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CodeCon, FOSDEM Both Around The Corner

Posted by timothy on from the please-select-from-the-following-options dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The program for CodeCon was quietly announced a few days ago. The third edition of this groundbreaking programmer's conference, which adheres to a strict set of rules geared to providing a high-content event (such as requiring working demos of projects presented, and all presentations to be given by an active developer) is well stocked with interesting p2p, crypto, coding, and open source projects. Some of the highlights of this year's con include Audacity, Bram and Ross Cohen's Codeville, The U.S. Navy's Onion Router, and PGP Universal. Other notable applications, like Bittorrent, the Invisible IRC project, GNU Radio, and Mixminion all made their public debuts at past CodeCons. Produced by cypherpunk Len Sassaman and BitTorrent programmer Bram Cohen, this grass-roots conference is a must-see." CodeCon runs Feb. 20-22 in San Francisco, while FOSDEM (the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting) is taking place in Brussels on Feb 20-21.

8 comments

  1. FOSDEM and Gnome? by Simon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Gnome guys/gals don't seem to have a dev-room or much in the way or offical talks. Anyone know what is it going on?

    --
    Simon

  2. SOLIPSIS by Sklivvz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Both the convention site and the project homepage seem to go little way in explaining what this interesting project is about.
    For those who don't know anything about the project is a cross between a P2P application and a MMORPG. Basically it's a distributed MMORPG of sorts.
    That's all I could gather from the official pages. Does anyone know more about this?

    --
    My Stack Overflow user
    1. Re:SOLIPSIS by joaquin.keller · · Score: 2, Informative
      The solipsis project started with the idea of building a Metaverse-like (Neal Stephenson "Snowcrash") virtual world that could be experienced by several millions of users. But only a totally decentralized system with no intrinsic bottlenecks (like central servers) can achieve this goal. Moreover, we have no ambition to be gods and force all users to experience exactly what *we* might desire (not like in actual MMORPG). Rather, we expect that users will contribute to the project, creating their own implementations of Solipsis entities (we will migrate asap on sourceforge)

      That's why Solipsis has a pure peer-to-peer architecture in an open-source project.

      We envision to build a parallel virtual world as big and as free as the web, so the only way is to gather all users contributions, all users machines and networks.

      -- Joaquin

      NB: For technical data Toward a peer-to-peer shared virtual reality is not bad

    2. Re:SOLIPSIS by Sklivvz · · Score: 1

      Very interesting, but what do you mean in practice? Looking at some (albeit preliminary) screenshots it seems to me that it's very similar to a distributed chat client.
      What is this parallel universe made of (files, sites, shards)? Which kind of data is contained in it? How is it different from VRML? How and what does a user contribute to it?

      --
      My Stack Overflow user
    3. Re:SOLIPSIS by joaquin.keller · · Score: 2, Informative

      > Very interesting, but what do you mean in practice? Looking at some (albeit preliminary) screenshots it seems to me that it's very similar to a distributed chat client.

      good question:
      it looks like a chat client because you can chat, but there are big difference with:
      1. IM clients (jabber-like)
      with IM you chat (mostly) with your friends
      in Solipsis you can meet people
      2. Chatrooms (IRC)
      most chatrooms are empty, most populated chatrooms have tens of chatters
      Solipsis is like a huge chatroom that can accept an unlimited number of chatters and chatbots (millions and more)

      Chatters are represented by their avatars (for now just a disk with an image inside) and have a position on the solipsis world (the solipsis world is a surface, a 2D torus).
      When you are (your avatar is) at a given position you can interact with your virtual neighbors.
      For now 'interact' means text chat but in a few weeks it will mean also exchange files, and it could mean anything developers could imaging from arcade gaming to numeric kissing(!?).

      Current navigators show the world from above and avatars are just flat.
      Just imagine a navigator providing a 3D subjective view with 3D avatars walking on the solipsis board...

      Solipsis could have several navigators (for now two, in tk and wx).
      It's like the web: you can use lynx or mozilla (or M$ IE)...

      -- Joaquin

  3. You should attend! by Bert690 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Having attended the last 2 code-cons, I can highly recommend the event. The focus is on working or near-working applications in p2p, privacy, encryption, and other topics most Slashdotters know and love. The crowd is also great... you'll learn a lot simply talking to people between presentations. Bram and Len have done a great job with the program and this year looks to be no exception.

  4. Info on previous conferences by PureFiction · · Score: 2, Informative

    To get a feel for the conference you can listen to the CodeCon 03 audio recordings or review the CodeCon 02 write-ups for day one, day two, and day three.

    As a developer who has gone to the previous conferences I can say without hesitation that they are well worth the time and cost.