Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Barcamp Gent 3, the one that took place yesterday is probably going to be my last Barcamp in Belgium. I already had my doubts upfront when looking at the suggested talks, but once there I realized it was much worse than I expected.

Lemme repoint you folks to what I wrote about the first Barcamp in Belgium back in 2006

Maybe my expectations on what kind of people / talks to meet and see there were a bit wrong.. when looking at other barcamps where people such as whurley and Moshe were present, I was maybe hoping for a bit more of system level innovation etc. or at least more technology innovation rather than Bloggers meet and talk about Blogging tools. I wasn't sure on what I should talk about as most of the topics I usually speak about would have been so out of scope and probably wouldn't have reached any potientiel audience.

So for 3+ years I kept hoping for change, there's always an amount of interesting people that show up that make the day interesting, but yesterday there were timeslots with no relevant topics for me at all. Don't get me wrong ... I really liked Ine's presentation preparing to travel and work for a year, but that's not why I go to Barcamp. Maybe it was because people that normally wouldn't give a presentation were forced to give a presentation and came up with these kind of topics, or maybe it's because Barcamps have changed, luckily there were different other talks tackling the Semantic Web, Hackerspaces etc that did catch my attention.

But maybe the majority of Belgian Barcampers needs to realize that what they want is not a Barcamp but TwitCamp, Blogcamp or maybe even LifeCamp, For me topics such as Pension Plans, Makeup, Beer, Travel Advice, etc don't belong on a Barcamp. I`m not part or the Belgian Twitter and Bloggers community, I`m part the Belgian Tech community, blogging on Open Source and new technologies . But when someone tells me "Hey there the Paris Hilton of the Belgian Bloggers" my reaction is ,wtf is Paris Hilton and why should I care

The best talk of Barcamp this year was a talk titled "Where are my Keys" , Elise was running around with a problem, and a partial solution, the discussion and input during that talk could have lead to actuall building something and nferis nferis
I'm not alone with this opinion, Some people already gave their opinion about the Belgian Barcamps buy just not showing up anymore ... and in other parts of the world other barcamps seem to have the same problems.

Barcamp has had his different spinoffs. There's GovCamp, MobileCamps, CaseCamp, NoSQLCamp, SQLCamp, CloudCamp, DemoCamp, LAMPCamp , WordCamps, DrupalCamps and many more ... and you'll probably bump into me on the more specialized ones .. given enough Android topics you'll see me at a MobileCamp, you'll see me at LoadAys (a new conf on Linux and Open Source Administration topics), DevopsDays . I hope to be able to go to the new and upcoming Hackerspaces a bit more

Unless the next Barcamp heads back in another direction :)

But until then...so long thnx for al the fish

Too bad the majority of the audience already knew what I was a bout to say ....

Last saturday was ZooCamp , also known as Barcamp Antwerp II

The location , the Antwerp Zoo, was the same as for the last CloudCamp Antwerp edition, so I was already pretty familiar with the location.

Lots of new people at ZooCamp and also a bunch of regulars..

My 4th barcamp and the 2nd where I didn't do a presentation, I hope the fact that Inuits was sponsoring ZooCamp made up for that.. contributions can be done in different forms, and you can't always keep coming up with new topics.

I went to ZooCamp with a backpack full of internet connected things as that was the topic , my freshly upgraded TuxDroid and my Chumby .. but I didn't even have the time to fully unpack them and set em up. The biggest problem with the chumby was the website authentication that was required for wifi access.. and a Chumby with no wifi is like a pub with no beer.
I had even planned to do a rerun of my CloudSec talk from the last CloudCamp Antwerp, however the schedule filled quite fast with different interesting talks ...

Frank even managed to hijack my favourite topic, yes that's right .. he did a talk titled "Everything is a Frakkin DNS Problem". He pretty much covered zero of my typical cases so I can still do a run of my version of that talk one day :)

This barcamp was almost back to basics, apart from the location, wifi and the obligatory catering the crowd took charge , Lunch was everybody on their own .. so we ran out for Sushi , great ..
Not sure if we need to cough up that amount of money for a location in the future ..
Ideally we'd be able to find a location for free at some companies office, but that seems to be a difficult task for a saturday event.

Oh and we got to see the baby Elephant.. it was sleeping :)

Less than 1 week till ZooCamp, you know .. Barcamp Antwerp 2, but then in the Antwerp Zoo.

Register here

I predicted it to some people and it actually became true :(

I just removed myselve from tomorrows BarcampGent 2 subscription list.

It seems I can make it to most of the "odd" issues of Belgian Barcamps, I made it to BarcampBrussels, BarcampBrussels3 and the first BarcampGent, but for the Even Barcamps , Brussels2 and 4 and now Gent2 there always seems to be something that eventually blocks me from going. Just like with the BXL edition family priorities kicked in.

Anyway .. have fun tomorrow .. I`ll be thinking of you folks
and see you next time :)

This was not a CloudCamp !

Don't get me wrong, it was a great event and I met lots of interesting people , but it was not a *camp.
The idea was there to have an unconference after the formal sessions, but the formal sessions ran out and there was no time because of food and bar duties.

The event was a mixture of regular Belgian Campers, Virtualization geeks, Open Source folks , obviously there were a couple of "lost" americans , and the crowd from up North :)

The location was weird to say the least, what if the boat hat floated off on the river :)

It's obvious the world doesn't have a fixed definition for "Cloud Computing" yet , Tarry really made a safe bet by cut and pasting the definition from WikiPedia but the thing that really worried me was that when Raph asked if the audience could define Open Source they couldn't either.

Given the audience it's really hard to understand why they couldn't explain what Open Source is .. they should be able to. As the biggest chunk of Cloud Infrastructure is based on Open Source , the audience of a CloudCamp should be able to define Open Source, but then again there was quite a number of suits around that weren't expected to understand what it is all about :)

The fact is that a the cloud today still is a bit of undefined, different marketeers are grabbing the opportunity to rebrand their longtime existing product as fresh and hot cloud.

The interesting part of the Cloud to me is the mix of Virtualization, Scalability, Automation , Large Scale Deployment , playing the puppetmaster, and High Availability ..

It's stuff I have been doing for ages , it's the stuff this blog has been covering since the beginning ... but I don't plan on renaming my blog .. as afterall the whole cloud issue is just a Freaking DNS Problem

Pictures of the event are here

Bart just pointed to MobileWebCamp , wondering how I could have missed it :(

Over at the fresh Open Management website , I launched the idea of having a European edition of Barcamp ESM.

Just lets make sure that Europe is also placed on the map in this area..!

Barcamp Gent , hopefully I can make it this time.

But I`m with Koen : who's gonna organise a Barcamp Antwerp ! :)

Barcamp Brussels 4 is comming

It’s decided! Barcamp Brussels #4 will take place on Saturday Dec 1st, in the mVillage business center in Schaarbeek, close to the Koninginneplein, Kruidtuin/Botanique and the Brussels North station (thanks for the help, Simon).