The i2fest fiasco.

So recently I participated in a couple of events as a presenter and as a speaker. The first one was i2Fest in November 2011, which is an indie festival organised by my school of Industrial Informatics in Kavala. I went there voluntarly with my project, QRier, which is a QR feedback system for e-shops and delivery services. Nothing too complicated, a small project, but enough to get me into the festival.

As a sidenote, my project was not hardware related as the rest of the projects and also I did not contact any professor to promote me there. I submitted my project, got accepted and went there on my own.

By the time we arrived there, the problems started. First of all, there was no contact from the organisers for any technical equipment we might need, which didn’t bother us much since we only needed a monitor to be able to show them our work. Why am I mentioning this? It shows the lack of organisation. We were given no programme of the festival, everything we needed to know we asked around the volunteers. As a result I missed a speech about mobile apps, which I was really looking forward to.

The first day we also did not have Internet access, and while one of the organisers there told us that it was a good thing, because now they will be able to ask for more funding, it was a bad thing for us as we couldn’t show our web app. That was something that enraged me. The problem did not occur due to network overload, because we were the same people in the festival all day, which brings me to the biggest problem there, the quality and the quantity of the visitors.

The i2Fest quantity of the visitors

The festival had a span of 4 days, Thursday till Sunday. The first 2 days it was planned for some local schools to come visit, which I find very positive, as I believe that these children will pick up from our work and move forward. We were accepting schools from 09:00 till 13:00, the volunteers worked their asses off, and did an excellent job. Afterwards, we had to stay at the place till 20:00 in case some other visitors decided to pass by. Which they didn’t. The first day there were 3 visitors, the second 6. And I counted them all. I am dead serious. Same thing thing happened to last i2fest in May of 2010, I was there. Why did they keep us there? Why they didn’t let us go at 15:00? They knew that very few people would visit in weekdays, same thing happened a year ago. Not only it was badly organised, but also the organisers did not learn anything from last year. I saw the posters in the city, there were no schedule printed there, they could inform the public about the working hours. We in the tech show had to stay there, the volunteers could leave though. The hours were too long.

The i2fest quality of the visitors.

After all that, the weekend arrives where we hoped the things to get better. To be clear we had more visitors. Excluding the random people, the mayors and other politicians, there were 4-5 IT people there. I honestly am fucking serious. To explain why this is a tragic PR management for the festival organisers, in 50km range near the festival there are 2 cities, Kavala and Xanthi,  and 2 industrial areas, one Technological Institute and a University with Electrical engineering department. I believe with a *little* promotion, we would have at least 50 people there. This is why we hold these festivals, for technical parties to introduce each other and collaborate in the future. Instead the organiser were there to kiss some politician’s ass to get more funding. They had some pretty volunteer girls to dress up like some stewardesses. So pathetic. Come to think of it, the professor that made the whole thing possible, first visited our stand with the politicians while he was showing them around. (Sidenote: Why a politician is interested in a dancing robot, while 10 kms further there were people striking for their salary decrease?)

Finally, when the last day we asked to leave earlier, because I work 2 jobs and needed some time to rest the organisers were pissed off and did not wanted us to go, even though I had no choice, but to leave them there. I notified them about my early leave a day prior and nevertheless it was a surprise for them. Anyway, I thanked the volunteers and left, without even one of the organisers saying thank you. I took a vow of never going back there.

The iekXini Edu festival train-wreck.

But why am I bringing up an issue that happened last November? Because I recently had a similar experience in another indie festival, the IEK Xini edu Festival which through a friend of mine I was invited give a presentation for WordPress. I use and build websites with WordPress for the last 4 years. The presentation was supposed to be a two-parter, the first part was an introduction to WordPress by a representative from Automatic, also friend of mine. The second part was mine, a small guide to migrate to WordPress, just a simple way to touch the Twenty Eleven theme and some guidelines for other platforms. I went there the year before again with a WordPress presentation.

The day before, while I was working, the other spokesman bailed on me, because of a new contract he had, which nowadays is a very big thing to have this big work (he is in an exclusive contract, with big pay). So I had just an hour to implement some introductory slides for WordPress, because the next morning I had to work again. To explain things better:

• I worked the day before from 15:00 till 23:00 – Having my presentation ready
• I was notified from the other spokesman at 22:00 about his inability to give his presentation
• At 00:00 I started making the slides and had to wake up at 06:00 to go to work again until 15:00

I know that the organisers didn’t care at all for all these, of course, since I didn’t meet or contacted (or contacted by) any of them, but I am writing these things down to show you that I also could have bailed out, but I kept my word and made it there of course completely voluntary.

When I arrived there, I set up my laptop, got the microphone, and explained part of the situation that my presentation was a bit technical and that I was prepared otherwise. So I went on and talked about 40-45 minutes, showing little to no code at all. Before the presentation I was informed that in the audience would be designers, developers and some other people, around 20 persons in total.

