BarCamp London 6 is in a month or so, and everyone's trying to get a ticket. Well, so it seems, anyway. Two batches have so far been released, and both have been allocated within a minute. It's so ridiculous, I don't even think I can be bothered trying.
I've complained about this sort of thing before, way back when, on the 2lmc spool, when that was extant. Even then, rather than just grousing, I had a suggestion.
Given the current ticket allocation system is a lottery, why not, well, make it a fair one? Rather than giving tickets based on who can hit "reload" in a browser fastest, leave the ticket system open for as long as the current wave system lasts (well over a week, so far), and let everyone apply for a ticket. Then, close the system, and randomly allocate the number of tickets available to the list.
This seems to me to be a far fairer solution. Of course, there are other ways of doing this. A nominal fee - something like the £12 charged by Ruby Manor, or the £20 for Interesting - would also have the effect of trimming the entrance list, and it might stop some of the encroaching commercialisation of the event. (Anyway, does every BarCamp really need its own tshirt?)
After I ranted about this in the pub, Gavin Bell suggested another model, an invite network, under the name seed16. In the comments on that piece, Simon Wistow suggested that, if going with friends is important, you could let people apply for tickets en masse, and vary the lottery model in different ways.
I'm sure the BarCamp people have a lot of work to do in getting their conference running, and having organised a few events for london.pm way back when, I know it's easy to criticise. I do think that ticketing has become something of a farce, though, and it's got to be worth considering different approaches.
Last week, I gave a short talk at the London Ruby User Group that I titled "Avoiding API Library Antipatterns". It's really about what not to do when you're writing a library to use Flickr's API (although I think there's a lot you can learn for any RESTian service provider from the experience). You can see the slides at Slideshare and there's even a video of the talk at Skills Matter, who hosted the event.
So, what was the gist? Rather than writing lots of boilerplate code to handle every Flickr method, and wrap the returned XML into objects, instead use a generic caller and JSON to eliminate much of your work. If you're able to, use reflection to provide convenience methods. As a result, I use flickraw, because it's the only Ruby library I've seen that does things this way.
One of the weakest points of the talk was that I didn't cover how Flickr's responses don't just change when the API changes. Most methods take the 'extras' parameter, which allows you to flesh out the returned data with additional fields, such as the dates the photo was taken and uploaded. Naive libaries require patching to deal with this; smart ones, handing back the response with minimal changes, don't.
I also shied away from explicitly putting in the slides many of the recent projects I've built, including where? what? when? and the machine tag browser, which rely on using new API methods. If you're stuck behind a poor library, there are cool toys you won't be able to write without fighting it, and software's meant to help, not be hateful.
The talk itself was surprisingly quick to deliver; I blew through the slides in ten minutes, allowing lots of time for questions, which were (thankfully) interesting and insightful. The suggested use of method-missing to provide syntactic sugar (calling flickr.photos.search not flickr.call(flickr.photos.search), for example) if an API doesn't provide reflection (or if the library author wants to avoid having to fetch method information) sticks in my mind as a point that's worth repeating.
This was my first talk to a language-specific group outside Perl, and I'm fairly happy with how it went, so thanks to LRUG for listening and being so welcoming, and I hope readers here also get something out of the talk.
This weekend I was at the festival for the first time in almost a decade. I'd been worried both at leaving behind technology and at how I'd cope with tents (especially if it rained). While I did have a bit of trouble with the weather, and I missed some of the communication that IRC and email affords, it was actually a good weekend. Here's the distilled version of my weekend.
Well, Doc Searls appears to be in London and Ben Hammersley invited ukbloggers along. I made sure Matt Webb would be there and with help from a remote Google source (thanks Simon) I made it to the pub.
It was a little odd for me being there, since I hardly knew anyone there. On the other hand, people there were friendly enough, and I got to eat lots of really garlic-y garlic bread, drink strange little shots and bottles of lager, and we talked about all sorts of things, like whether Apple were doing enough with OS X (and Jaguar) and how fragile their position was, bridging MOOs and IRC (with bots, naturally), Shazam! and other uses for phoning services up for information (like, um, lie detectors), the sociability of British geeks compared with American ones, and my utter inability to take photos without it going all wobbly somewhere (plus a bit of lust for Doc's nice video camera).
Anyway, it was a nice evening, even if it did make me feel curiously like I was under some sort of obligation to make a blog post...
Kake's been suggesting that someone organise a London.pm trip to Oxford for a couple of months, so we can go punting (and drink Pimms, obviously). After (finally) deciding to go, I ended up sharing a car up there, via the M40 and a couple of the complex motorway junctions I discussed here earlier; it's been a long time since I'd been on that much motorway, and it was a little odd going over these structures I'd been mildly obsessing over earlier.
Whilst driving up, Dom was using Art's iBook to write TeX; there's something odd about how used to laptops people are now, me included, as the thing that struck me as odd wasn't so much the use of the laptop as the fact that I'm really not used to people using Macs multi-user, especially laptops; I tend to guard mine somewhat jealously, which I'd suspect is fairly common for such a personal machine.
After arriving we had a small respite (complete with a swarm of aphids over the table; perhaps they've got on will with the spring, whereas ladybirds haven't) in a handily placed pub, then walked down to Magdalen where Dom had booked two punts for us. After the inevitable wait for members of the group to turn up, we made our way down to the Cherwell to board the boats. Getting in was definitely the scariest bit of the day. Punts are pretty low in the water anyway, and once six people are in there you feel worryingly like you're about to sink, especially when the punt sways as the lucky man with the pole (at first, Magnus) pushes off. Our punt (with me, Kake, aef, Magnus, Marcus and Kath in) was the first off, and the second (containing sheriff, PerfDave, Kit, doop, Dom and Earle) followed after a couple of minutes.
My nervousness was very obvious, but once we'd got past a couple of minor traumas (we lost the pole to a tree, but rescued it promptly, and had a minor collision with another punt) the Pimms and lemonade, combined with a touch of familiarity, let me relax.
I've been to Cambridge a little, and I was expecting Oxford to have a similar layout to the Backs, but instead the river goes a fair way from the town centre and there's a lot more in the way of strange little waterways. This meant that we ended up going round a rather strange triangular route, looping back over the same bits of river a little (but not too much). There were also the inevitable breaks to go to the loo, complete with a minor encounter with a bunch of nettles, and seeing whether ducks liked nachos (yes, apparently, even without salsa), plus inter-punt contests over who had the dips and/or alcohol (sadly, the Pimms ran out quite early).
Amazingly, no-one except the punters got damp, and we made it back to dry land in one piece. After a brief wander around the tourist hotspots of the centre of Oxford, the remaining section of people, plus Art, went to a fairly nice Chinese restaurant called the Pink Giraffe, of all things. After beer, wine, food and conversation, we headed back to civilisation.
