ICMP2 Logfiles

Cavac

Tavelling there and back took too long, as usual (Graz is far away from anywhere); Detailed description can be put aside (for that look at at CbC2004Log). For this trip, just add Dauti and limit the travelling time to 8 hours :-)

I'd have liked to be able to write here that I built a lot of damn good things. The fact however is that it was way too hot for me to do much creative work. Here the most important points in short:

Wednesday: Arrived in the evening. As the PoC has brought a fairly big tent with complete office-, Living room-, Serverroom-, PhoneOperatingCenter-, and Kitchen-equipment, we helped them building it up for quite a while. Sascha even had brought a Climate Control - what off course led to the fact that his tent became a much frequented meeting point during the hot hours of the day :-). After that we built up our own tents, ArcadeMaxi and all of our electronics-stuff including coloured tent-lighting. As end-of-evening fiesta we had a few cigarette- and beer-breaks, but no internet.

Thursday: Sat around all day, played with a loaned DECT-Handy and been to the PoC a lot to marvel at the interesting electronics and of course because of the climate control. Wrote a Perl-script for the PoC-webcams. In the evening I played a few sessions of Pong and lost against the computer. At the end of the evening I repairdestroyed LogoLights.

Friday: Inspection of the Loscher brewery (good beer and that sticky Mate-stuff). Really cool such a brewery - especially the storeroom with +4°C - highly interesting. I knew before that brewing beer isn't that easy, but what you really have to keep in mind almost nears nuclear-science... After another hour of debugging LogoLights 1stein just switched the Power-convertor from 9 to 7.5 Volts and suddenly it worked just fine. Ooops. The whole afternoon then was spent prepairing the lecture "Secure Webserver programming in Perl". The lecture started after a short delay at 1:00 at night. It went fairly well, measured at the fact that I was practically asleep standing up.

Saturday: Hung around the PoC all day, being lazy and thinking creative thoughts. In the evening there was a tempest warning and we almost completely tore down the BlinkenArea. The tempest itself luckily did not show up, but we were unable to do any blinking. Instead I listened to the really interesting technical discussions at the PoC-tent. If Daniel hadn't explained the basics of "Alternating current lines" (Protective grounding and suchlike) to me I probably wouldn't have understood anything. This show's that I'm more of a Software-Person 8-)

Sunday: Slept a little longer, then sat at the PoC-tent and listened to music untill noon. Around noon there was the BBOMeeting about diverse technical issues, during which we reached a lot of agreements. After that we started tearing down the tents and packing up our backpacks, we started our travel back to Graz around 14:00.

ST

Arrival

Kathe already went to the ICMP on 02.08.2004, as she was "archangel" and helped with Build-up and organisation. At the 4th 1stein, Cavac and Dauti had joined her. When I arrived in Münchsteinbach around noon at the 5th a lot of the stuff had already been built-up. The main Tent/Hackcenter, the PoC and some 30 tents had their place on the field. At the BlinkenArea there was already a Pavillion-tent and the ArcadeMaxi. We unloaded LittleLights and the rest of the hardware from my car and built-up another pavillion-tent. It was really hot and we ceased any activity and did nothing for a while.

At nightfall, when it started to cool down we built up the rest of the BlinkenArea completing it. All Pc's, Lighting-strings and fluorescent-lighttubes were installed, Ethernet an ISDN were hooked up.

Infrastructure and such

The telephony network, DECT as well as ISDN, worked very well. Also the WLAN and Cable-net worked including DHCP, this without problems and with good bandwidth. The internal net provided some servers and a webserver was used to announce lectures and events. Due to extreme heat during the day, all lectures were placed within a 21:30 to 24:00 timewindow. In my opinion a good decision and very nerdcompatible. There was a big deficiency though. The first two days there was no internetconnection. The Satellite-link wasn't up yet, because the ordered dish was delivered too late. Even later when the net was up, there were regular disconnects due to the provider, because the implementation of the Protocol was faulty. Only after the NOC-Crew had established a tunneling to Berlin the connections were stable. In total I experienced the Internetconnection as being too sluggish. Foods and drinks were there aplenty and extremely cheap. 2 bottles{approx. 1 liter} of Mate, Cola, Juice or water (From the cooling-truck!) cost 1,50 Euro's. Grilled Bratwurst with a bread roll was only 75 cents. Breakfast and coffee were available all day long, and had been included in the 30 Euro entrance-fee.

Blinking

ArcadeMaxi and LittleLights were turned on at dusk when it got dark and kept blinking untill dawn. I configured the blccc with the dispatcher function, so all we needed now was a Phone-number and *number# could be used to execute different functions. The configuration was thusly:

Phonenumber 2026 (*5 to enable DTMF if needed)

• default Pong
• *0# Snake
• *1# Retris
• *2# XXO
• *3# Uhr
• *4# Matrix
• *5# Quix
• To start Film-on-demand: *[Number-of-film]#
  e.g. *HERZ# ~> *4379# or *POC# ~> *762#

I didn't really do much during the ICMP, because the excessive heat nearly killed me. Most of the time I hung around the "idle loop" or slept. 1stein thereagainst was hyperactive and drilled 1040 holes for my ArcadeMini and updated the firmware for my believed-to-have-died ArcadeMini PCB. Thanks a lot again for this! Together with PoC's Daniel I bent a few LED's, but at the end of the ICMP I had only soldered in 240 of 1040 LED's. Together with Dauti and 1stein we compiled the MPlayer with bml output. 1stein built a blccc for the Arcade on the last day, so now the ArcadeMaxi could be used to play using the DECT telephony-net.

ICMP-Stats

According to the organization there were 97 people at ICMP2 and the PoC had connected 66 Phone-extensions.

-- ReneSchickbauer - 09 Aug 2004
-- STephanKambor - 12 Aug 2004
-- ThomasCouperus - 12 Nov 2004