Intro:

Yes, I’m a sucker for Cygwin. Being “forced” to live inside a few windows boxes on the corporate world made me embrace this tool to escape from a few nazi-ish policies and improve my efficiency when faced with common (and then again, maybe not) tasks.

Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts:

• A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.

• A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel.

The Cygwin DLL currently works with all recent, commercially released x86 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows, with the exception of Windows CE.

Think of it as an advanced Command Prompt for Windows boxes. Developing, debugging,scripting, testing, hacking. All of this can be done inside a Cygwin window  – just be aware that the standard Cygwin shortcut will just launch a cmd.exe window with a bash shell on it – for added usefulness, it’s much more efficient to launch it using the following shortcut:

C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -fn "Lucida Console-11" -bg black
-fg white -ls -st -sr -sl 1500 -C  -e /usr/bin/bash --login

Cygwin packages, the debian way:

Getting a new Cygwin installation running is usually a painful experience for several reasons:

1. As far as I know there is no way to script a complete installation using the setup utility.

2. Selecting packages for installation is a pain in the ass since the setup utility looks like it’s been designed by a monkey.

3. When an error occurs on installation, chances are your package selection is probably gone.

Truth be told, major revamping on the setup utility has been done on the past few months. It is now possible to search for an individual package by name. Searching for a package that provides a given binary/file/whatever is still very hard to accomplish and/or quite unclear.

However, I’ve come across an interesting project (one year old, as we speak) that brings the familiar Debian apt-get family commands to install packages. I’d think about this as a way to jumpstart a Cygwin installation, but it requires bash, wget, tar, gawk and bzip2 to be installed beforehand (and these should be installed on a zero configuration setup run)

Its name is apt-cyg. “a command-line installer for Cygwin which cooperates with Cygwin Setup and uses the same repository. The syntax is based on apt-get but simplified.”

With it, installing a full fledged and customized Cygwin setup is just a matter of running setup.exe once, installing the script using the suggested invocation and launching a preexisting shell script which all it does is installing the remaining packages (and dependencies) in one step.

I’m not going to talk about the fact that it’s by now proven that social networks (Twitter, mostly) often become the first source of breaking news (lacking accuracy and reliability – but hey, we like it short and direct).

I’m also not going to talk about Twitter’s lack of scalability and stability. It’s often usual to see the smiling fail whale whenever the two facts I mentioned before combine together.

Today, Twitter was down for one hour or so.  My first thought was “what in the world is happening capable of bringing twitter down to its knees?”. But the stupid whale wouldn’t say a thing.

I’d later find out it was some “sudden failure”. But I bet it was the combination of two episodes. A new earthquake on Haiti and @billgates (what took him so long?) joining Twitter. These were the trending topics the minute Twitter came back up and they stayed like that for some time.

(edit: the first episode would lead to a quite quick humorous response by @workforfood: an appropriate blue whale of death)

So, Twitter, here’s an idea. Next time you fail whale on me and something is happening in the world, get a static page with the top trending topics so we get a general idea of what’s happening. Either it’s #billgates, #earthquake, #haiti or #obama, we’d like to know. Kthxbye.

(spotted on a HP/Compaq 440716-001 WXGA Laptop LCD Screen)

Given the hectic state of things at work lately, I made sure I had the days off when I signed in, mostly because I wanted to pay attention to things and attend as much sessions as possible. When the first session plans showed up, I already had a pretty tight schedule and almost no free slots, but I think this might have happened to too many people and these “popular” sessions would soon be moved to other stages and timeframes. Which is nice.

I came to Codebits with zero ideas about projects and the whole spirit of the thing. If last year the focus had been on RFID and location based apps, this year would surely be the social networking year, something which the Pond launch kinda confirmed (and later the project “score” would, too).

One of the things I liked most about the 2008 edition was the quiz, a series of small web based puzzles and riddles which would, properly evaluated and scored, rank a number of users giving them access to the “real” quiz show during the main event.

Coincidentally, when the first quiz came out, I was with a couple of friends on a bar musing about improbable things, drinking caipirinhas and toying around with Google Wave. In an adrenaline rush I hadn’t felt for a while, we cracked the thing in less than an hour and had quite a few laughs based on the subject. Whenever a new quiz was out, we’d join forces on Skype, Google Wave, email and IM solving the riddles.  That’s how most of us got on stage. That’s how some of these folks ended up in the same large team to develop our “project”.

