The Haus would like to welcome GeoTools to the hacienda. We're supporting them with Jira at this point.

So... here's my wrap-up before I lose connectivity tomorrow...

I mostly floated around the periphery, being the shy kinda guy I am, but this is what I picked up over the weekend. First, the hausmates are quite a diverse folk, but strangely similar in some unidentifiable cross-cutting way. I was daunted most of the weekend by the intelligence that surrounded me. There's some amazingly bright minds at the haus that can apparently drink an amazingly large quantity of alcohol and still come up with good ideas, or at least some funny stories.

So, for the details...

Aslak presented some demo that didn't involve cheese (wtf?) regarding Pico container. Demonstrated how Pico is a fancy builder pattern implementation. Jon Tirsen then weaved in some nanning aspects to the component instances. Jason van Zyl considered ways to easily allow deployment of Pico components within the Plexus container. While not present, Peter Donald has been chatting with Jason about some synergy (synergy I say!) between Plexus and DNA and possibly Loom.

Strachan presented something about groovy. James has the ability to say things that only a crazy man should say, but somehow they end up making a lot of sense in a David Lynch sort of way. Chris Stevenson pondered PogoSticks (plain ol' groovy objects sticks "on disk") as an O/R layer that directly uses the groovy AST to translate expressions into SQL statements or such. With some syntactic sugar, James thinks that groovy can be an alternative to using XML markup for hierarchic/tree-shaped data and configuration.

Aslak and Jon (and others?) paired on damagecontrol, which is thrashing through a birthing. Not deployed upon the buildmeister yet, and Jon's saying something about incompatible libC versions on RedHate 7.1. Not the sort of thing you want to upgrade from an ocean away, so that'll have to wait until I can physically lay hands.

Joe chatted up a few folks about XStream, and Tirsen volunteered to solve his circular references problem.

Tirsen also confessed that Paul looked nice in his pants, and that his love for Ruby was only the result of being tortured by Aslak. He really loves groovy. Really.

I'm sure I missed something, and enough hausmates have blogrights they can file addendums as they see fit.

Well, it's Tuesday, and the haus in Amsterdam is mostly empty now, aside from me, my wife and Jason. The other hausmates have sailed to the four corners of the world. Overall, I'd say the First Irregular Haus Party went off without a hitch. Much was discussed around Pico, Nano, Groovy, and XStream, along with some community-building excercises such as indulgent drinking, crazy eurotaxi rides and aimless wandering of the city.

In the next few days, I'll be gathering reports and publishing a conference proceedings on this here blog.

the hausparty was a smashing success.

So, Martin kidnapped me and my wife for a surprise klompen shoppen outten. So, we drove past thousands of the tiniest sheep you've ever seen, and found a kloppen maker. Thus now I have suitably large wooden shoes for my feet. Of course, they scream "I'm a tourist" so I shall only wear them back in the states, to proclaim "I was a tourist". I was also horrified to learn that Holland contains no entry in the doughnut food group.

Mighty props to Peter Royal for telling me of my wife's much maligned (by me, alas) iBook can be a wifi access point while also jacked into the DSL router. Which has 4 ports, by the way. But just take a wild guess how many ether cables we had. So, we're swapping cables to be online at different times. Attempted and failed to purchase another cable. But then, Peter, the god across the seas, told me about the magic of Mac. Bless you Peter. I owe a big heapin' glass of Chocomel