Barcamp Auckland: Liveblogging.

I know everyone is twittering, but I thought I take a half-assed attempt at some live-blogging.

We all found power sockets and introduced ourselves. A great crowd – this is going to be choice!

Session One: The future of Web Standards

First session I’m attending is Rob O’Callahan, Mozilla Corporation talking about the future of web standards.

• Standards are necessary; balance of implementation/development.
• Clean up existing standards. De facto vs. de jure : eg: innerHTML. Background of standards groups, etc.
• Add new features. The open web needs to remain a competitive platform, eg. not closed flash, silverlight, etc. New stuff like SVG, video, etc.
• WHATWG/HTML5. <video> vs. <object> client-side SQL, offline stuff, browser registration as protocol handlers. HTML5 spec
• Video. Ogg Theora. Standards should be open.
• ES4. What is ES4? Ah… ECMAScript; The proper name for JavaScript. Too much change, too fast? Incremental vs. complete overhaul?
• Politics.
• Your needs.

Development environments: ActiveState Komodo IDE, built on XULRunner. Aptana.

Morning tea = tasty muffins and sausage rolls with open sauce.

Session Two: Sending Spam

Simon Lyall.

• InternetNZ Spam Code of Practice
• Friend-get-friend. Overly legislated – most companies are dropping friend-get-friend just in case.
• Test your email across a number of ISP before you send it.
• IP reputation, Customer ranking (‘Mark as spam’), SPF, Domain keys

Session Three: DIY CSS Frameworks: CSS Design Patterns

Darren Wood (go, microformats!)

• Blueprint, etc.
• Reset your CSS
• Set up some default styles
• Set up styles for accessibility
• font-size:62.5% = 10px or thereabouts, so then 1.2em = approx 12px, etc.
• John Oxton’s scalable logos.
• Pros and cons of large corporates with supplied/mandated markup/CSS; it’s tough having to implement crappy code, but conversely, you have the benefit of code handed to you on a plate.

Cheers, Darren.

Lunchtime!

Session Four: Spaghetti or Meatball?

How to design this barcamp t-shirt.

• Designing before the fact, not after.
• Freehand over Illustrator.
• It’s a wear-again shirt; not your average conference t-shirt.

Much of Matt’s presentation was too tricky to type up – thought processes, rationalising, influences, feedback from others, etc.

Session Five: Charles

Karl von Randow tells us all about Charles.

• Developing and marketing software.
• Shareware: time is precious for developers, so there’d be a willingness to pay to remove the 30-minute time limit, etc. If you’re not using it enough to be annoyed by the time-out and the nag-screens, then you’re not using it enough to warrant purchasing it.
• Development driven largely by user feedback/requests.
• Leaving Charles running for your everyday HTTP requests means you see all sorts of interesting things; e.g. how to hack Mintshot.
• Bandwidth throttling

Session Six: Demos!

Some short demonstrations of cool stuff!

• Simon Lyall demos the Asus eee.
• Mark Derricutt demos some DB migration Java classes.
• Jeff demos the Mukuna gig guide changes since the last Auckland Web Meetup.
• Demo of Vidavee’s WordPress plugin. This is worth checking out.
• Robert O’Callahan demos in-page OpenGL 3D. Browser talks directly to the GPU – it’s really fast!
• Karl stands up and says iPhones are cool.
• Lugwig – the man himself – shows us an app he built: NCEA tracker.

Well, this has been barcamp – thanks everyone – it was great!