Of course, when things got hardcore (javascript golf? brainfuck?), we fled. We have a life too. Some of us. Sometimes.

Day 1.
The first day came by and if first impressions are what count, let me tell you I got pretty impressed by the size of the thing Sapo and PT built. The Cordoaria Nacional building is HUGE and (IMHO) not very practical to create isolated areas, as there are no “natural” walls (it’s a 400m x 10m rectangular hall with high ceilings). It was, however, pretty cleverly partitioned and served our purposes perfectly (there were minor issues with the temperature and the lightning, but nothing too important).

Next: infrastructure: comfortable puff sofas, plenty of tables, power plugs, wi-fi, ethernet, free food (pizza slices, salads, fruit, candy bars) and drinks (coffee, coke, redbull, etc), a bunch of consoles and an arcade machine, some partner stands showing up the latest technology and products and a rest area. Although I think there might be some more extra (and easy to assemble) details I’d think of, this was insanely cool for a free event. Amazing.

After the introductory session and welcome speeches, where it was revealed that Sapo was planning on deploying new projects every two weeks (nice move),everyone gathered up setting up the schedules and preparing teams and projects until the first sessions started.

From the first day, I’d absolutely recommend the witty “optional is required” by Brian Suda but also the Giuseppe Maxia and Lenz Grimmers talks on MySQL (one of the topics I followed closely last year). I also attended one or two sessions that didn’t manage to catch my attention (potentially interesting subjects but too exhaustive on details or too technical) which were switched for better options. The most popular session would turn out to be about Pond (no wonder).  Credit goes to the presenters, sure… but… The secret consisted on having two blonde hotties playing geek girls and delivering prearranged questions about the project. Brilliant marketing ploy. Surely one moment everyone will remember from this year event.

So by now, it’s clear that most of Codebits is about talent (or the search for it). And a great number of people had their minds already prepared for their assignments, to develop a project to be presented on the third (and last) day. Pedro came up with the idea of a roaming LEGO Mindstorms NXT robot that would wander around, avoiding obstacles and taking photographs of people. Given the reduced number of female fellow attendees, the idea of an upskirts camera was flawed from the start, so we figured out it would be wiser and more adult to just make it a roaming photographer robot. Which incidentally would be called Rupert.

Day one would be the Codebits Quiz Show day, with participants based on the ranking for the online quizes for the preceding weeks. I felt great to be one of the lucky participants and managed to squeeze myself into the third place in the final, just 2 points away from the first place. It’s great to place all this useless knowledge to use sometimes. And learn some additional shit in the process too…

Without any specific task assignment, we searched deeply and laboriously into the RCX code documentation and also on a giant box with tiny plastic pieces starting to build something that would act like expected while looking cool and keeping itself on one piece. On the day of day one, we’d have most of the software part done (which proves exactly the high potential Lego Mindstorms has to help out develop analytical and logical programming skills even for non-programming folks) and a (not very stable) prototype of Rupert. Most of us stood there until late just to realize we wouldn’t get much sleep and would be in a terrible mood the next day.

Day 2.
I’m not a morning person and getting up early is not my cup of tea. Getting there “early” to check the first sessions was a nightmare and I can’t believe I missed Mitch Altman’s “Make A Living Doing What You Love: How to Bring Your Project From Idea To Reality” talk (still waiting for the whole set of sessions to be published on the website to catch up). I’d spend a good part of the day sitting by his (Mitch) side learning how to solder properly and then watching as he debugged a faulty tv-b-gone kit. Sapo got him a stand with a bunch of soldering stations and tools so that people could buy kits and assemble them right away. Impressive stuff. He’s such a nice guy, always running from side to side helping people out and assisting them with the electronics. It was one of the most popular areas on the whole event and it was the start for numerous tv-b-gone sprees: From turning off the arcade and the console TVs and (sadly) session recording equipment to raiding the city malls for global disconnection. Fun. Fun, I’d say.

