Hackasaurus Rex
Welcome to Hackasaurus Rex, king of the hackathons!
A hackathon is one of SIPB's time-honored traditions, where people gather in the office and hack on awesome projects. Hackasaurus will be running on March 20th from 1pm until arbitrarily late. Feel free to contact us at any time, for pretty much any reason.
Aftermath
(written by jhamrick)
I think that this was perhaps the most productive hackathon since I came to SIPB (except maybe the Debian bug-squashathon). We got a lot of new people involved in projects, and even got some new projects going! Over 50 people showed up (including some people from Libre Planet), and the office had at least 5-10 people in it starting at 1pm, and going until I left at 4am -- I've never seen a hackathon so populated the whole time. We should definitely do this again!
Anyway, here are some of the things that got done:
Gutenbach: We started the move to CUPS! The filter was patched and turned into a back end, and the configuration parts of the package were also translated to work with CUPS. All that remains is to put everything back together and test it.
MITeX: MITeX is finally off the ground! We have a working website (http://mitex.mit.edu/) which gives you a template to fill in, and will then output a .tex, .ps, or .pdf file.
Scripts Pony: several new features were added, including being able to see and add aliases for hostnames and asking for a "purpose" on hostname requests. A zephyrbot is in the works to approve people's hostname requests. The general parts of scripts-pony were split out into a separate "scripts" module to facilitate adding other scripts.mit.edu account management apps in the future.
MacAthena: now has a zephyr package!
apt-zephyr hook: now suppresses the empty zephyr when no packages are changed, and sends a "Done." zephyr when dpkg finishes running.
anygit: decided on a better architecture, and made progress towards having a reasonable indexer.
QuickPrint: we added Windows 7 setup instructions, switched to using the new CUPS printing infrastructure, and fixed double-sided printing problems from some OSes. We also started working on a rewrite of quickprint in Python (the current code is PHP).
sql.mit.edu: We tracked down a bunch of users who were abusing their quotas (always due to a spam-filled mediawiki, not intentional action on the user's part), and spent some time optimizing the performance of sql.mit.edu. We also started working on a PostgreSQL implementation for sql.mit.edu.
Debathena: Worked on rewriting 'add', 'attach', etc.
(My apologies if I missed anybody or any projects in the list above)
Given how much work got done, and how many new people we introduced to SIPB during this hackathon, I think that SIPB will need to continue to have such awesome hacking parties of this magnitude every so often! It’s probably not feasible to do it every month, but once or twice a semester seems like a reasonable rate. Look forward to more exciting hackathons in the future!
Projects
So you'd like to work on a project, would you? Great! That is, um, the point of having a hackathon. We have a list of potential projects posted to our project ideas page. Feel free to poke around there for something that looks interesting.
If you have trouble finding a project, please let one of the organizers know (a particular contact is Greg Brockman, gdb@mit.edu or gdb on Zephyr).
Feel free to work on projects of your own (and to convince other people to work on them as well!). Our zephyr class would be a great place to do this.
Zephyr class
The zephyr class for Hackasaurus is -c hackasaurus.
Prizes and free stuff
We have lots and lots of prizes and swag. Our prizes include:
- Nom nom lunchbag (2)
- Walking robot pencil sharpener (2)
- Stapler eyes (2)
- Crazy mindbending puzzles (3)
- Dismember me plush zombie (2)
- Star trek interactive tribbles (1)
- Food chain dolls (2)
- The Zombie Survival Guide (2)
- How To Survive A Robot Uprising (2)
- Cable clips (2)
- Interesting screwdriver (2)
- RTFM mug (1)
- Credit Card Lightbulb (2)
- Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate (2)
- Halo 3 ODST (3)
- Free 3-month X-box Live subscription (1)
and there is a lot of free swag generously donated by Facebook and Google. We also have a lot of free food for you, so please eat!
Prizes will be distributed via lottery at drawings on the hour until they are all gone. You must be present in the SIPB office to win. Once you have won a prize, you are ineligible for winning further prizes (unless everyone else present in the office has also already won prizes). To submit your name to the lottery, send an email to hackasaurus@mit.edu with "Submission for: " in the subject line. To remove your name from the lottery, send an email to hackasaurus@mit.edu with "Removal of submission for: " in the subject line.
The first person to write an application to populate a database according to these email commands and randomly select winners (marking them as ineligible thereafter) wins a free prize.
Sponsors
Google (logo not included due to Google policy)
Contact
Please feel free to contact hackasaurus@mit.edu with any questions, comments, concerns, feedback, ideas, suggestions, complaints, rants, gifts, condemnations, reports, queries, bug reports, warnings, admonitions, complications, or vague bad feelings you may have.