Haiku Down Under 2010 Report

It was a fine, sunny morning in Brisbane, Australia: home of the Third Annual Haiku Down Under Virtual Conference for Haiku Users and Developers. Virtual in the respect that the event was streamed live over the Internet via the uStream service. We accept (and regret) that this service requires Flash, so you can’t use Haiku to view this event, you must use another OS like Windows, Mac or Linux.

This year, HDU (short for Haiku Down Under; not slang for How Dare yoU) were able to book a conference venue at The University of Queensland with projector, white board and limited seating where myself, Sikosis was joined by BeMark and Mojodale.

Unfortunately, the event started about 20 minutes late due to the conference room’s network ports not being wired up in the switch cabinet. Thankfully, I’m an admin with keys at UQ, so I rushed around to get our broadcasting and monitoring machines online as soon as possible.

If you haven't watched the recorded stream by now, you should, if you wish to get a feel for how things played out. Whilst, I was initially a little disappointed with the lack of submissions for this event; I believe in the end, the content that I produced and which was presented with the help of BeMark, will still be helpful to the community at large. In saying that, I'd like to give special thanks to BeMark for stepping up last minute to present the QT on Haiku session. As stated, it was a tutorial merely to prove it works; next year who knows we might have something more advanced. BeMark is actually a Pascal guru, perhaps next year we might be able to get him to run some FreePascal sessions instead. Just to follow up on a few things from the event, the Haiku in the Workplace site has been setup, though I still need to add all the content we discussed plus further developments in this section, Project Rhino is taking requests for its beta program and will be due to launch soon. If you have signed up for the beta program, you will receive an email at the end of the month and the netPanzer Face-Off mini-site has been reset for next year. This year’s prize winners were Daniel Devine (HDU 2010 T-Shirt) and Kokito and sand_man both winning the Learning to Program with Haiku eBook by Jon Yoder aka DarkWyrm. These prizes were gladly sponsored by Daily Haiku and Haiku PC. This year we’ve also made the slides available in HTML form, along with the code examples to download via the HDU Code Repository, or you can view them using web syntax highlighting. HDU will return next year on Sunday 9AM (GMT+10) 21st August, 2011 - we hope to see alot more developers wanting to get involved, along with more users and viewers. There is also a survey, which we would very much like you to complete. By doing this, it will enables us to tailor things for next year. Let us know what we’re doing right and/or wrong. The statistics for the live stream peaked at a total of 23 viewers. Over the course of the 3 hour broadcast, there was an average of 11 and 65 offline views of the 177 minutes (2 hours 57 minutes) recording. Also, the website garnered 2,112 hits for the month of August. Thanks for your support, we look forward to the next time HDU takes place. Most importantly, we look forward to seeing how much Haiku evolves over the coming year.