GeekDinner – Carnivorous Cantaloupe

Another successful GeekDinner is in the bag…

Last night around 70 of Cape Town’s coolest geeks converged on Krugmann’s in the V&A Waterfront and ate, drank and discussed geeky things like wireless meshes and selling wine on the interwebs. I’ll leave it up to more neutral people to say whether or not it was a success but I certainly enjoyed myself.

David Carman spoke about building a wireless mesh in Scarborough… his talk was excellent… I’m very interested in the technical elements of wireless communications but the thing that “got” me the most was the fact that they are providing internet access to kids in the township. I don’t care what authority you’re from and what laws you want to twist to “get your way”, but if you want to take Wikipedia away from underprivileged kids you’re going to have to do so after ripping the CAT5 cable out of my cold, dead hands.

Next up was Ian Gilfillan who essentially told us that, even though he is now an International MySQL superstar, he didn’t get rich doing so.

Alan Levin talked about peering… Alan is a great speaker who did his best to ignore Wizzy’s heckling. It’s comforting to know that we should soon have cheaper international bandwidth in this country, and morally reprehensible (what’s new?) that the government and Telkom have set it up in a way that it’ll still cost an arm and a leg because some irrelevant middle man has the “rights” to sell it at some archaic price as previously defined by Telkom. BMW X5 much? (Alan, did I get the corruption chain right?)

Johann Wegner of GetWine.co.za (our fabulous wine sponsor) was up next and talked about the challenges of selling wine online. His sidekick (what was his name), Sam Paddock, gave a more in depth technical discussion about how they actually do it. Very interesting…

Finally we had Aslam Khan telling us how wonderful PHP and Pretoria are. Actually, he talked about Behaviour Driven Development… a talk which for some reason the two non-technical people I brought along seemed to enjoy the most… perhaps because he used the dog.getBody().getTail().wag() vs dog.expressHappiness() analogy. Aparently non-techies like dog analogies.

I’d like to personally thank:

• You guys for rocking up!
• Antoine for hooking us up with sound and a projector.
• SimplyAV, an excellent AV company that I would seriously recommend you contact if you need AV – (021) 782-5100.
• GetWine for providing the Wine.
• Krugmann’s for hosting us.
• The other GeekDinner organisers.

Finally, just a little punt. These things don’t organise themselves and we’ve got it to the point that it’s actually quite easy to put together. PLEASE, if you have any inclination for helping us organise a future GeekDinner, sign up to the GeekDinner Planning list. We don’t mind if you lurk.

There’s also the announce list which everyone should join so that you know when these things happen. The list traffic is extremely low, about 1 email a month. Finally, for those of you who have succumbed, there is a Facebook group.

Cheers, see you at the next GeekDinner.

ATH,

J.

ps. The photos and the very bad recording (something went wrong) will be available some time over the weekend.