I attended a talk on the L4 Microkernel at 21C3. Close to the end of the talk was a inaudible conflict of opinions between the lecturer and a member of the audience. I couldn’t figure out, what the reason for the differences between the two was. The member of the audience left the room with the words “what a waste of time”.

If there was another feedback mechanism instead of getting the microphone and asking questions, it would have been possible to get a more in depth insight. Weblogs and other webbased forms of publication have a significant advantage due to their feedback possibilities e.g. via trackback and comments. But I also value the conference model because of its compact presentation form and the potential in-person contact to the lecturer.

Sometimes I wonder if there could be a way of combining the advantages of the two distinct models?

• Live IRC chat? Nah.
• A weblog per talk? To much overhead.
• A conference weblog with one entry per talk? Maybe. The 21C3 weblog was already a step in that direction.

Joel Spolsky published an insightful essay for aspiring computer science students. If you are starting college soon or are in the middle of your education, this is a must read. I wish somebody gave me the same advice when I was attending UCSC.

Proceedings for the Chaos Communication Congress are available for the first time. This is very good news. It was rather difficult to find the presentation slides for talks in the last years. Usually the speaker would announce to publish his slides online but rarely announced the URL. And the central documentation page for presentation slides on the congress’ webpage stayed pretty empty.

The proceedings contain full papers for approximately a third of all talks including highlight like Peter Glaser’s keynote, Daniel Bartlett’s “Automated hacking via Google” or Angelo Laub’s “Practical Mac Os X Insecuritiy”.

The proceedings were available in printing on the congress and got released online afterwards. Get them now as pdf.

I am happy.