The time for barcamp is .. well.. around September! That’s at least what we’re targeting for BCSD10.

We’d like to start very early, and try to secure budgets, attendance, the venue – pretty much everything we need to pull the trigger on the event way ahead of time, because … ten barcamps! TEN! I think we did BarCamp San Diego 1 back in 2007 and some of the first emails I have are from around April. Next month that will be 5 years!

Lets make BarCamp San Diego 10 epic. I’m thinking shirts, badges and fancy challenge coins. Sound neat? I think it sounds neat.

I’ll start pinging the usual suspects in terms of sponsors and venue, and all you awesome readers out there can help out by spreading the word about BarCamp San Diego or helping find local companies that would benefit from being involved with BarCamp.

I’ll also be marking up the wiki with the newest information. I strongly suggest you join the mailing list if you haven’t already – its where all the BarCamp discussion happens!

Interested in finding out more?
- Check out our WIKI
- Check out the MAILING LIST
- Drop us a line! sponsors@barcampsd.org

http://barcampsd9.eventbrite.com

We’re playing by the same playbook as last season, since it went over so well.

*** REG CLOSES ONE WEEK BEFORE BARCAMP ***
We have to close reg a week before the event so we have enough time to print the shirts and assemble the badges, so please remember to register before the close of reg to ensure you get your badge and shirt. If you’re fine without a badge or shirt, walk ups are free and not required to register – but the security guards at Intuit will be stopping all walk-ins and getting ID and registering them as guests of Intuit, so it’s in your best interest to register!

Stay tuned for more details as they become available!

We’re also still looking for more sponsorship as well, so if your organization is interested please drop us a line at: sponsors@barcampsd.org

Here are two PDF files we’ve prepared to help spread the word and get information out about BarCamp this season.

The ‘what is barcamp’ PDF is for anybody who’d like some basic info, and it links folks to this site – it’s for places like inside an elevator or break room.

The ‘sponsor request’ pdf is for any person/business/org/etc that has an interest in sponsoring this time around!

We’re working on a slightly shorter time line this time around, so expect us to be a lot more vocal.

p.s.: Ignore the date in the green graphic at the top of the site, we still need to update that :D

(every time I say that I nostaliga back to the game starcon2. You oldschool gamers know.)

We’ve heard from Intuit and both BCSD9 AND 10 have been approved! For now we’re going to make BCSD9 happen and leave the planning of 10 for later, but rest assured it’ll be at Intuit!

We’ve dotted our i’s and crossed our t’s and its time now for sponsor roundup! We’ll be working feverishly to churn out some cool one pager documents to help spread the word and show sponsors what kind awesome ROI they get for their investments. If you work for a company that you might think would have some interest in BarCamp here in town, please let us know! email sponsors@barcampsd.org and we’ll be happy to give you all the information we have that is up to date. Until we finish shining that stuff to a mirror polish, heres a post we made a while back describing the sponsor process, its pretty juicy!

Stuff that worked: People *LOVED* the badges. Huge thanks go out to Geo for hooking us up with the folks to make that happen, and we’ll be doing them again. The $10 thing also helped tremendously, so we’ll also be doing that again

This season lets try something new: Everyone think of something thats never been to BarCamp before, and lets bring it to the table! I’m going to try and beg/borrow/steal/coerse/bribe some cool speakers into coming to BarCamp to give talks on neat and interesting things. What will you do?

Got cool ideas? Let us know! Were on twitter as @barcampsd and you can always email us at sponsors@barcampsd.org!

Stay tuned for all the juicy infoz!

-the elusive barcamp monkeys

BarCamp San Diego 8 is quickly approaching! Here are the deets
Date January 15th and 16th, 2011
Location Same as Last Time: Intuits Santa Fe campus – 7545 Torrey Santa Fe Road, San Diego Ca 92129
Cost $10 (let us explain…)

So last seasons BarCamp went off wonderfully! Only problems were that 357 people signed up and less than 200 actually showed – then about half of our food mysteriously disappeared. Two logistical quirks that we think we’ve been able to nail down with a slight tweak to the format of BarCamp.

