Since Christmas 2000, I've held an annual barbecue for the local open source hackers. This
year it was on 3 January 2004.
We've always had great fun, though it's surprising how much the atmosphere differs from one
year to the next, particularly when so many of the same people came. Originally it was timed to
correspond with the presence of exiled SA hackers such as Kris Kennaway and Benno Rice, but
this year neither of them were here. Daniel O'Connor has been here every year, and Chris Yeoh
and Bernd Wulf were both here for the third year running. A new guest was David Newall.
Another guest who was missing was Coopers Beer.
Some months back I started brewing my own beer, so we drank that instead, copiously: between us
we managed a total 12.875 litres.
It was warm again, and though we spent some time outside (no photos), we went inside for
lunch, after which the laptops appeared. That's changed a lot, too: three
years ago we multiplexed four IRC sessions on a single laptop. This time we had more
laptops than people, and we did interesting things with them, though not
(as last year) networked games, and also no IRC.
Instead, we rebuilt computers, talked about the
upcoming Linux and Open Source in
Government conference, which David and I are organizing, and did lots of other
things. Normally people start leaving at about 4:30 pm, but today everybody had so much fun
that the first people didn't leave until nearly 10 pm. Tiring, but fun.
The photos on this page are a selection. Click on the photos to see progressively larger
versions, or look at all the photos.
Does FreeBSD 5.0 run on Daniel's laptop? Yes. I had an old disk floating around, made on a
different machine, but it booted immediately. Daniel then spent some time upgrading his
system to 5.1 (a bad idea if you're using wireless networks), and thence to 5.2.