The midnight hour is approaching and the hardcore of hackers is not even considering packing up. In fact, a bunch of them have just returned to get stuck in for the night. Fuelled by steamed Thai comfort food, there is a renewed energy in the room. This is not frantic, panic driven hacking but measured, persistent working towards goals.
Perhaps because half of the hackers have previous hacker camp experience, or because they've paid heed to Director Willem's advice to stick to well defined and doable ideas, all of the nine projects seem remarkably under control and on schedule. Some of these guys are straying way outside their comfort zones, guessing their way through new languages and offering to fill in the gaps in each teams expertise so that all the projects succeed.
On the stroke of midnight, what are the hackers actually doing?
Sly is trying to hack python code ... Luis is trying to get an RFID reader to work on an EEPC laptop to avoid nasty last minute surprises ... Ubi is connecting the phone mic speaker to jacks, a little soldering and then back to programming ... Eelco is making a To Do list for tomorrow as he ran out of materials for the third IkSpin base ... Dirk is converting OSC (open sound control) data from processing into Quartz Composer to beam on the screen of the Network Knockout game ... Tijmen is discussing beamer throw lengths with Tim ... Neil is fixing Arjan's job of fixing Javacode to upload photos to the PICNIC network from Java ... Bastiaan is reading my blog entry on gnomes and will be sleeping here tonight ... Carl Emil is emailing home to Copenhagen and about to leave ... Edwin is outdoors squirting wood glue onto the final parts of the gallows-like Ik-a-Sketch framework ... Tim is bringing the expensive equipment indoors for the night and is then thinking of some coding ... (and around Amsterdam) ... Dan is doodling ... Eric is coding in bed ... and Jeff is reading a book on the power of now.