This time the event costs $10 – but thats a soft cost – If you only want to come for a couple hours on Sunday or something, thats fine – you can come for free. Here’s the tug:

We wanted to give people who are completely committed to the event the first run at T-shirts, food and all the goodies and gimmies that come with the event. We wanted to avoid the possibility that people who contribute so much to the event won’t get dinner, or won’t get a shirt. This year there will be badges. The badges cost $10 and earn you ‘first run’ at the food and the t-shirts. Once all badged attendees get a first serving of food, unbadged attendees may partake. Registration is absolutely mandatory even for unbadged folks – we have to keep track of who came to the event so that we can adjust the scale of the event up/down based on the figures. The more track we keep, the better the event gets!

We’ll have our own registration area this time as well so that we can keep track of how many people show up and who got badges. The badges will have a detachable star in the center allowing attendees to turn it in for Saturdays dinner (or thats the idea anyway, we’re still figuring that out)

People who sign up early can even get their names/handles on the badges as well, making them a unique take-away

How awesome is that?!

Feedback is totally welcome – for a short period we had a discussion about format on our mailing list!

We’re also still on the hunt for more sponsors – so if you have any questions about sponsorship or are curious what it entails or what its benefits are, please by all means inquire within!

There are still spaces available! As I type this, we’re at approximately 180 out of a possible 350 available seats. If you haven’t registered yet, please check out the wiki (link above) for the registration information!

Some things to remember:

• Business cards / moo cards
• Laptop + power
• Sleeping bag/tent/something (if you plan on staying overnight)
• And most importantly: an open mind!
• A fun and/or entertaining presentation!

And a few bullet points since we’re on a corporate campus

• Smoking is only permitted in the smoking areas. The security staff can direct you to where they are
• If you’re going to open a bottle of wine, use a bottle opener, not the wall *GLARE*
• There is no roughhousing permitted. At all. If you want to wrestle, do it in the parking lot.
• Be responsible with alcohol consumption. If you aren’t security will disappear you.
• Do not attempt to plug networking devices into any of the open cat5 jacks on the wall. Again, you’ll get disappeared by security
• BarCamp will have its own additional security staff this season. They have the same authority as Intuit security.
• This place is an office where people will be coming in to work the following Monday, so lets treat it with respect.

See you all in 11 days!

BarCamp San Diego 7 is upon the horizon. It’s slated for July 10th and 11th at the Intuit Campus in Carmel Valley.

We’re currently in the sponsor-roundup phase – here are the deets:

Its 6 weeks out and we’ve only made about half our budget. If your company, your employer or your friends may have an interest in sponsoring BarCamp please drop us a line : sponsors@barcampsd.org

The details are almost the same this time around:

1) Primary Sponsorship – $1000+
2) Secondary Sponsorship– $750-1000
3) Tertiary Sponsorship – $300-$750

Visa Gift Cards or Checks made out to Dan Tentler (the sponsor/budget guy) are the preferred methods of payment. This gives us the fluidity to combine smaller contributions from sponsors with other smaller contributions to afford the things that make barcamp awesome!

Alternatively you can elect to sponsor one of our ‘direct vendor’ costs:

1) T-Shirts – $1500
2) Lunch Sunday afternoon Sponsored by DiVX
3) Lunch Saturday afternoon Sponsored by Yahoo
4) Dinner Saturday Night – $1500
5) Snacks – $1100
6) Beer Sponsored by 2guysdrink

You may be seeing some rather large names up there on the sponsor dockett – Thats because these folks smile when it comes time for BarCamp San Diego – our community is so fruitful and awesome that these wonderful folks acknowledge it by helping bring everyone together to share ideas and new technologies. They lead by example!

