Thursday's diary

I wonder why people come to HIP, put up their tent, install their computers and start working on them. There's connectivity here, you think that's the reason people come here? Everybody has internet connectivity at home, don't they? Is it faster here? Not on saturday and sunday it won't be. Calculate yourself: 6MB HIP connection divided by 3000 computers doing heavy stuff, that's not better than 33k6 is it?
Is it the program? Sure, for many of us the program, the lectures, the workshops will be sufficient reason to come. But why take your computer and stay in your tent hacking? hmm.
I wonder. btw, their using an electric sawing machine at 1 meter of my computer, so I don't have internet access right now. The machine effectively blocks my wireless connection. it's 10:27 now.

Last night, walking across the camping site, I was thinking how much time and how much money it cost to connect a medium sized office to a lan (not mentioning internet). When I was working for Origin, they would take weeks for connecting the office to an ethernet lan. With only 40 PC's in the office. What about a major bank?
Compare that to HIP. The organization spends a day at the camping side placing ethernet hubs at strategic points on the camping fields and at workshop tents, the central hall and some other places. People come in, hook up their computer, pick up their ip number, and there they go. Within four days 2000 computers will be hooked up in one big network. And what's even more remarkable, central coordination is minimal. Ever talked to your system administrator asking them for facilities on your office lan, or trying to make them solve your network problem? There's a difference though. There's nobody here who needs a system administrator for routine problem solving. If everybody would know how to hook up a computer to ethernet...

That's what brings people to HIP. The simplicity of building a gigantic network, the .. hang on.

They've just brought in the Jolt. Jolt is a cola with more cafeine then any other cola. It can't be sold in Holland, it's got too much cafeine. I just bought my first tin of Jolt. I'll open it now. (10:58)
It tastes like Coke, a little sweeter. It's supposed to be the Hackers drink. Hackers are said to drink it a lot because it keeps them awake at night and in the early morning.

In the central hall, the place where I am now (11:05), PTT has setup an "infozuil", a column with a terminal which gives web access. You have to use a telephone card or credit card to get the thing to work, you may know them because there's a lot of them in Amsterdam. Nobody uses them there, because they're expensive, and offer very little. Who would want web-access in the city? Maybe I should try to read email on one of them, that would be useful. Otoh, a pcmcia gsm modem would be much handier.
I wonder what genius has come up with the idea of having an infozuil at HIP. Everybody here has a computer in their tent or in the central Hall, with free internet access. The last thing we'd need is limited access which is expensive. Even if they decide the infozuil is for free, who would want to use the awkward keyboard (consisting of pusbuttons on a vertical panel)? Hmm..