Haiku Down Under 2013 Report

It was a rather ominous start to the day with fog covering most of the city early in the morning, but thankfully it turned out to be a great day both weather wise and for the Sixth Annual Haiku Down Under Users and Developer's (Virtual) Conference held at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia on 18th August, 2013.

The live feed was provided using the Flash-based UStream service once again and we apologise for those who couldn't follow along. We keep waiting for some better technology to be made available to do the stream and is also open source and Haiku friendly. One day.

On with the Show
The event "Computer ChaOS" was kicked off with me, Phil Greenway (Sikosis) talking about how the OS landscape has changed in recent times with mobile looking to take over desktop Internet usage in 2015. I then concluded with the State of Haiku keynote, as I do each year, highlighting Haiku's achievements over the previous year.

We then took a short break whilst watched the Haiku in Action VI video, showing the poor state of HTML5 browser support, DHTML working just fine and ending on a good note that there are workarounds to getting to watch your favourite YouTube videos on Haiku.

Mark Patterson (BeMark) then took the stage to demo Lazarus, a QT application that replicates the Delphi experience using the Free Pascal Compiler. Unfortunately, Mark had done his tests using a different nightly build of Haiku then what I had on the broadcast machine. Mark will be making a video demo using the machine he has and that will be edited into the High Quality version of conference.

Speaking of the broadcast, there is an MP4 video available for download, which was recorded during the broadcast. I also recorded a Higher Quality local version, which we hope to have available in the not to distant future.

We took another short break to show the GIT Repository Visualisation by Phreadom (Justin Stressman). Unfortunately, due to an unforeseen error, Justin was unable to get an updated version of the video. We're still hoping he can get that to us and we'll place that in the HQ version too.

I then came back on with my cURL demo otherwise known as the cURL Just Wanna Have Fun session. I demo-ed first using the command line version of cURL, the most common usage in scripts and the like. Then I delved into some Haiku C++ coding using libcurl. Something went a little weird with the demo, so I grabbed the code for bitly, a simple cURL based application I wrote last year and was able to then complete the demo.

We had 39 live viewers on the day according to UStream with another 41 streamed to date and the 5 dedicated people in the IRC chatroom. We thank all of those who participated and got involved.

I really get a buzz out of these events and it renews my faith in all things Haiku. Please consider completing the Survey Form. This will help us to shape the event for next year. Until then keep on Haiku-ing.