There are some folks on the mailing list that have talked about recording every talk – and we’ve also heard from another awesome individual who would like to record every single talk and publish them online a-la defcon-style talks – very high resolution and with cuts over to the slides so the folks at home can see all the details. So far BarCamp San Diego 7 is stacking up to be a mammoth, but we still need help!

Looking for a job? These heavy-hitters use BarCamp San Diego as a recruiting depot – so spruce up that resume!

Looking for a gig? BarCamp is full of of folks who need someone that does exactly what you do.

Looking for talent? BarCamp is packed to the gills full of it – come say hello to a future employee or contractor!

and for all you perl/regex/coders out there: s/barcamp/talent exchange/g

There were roughly 170 BarCamp attendees.
There were over 275 unique mac addresses at the event.

That means each person on average had approximately 1.6 devices on the wireless network. The busiest time was between lunch and dinner on Saturday.

Heres the bandwidth chart for the weekend:

It’s interesting to note that you can directly correlate the peaks and valleys in the bandwidth chart with the happenings at barcamp.

A little background: I’ve been doing networking since roughly 1993 – where my first network was two 14.4k modems hooked directly together, and ‘ata’ was run on both at the same time creating a 14.4k baud serial connection. We played descent that way! (it was awesome). Next was coaxial networking cards (token ring!) to play doom 1. Then shortly after that cablemodems came around and people were using ethernet. I’ve spent a long time troubleshooting networks and doing so has taught me well. A quote from the matrix comes to mind:

I don’t even see the code anymore.. I just see … blonde… burnette… redhead..

Except for me replace ‘blonde, burnette, redhead’ with ‘Streaming the game, uploading video, opening a torrent application’ or ‘people go to sleep, people wake up, people have lunch’ etc.

This time at barcamp we used two different wireless hardware vendors. Aruba and Xirrus. The hardware aruba gave us had multiple access points, and the hardware xirrus gave us had one huge one. We used the aruba hardware on saturday and the xirrus hardware on sunday.

Saturday we had the majority of everyone who came to barcamp in attendance, as is the norm. Because of udp/gaming/filtering issues last season I completely opened up the firewall, disabling all protocol filtering and traffic shaping. This was good for performance, but ended up hurting performance as the teensy pentium 3 firewall we currently have herding all the traffic started to strain under the load.

Add to that the dilapidated hardware which would often reboot if you touched it wrong, and you end up with a mostly-stable network “so long as you don’t breathe on it”. The firewall being the most fragile.

Here are some interesting things I was able to point out:

I could tell when people started streaming the football game:

It was clear EVERYONE was online:

I quickly found out when my packet filtering rules began working:

I could tell who was in what talk! :D

As for the wireless performance results that everyone was looking for, I can’t in good conscience say that the test was fair at all. Aruba gave us 3 ap125′s, which we used two of (each ap125 has 3 radios in it: A, B/G and N), and Xirrus gave us one giant radio(which contains I think 12 radios, 4 A, 4 b/g and 4 N).

Here’s the short and skinny:

The aruba radios were able to successfully cover all of the grounds with no trouble, just like last season. The Xirrus array had some trouble penetrating the multiple rooms and walls. Every ‘sharp corner’ in that venue is made with a thin bit of metal. That being the case, if one were to take an xray of the venue, one would see lots of little lines floating around in the air – interfering with radio transmissions. So for this venue more radios would do better than less radios, simply because of the width of the place and the saturation required.

The Xirrus array though, was quite cool and people gathered around it to take pictures. I got reports that “the internet is faster” on Sunday, but that was easily because only 1/3rd of the people were there on Sunday compared to the day before – the bottleneck this time was the firewall being overwhelmed. Next season we’ll have a shiny new netbook as our firewall and we’ll be able to greatly increase our capacity (and likely not have to deal with scaling for quite some time).

