Haiku Down Under 2011 Report

It was a rather overcast day in Brisbane, Australia: Home of the Fourth Annual Haiku Down Under Virtual Conference for Haiku Users and Developers. It was virtual, in the respect, that the event was streamed live over the Internet once again using the uStream service.

We accept (and regret) that this service requires Flash, but at present, we still haven’t found any other services that are capable of delivering the same features. One of these days, we hope to use a Haiku friendly service.

This year, HDU 2011 (#hdu2011) was hosted from one of the ITEE boardrooms at The University of Queensland where I, Phil Greenway (Sikosis) was joined once again by Mark Patterson (BeMark) and newcomer Daniel Devine.

We kicked off the event at 10AM (GMT +10) instead of 9AM like previous years, to enable us plenty of time to get all the hardware setup for the event. It was raining outside, which was unusual for this time of year, still this had no impact on our event.


This was a good thing, as we managed to start on time and everything was going smooth. We did have a couple of issues, but we trust that didn't deter from the rest of the event.

Truth be told there were two hiccups during the event, one being when I was playing the Audio Interview with myself and Matt Madia. Unfortunately, uStream isn't very smart in the fact we were running a broadcast and they decided to play someone else's event stream in our browser.


So, it took us a few minutes to figure out what was going on. The other issue was with netPanzer, more on that later.

For those who missed the event, there is a recorded version hosted on uStream, so we encourage you to have a look. This year we didn't solicit for submissions, so the format was myself doing my usual coding session, BeMark was back again for some Qt stuff and thanks to the Haiku talk I did at LCA 2011 at the beginning of the year, I met Daniel Devine and he volunteered to help out.

Actually, Daniel was a prize winner from HDU 2010, so good to see him step up from user to presenter in such a short space of time.


I started off the event with a brief overview of what has happened in Haiku land over the past year, then I went into a coding session about Reading and Writing Files: The Haiku Way using the Storage Kit API. I also wrote some demos for BeMark to present on using Qt under Haiku doing reading and writing files as well; this was mainly so you could see the difference between the two approaches.

Daniel Devine, who has a Linux background, gave a very cool talk about doing Python Web Development under Haiku. Some really great stuff here such as the django web framework and I was impressed to see that SickBeard ran under Haiku. As Daniel said, there's probably a lot of hidden gems out there that run under Haiku.

To build on the mini-session from last year called Haiku in the Workplace, initially, I was planning to use Google+ Hangouts for an interactive discussion. When it came down to it, we decided to just rely on good ole IRC and went through various applications that Haiku would need to be able to be used in a work environment. I'll be putting more information up on the Haiku in the Workplace mini-site in due course, so stay tuned.


Unfortunately, because we ran over time and the video flickering issues we had running netPanzer, we decided to scrap Face-Off II and head off to have lunch instead. It worked fine the night before the event, but not on the day. We're unsure if we'll run this again next year -- if anyone has any suggestions on what else we could run, please feel free to comment on the HDU 2011 Survey.

This year’s prize winners were eNIGMa winning the Haiku® R1/Alpha 3 Commemorative CD and Omnimancer getting a copy of the Learning to Program with Haiku eBook by Jon Yoder aka DarkWyrm. These prizes were gladly sponsored by Daily Haiku and Haiku PC.

Once again, we’ve 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 10AM (GMT+10) 19th August, 2012 - once again hoping we can get the numbers (users, developers and viewers) involved up. We've setup a survey, so if you have some free time, please complete this. By doing this, it will enable us to tailor things for next year. It your chance to let us know what we’re doing right and/or wrong.

The statistics for the live stream picked up this year with 53 live viewers (that's 30 more than last year). Though the website stats were down to only 695 pageviews for the month of August. That being said, we appreciate and thank you for your support; we look forward to seeing you and more at the next HDU.