Barcamp Malaysia – Nicely Done! (Day 2)

July 28, 2008

On the second day, Sunday (that was yesterday), there was a Wifi cracking session that was pretty interesting, although it was pretty much standard Kismet/Airsnort/Airfart fare. The description of the various chipsets and hardware extensions were quite informative though.

After that was Ditesh‘s ‘The Malaysian Free Software Community’ session which highlighted a whole facet of the Open Source community and activities in Malaysia that a lot of us weren’t aware of. It would seem that there are quite a number of Malaysians, including Ditesh himself, who are not only devout advocators of FOSS, but also active contributors in various Open Source projects from MySQL to Linux drivers to FreeBSD hacks. Props to Ditesh and all the other Malaysian FOSS proponents, make Malaysia proud!

Oh, and Meng Wong had held a discussion pertaining to how he thought Web 2.0 was about to jump the shark. I can’t remember if this one was on the 1st or 2nd day though. I might have been slightly stoned. But anyway, the discussion was interesting and the attendees gave their own ideas about where they thought the future of web lay.

The generosity of ZoeCity provided the participants with Subway subs for lunch! Yippee-kay-yay! And cookies!

After lunch, there was a ‘lightning session’ where anyone with any interesting or kewl ideas/thoughts would be given 5 minutes to present them. I didn’t know this at the time, but apparently Aizatto was supposed to be handling the lightning sessions. I had launched into the first lightning presentation which might have been titled ‘How to stash your pr0n’. Regarding TrueCrypt for encrypting your pr0n on Windows, Ditesh said on his post that it is apparently broken . Guess you guys will have resort to having 150MB dlls named ‘sasha_grey.dll’ in your system folder.

Anyways, right after my talk, since I didn’t know there was supposed to be some sort of chairperson running the show, I just decided to invite the next person who wanted to present their thing. I particularly enjoyed this whole lightning session because it was honest and raw. The impromptu ‘speakers’ didn’t worry much about a ‘proper’ presentation and instead focused on getting their ideas out passionately. Quite a number of interesting ideas and concepts were thrown around that might not have been quite in place if they were sessions on their own. Arzumy talked about ‘how to hack geeks’ which was about social engineering geeks to get them to do stuff for you for free! Meng Wong talked about his version of the next step in online social networks: Gossip 2.0 or ‘Who’s fucking who now?’. I’m not entirely sure if he did it purely in jest, but I think it just might work. Heh. Hopefully someone might work on this one.

This 16 year old dude, can’t remember his name, talked about his application which not only aggregated blog content, but also analysed their content. Presumably to be able to group together relevant content. I’ll see if anyone has further information on this.

I also invited Devan, who had been telling us about his Thai adventures in underground programming at lunch to talk about it during the lightning sessions. I thought his story was amazing! I myself would love to be doing just that, travelling around the globe, meeting and learning from people around the world. Ditesh presented something along this vein with ‘Couch Surfing‘, a network connecting travelers with locals offering accommodations and advice. There was another site mentioned by someone else in this regard, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it is right now. I have it written down on a piece of paper which is at home. I’ll update later.If I remember and am not entirely too stoned out of my mind.

Kagesenshi talked about Fedora and it’s RPM system. And also some other stuff about Fedora, interspersed here and there during the lightning sessions. It’s very admirable this dude’s enthusiasm for his distro of choice. He’s also got a Fedora con kind of thing in the works. Good luck and good job mate!

Kamal did a short one about unlocking the iPhone 1st gen. He apparently had helped someone to hack their iPhone on Saturday, and decided to present how to do it during the lightning session on Sunday. Big ups!

All in all, a very satisfying first run for an ‘unconference’ I should think. And funnily enough, I thought the lack of rigidity and a sort of slight ‘disorganisation’ made Barcamp a very flexible event, which made it less cluttered and unorganised than supposedly ‘properly planned’ actual conventions. In fact, I’d say Barcamp mostly went without a hitch, and went according to plan, because there weren’t much plans to be worried about in the first place! I can’t wait for the next Barcamp Malaysia! Woohoo!

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