related: Assorted pictures from the flea market, with mad-crazy MIDI tunes embedded on the page. Fair warning.

What I wanted to say with this was: dear self, remember to go there like each weekend, just like cleaning house. It’s good for you.