Day two was also the day where one of the most popular and expected sessions took place: Becoming a Lockpicker, by Walter Belgers. He presented some popular (and insecure) lock architectures but he also delved into much more complex solutions and on the eventuality of these having as much chance of being hacked as the regular ones (once you have the right set of tools). Speaking of tools, the after-session consisting of handing down some tools and locks for people to crack into was really popular. Walter managed to sell all the tool sets he had brought, so it looks like some people are planning on having a good time in the next few weeks.

There would still be time for Pornophonique to play on main stage. If at first I was not impressed at all by their performance, I think the whole thing grew on me as I watched. There’s no way to know what’s going on on those Game Boy consoles, some sort of sequencer or simple sample player – something on the thin line between real talent and just hitting some keys in sequence to play pre-recorded music. Luckily, Pornophonique saves it all by having one hell of an attitude on stage and really creating an amusing show which will end with a killer combo of Britney Spears, Madonna and Slayer covers. That’s an high score for me.

And Rupert? Well we were having a lot of positive feedback on the robot when we had it sweeping the floor. We spent most of the night reinforcing the structure that would hold the camera and debugging one faulty back wheel just to redesign the whole chassis to a three-wheeler. We’d figured out it was too unstable for “production” and improvised a fourth wheel. By this time (3AM or so) we had several people from other teams helping out (everyone loves to play with LEGO), which was pretty cool. It was already morning on the third and last day when we figured out the replacement didn’t work out as expected, so we had to use olive oil as a lubricant on the faulty wheel and hope things would turn out alright. That’s a “#win”. And time to get home to get some sleep. The speeding ticket I got in the meantime was not on the plans. We’ll see how that goes.

Day 3.
It would begin (officially) two hours after I left the building. I missed the second lockpicking hands-on lab and the Enigma talk. When I got up and checked the online live stream, everyone was getting RickRolled on the main stage, which was a delicate act of true evilness. Few people manage to achieve this. You’ve made it. Congratulations.

The rest of the day would be spent getting projects finished, getting the presentations ready, retouching every single detail and taking the time to actually look at other people’s projects and interesting stuff like Microsoft Surface and a 3D printer.

It was then time to present the projects. The place was packed and there were 60 projects ready to be presented on 90 second slots. The attendees would then vote whether they liked (or not) the project using the intranet. It was probably the time when Twitter timelines got most flooded with witty comments and private jokes (close call with the Pond session) but still quite positive -  the global and extensive use of Twitter as a communication device during the event was something out of this world. Rupert’s presentation went well and caught some very positive feedback from the audience, which was great. There were some projects that looked appealing and I’m able to say some of those I marked as favorite ended up on the top 10.

About the presentations: People still don’t know how to “sell” their products. They loose valuable time explaining meaningless details and spoiling the first impressions about the project. They rely on “live” demos, the existing network infrastructure and the whole set of Murphy’s laws (instead of simulations, screenshots, videos of execution under “ideal” circumstances) instead of giving a good and clear idea about it and finishing up with a clean record. Some of the best presentations I saw (and I remember a few that are on the top 10) are probably from projects that are nothing more than a good idea with a neat presentation. Actual work and testing and hardening the whole thing is something you do on real life, not on a three day time lapse.

People still make presentations which probably look good on their screen but suck on the projector screen. People still read from a paper the project description instead of speaking from their hearts about their own thing. People still don’t understand 90 seconds are 90 seconds and that’s all they’ll have. If I was allowed to give these guys an advice, I’d say: rehearse, rehearse, time your speech, rehearse, rehearse.

Asking the attendees to vote and actually showing the votes is cruel. There were good ideas which got bad feedback due to bad presentations and that was felt on the room. And the opposite too. “Serious” projects such as the “Cython protobuf generator” got little or no reaction from the room. The final results had “human” adjustment from the organization, but that’s not enough. It should have been clearer that the attendees score was just a tie breaker or had little influence on the result, just to stress properly that the whole scoring and prize attribution thing is simple and effective.

Adding things up, I must admit it was quite a good event and that the team behind it deserves a big praise for setting it up so well, making sure the 700 of us had a really great time during those three days. Congratulations and thank you for making us feel so good!

Needless to say, whenever the 2010 gets announced, I’ll be there…

Photos: Giuseppe Maxia, David Ramalho, Isa Costa, Nuno Dantas, Tiago Serra, Lenz Grimmer