As far as a ‘comparison’, it was unfair in Arubas favor because we had more radios from them than we did for Xirrus, but looking at the map after the fact, its quite clear that one Xirrus array should be able to out perform two Aruba ap125′s without breaking a sweat.

Overall:

• Aruba: The hardware is great, provides awesome coverage. Each ap125 has 3 omni antennas in it, each attached to a radio – A, B/G and N. They’re quite buff! The software, I’m afraid to say, sucks. A lot. The web gui used to admin the mc200 we have has code problems and doesn’t work in Chrome or Firefox – I have to use safari or (god forbid) Internet Explorer to even be able to navigate its UI. There is no way to change the IP address of the thing without ssh’ing into it, and changing the SSID, encryption type, captive portal or anything like that is abysmal – page elements do not load, or do not refresh properly, or contain the wrong data. The hardware I have is in my opinion “Set it up once and NEVER TOUCH IT AGAIN – for risk of having to scrap the entire config and start over”. Also, there is limited functionality as the ‘good stuff’, as it were falls underneath a more expensive license than we were not given with the hardware.
• Xirrus: The hardware contains four quadrants – each with a certain number of radios – I’m still not quite sure how many, or if Xirrus counts an ‘A’, ‘B/G’ or ‘N’ as separate radios. If they do, the total is something like 12 – each of the four quadrants supports A, B/G and N, and there’s an omni in there as well for monitoring. These are all directional antennas as opposed to the omnis that are in the Aruba gear.The xirrus array right out of the box provides everything – all the potential functionality that the hardware and software are capable of. The web UI works in every browser, and one of the cooler perks is that the 802.11 triangulation works with zero config – you naviage in the UI to the right page, and you can see a 2d map of where clients are in relation to the array. Aruba won’t let you do this unless you have a floorplan – which I DO have (see above), however I didn’t want to risk bringing down the wlan for the sake of a pretty screenshot. Another thing that is clearly evident is that the xirrus directional antennas penetrate farther than the aruba omnis in any given direction – nearly 2x as far.

Conclusion: Despite the frustration in dealing with arubas UI, the multiple-radio solution works better for BarCamp since the venue is essentially a long rectangle. However – if I were to get my hands on another identical Xirrus array and lay them out the same way I laid out the Aruba gear – I have a very good feeling that the xirrus gear would outright spank the Aruba gear in performance.

As far as the rest of the event went – I heard nothing but good things! During the opening ceremonies that DivX was happy to record I’d say easily 1/3 or half of the room said that this was their first barcamp! Our community is growing A LOT. I heard nothing but good reviews about the food and the event – Intuit gave us the thumbs up that from their perspective everything went well. Stay tuned for an announcement for when we’ll be doing it again!

There a TON of pics on flickr of the event as well. Consider signing up for the mailing list to stay on top of all the future announcements and chatter during the off seasons!

]]> http://www.barcampsd.org/92/news/barcamp-wireless-network-review-and-post-mortem/feed/ 0 http://www.barcampsd.org/85/barcampsd6/barcamp-saturday-schedule/ http://www.barcampsd.org/85/barcampsd6/barcamp-saturday-schedule/#comments Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:17:09 +0000 Phelan http://www.barcampsd.org/?p=85 Here’s the calendar for Saturday.



]]> http://www.barcampsd.org/85/barcampsd6/barcamp-saturday-schedule/feed/ 0 http://www.barcampsd.org/81/barcampsd6/barcamp-is-this-saturday/ http://www.barcampsd.org/81/barcampsd6/barcamp-is-this-saturday/#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:48:17 +0000 Dan http://www.barcampsd.org/?p=81 Aaaaah! Its in 5 days! What to do?!

First, remember the basics:

• January 16th and 17th
• Intuit, Santa Fe Campus in Carmel Valley

If you need more data, hit the wiki

Want to help the organizers? Get there at 8:30am and help us unload and setup!

See you there!

]]> http://www.barcampsd.org/81/barcampsd6/barcamp-is-this-saturday/feed/ 1