When I was done, I asked the audience if they had any questions, there was a dreadful silence. The kind of silence that you know that things went bad. Really really bad. So I’m thinking, I screw things up! I went through my ppt another time to make sure, but there was nothing too technical. Turns out that the audience were little to none designers and developers. This happened because, I noticed afterwards that the organisers had given the title “Earn money with Blogging” on our presentation, which was totally misguiding. In the audience were different students from various specialities but 3-4 maybe from devs and designers.

Afterwards, I felt really ashamed and one professor told me that I lost the audience and should have talked less about widgets and more about ads. I explained to him that I wasn’t prepared to give that speech and he told me off by saying that we should have prepared more and nobody understood anything. And of course didn’t have the decency to thank me for my time. It’s mandatory that you thank someone when he volunteers his time.

Here is my problem. IF nobody understand anything its your own goddamn fault that there wasn’t the right audience there. You used the marketing tricks that you use to bring people to your Institute of Profession training or whatever you call it, and of course myself and the institute got exposed. This is really the last time I talk to an audience.

Why am I mentioning these two facts?

Well, they do have a thing in common. The target audience was off. Here is a free tip festival organisers, find the right audience. Both cases show that if you are unorganised and have the wrong audience you waste everyone’s time. Everybody gets angry, some get ridiculed and exposed.

My day job gets on my nerves, the IT world moves way too fast. I was under some kind of depression, extremely demotivated, closed all connections to the local IT people, and started playing PS3.  A lot of PS3.

Nowadays, I had an idea for a project, made some research, and didn’t really get the response I hoped for. Maybe some time in the near future I will start working again in the internets, but I don’t see that day anytime soon.

We actually were able to go online!

INTERNET

Well the first day was typical. Many school students, some professors and… noone else.

Anyways the Internet went down and due to my project being a web app, I couldn’t show anything. I am completely dissappointed from the organising this year, and many volunteers there agreed with me.

I hope that the 2nd day will get better…

Ας κάνω λοιπόν μια γρήγορη λίστα με το τί μου άρεσε, τι με άφησε αδιάφορο και τι δεν μου άρεσε.

Τι μου άρεσε:

• Η ευρύχωρη αίθουσα. Μετά το περσινό στρίμωγμα ήταν λογικό οι διοργανωτές να ψάξουν κατι μεγαλύτερο. Και το βρήκαν
• Οι παρουσιάσεις της Ζαχαρένιας, του Βασίλη, του Γεράσιμου, του Δημήτρη και του Θάνου
• Τα μικρά δωράκια που έκαναν και φέτος την εμφάνιση τους!
• Ο άφθονος καφές που υπήρχε στο break
• To networking που φυσικά επακολουθεί μετά απο κάθε event

Τωρα θα γίνω λίγο δυσάρεστος, θα πω τα πράγματα που με αφήσαν αδιάφορο

• Η παρουσίαση του Γιώργου, κυρίως για το HTML5 (την ένιωσα τελείως εκτός κλίματος)
• Η παρουσίαση του Φώτη (σορυ σειρά, αλλα με έχασες κάπου) και του Αποστόλη (μου φάνηκε αρκετά generic)
• Η παρουσίαση του Γιώργου ξανά για το WordPress στα Windows (μου φάνηκε αρκετά παρόμοια με την περσινή)

Και τέλος θα γίνω πιο δυσάρεστος, τι δεν μου άρεσε

• Η μικρή προσέλευση του κόσμου. Μετά την περσινή επιτυχία, περίμενα περισσότερο κόσμο, τελικώς ήρθαν νομίζω ακριβώς ίδιος αριθμός με πέρυσι. Ο λόγος πιστεύω ήταν η τοποθεσία του ξενοδοχείου που φιλοξενήθηκε το event (εκτος πόλης), το Λιμάνι Αλλιώς και το OpenCoffee που έγιναν ΤΑΥΤΟΧΡΟΝΑ.

H τελική γεύση που μου άφησε το event ηταν πολύ θετική τελικά και ελπίζω σε κάτι μεγαλύτερο πλέον. Το community των “open events” δειχνει να δυναμώνει σε αυτή την πόλη και ελπίζω σε καλύτερες μέρες!

The presentation was part of the Xinis Educational Festival and with me was Basilis Kanonidis talking about WordPress theme and plugin  creation.

My presentation (in Greek)

As I browsed through the Error logs of the system (I am not  a techincian on the hotel, therefore I can only investigate, not solve problem) I found that there was an activity log that was “full” and had to be backed up. The activity log apparently was used to monitor EVERY SINGLE CLICK in the system. The information held in the log was like this:

[username][date][time][workstation][activity][database query][explenatory text of what the query meant]

This shouldn’t be a problem, and it is rather logical keeping logs for some time, the problem here was that the log was NEVER reset! It kept records from 2006! This resulted in an enormous log of useless information (legally the hotel is not obliged to keep this kind of log) which was gathered over the years. The result was a file with size of 50GB! Occupying the whole hard disk where it was stored!

How much is this? The database containing the clients’ data (the usefull ones) was just 2 GB (also there there is the reastaurant charges, EVERYTHING that moved in the hotel from 2006). In comparison: A bit more of the WHOLE Wikipedia’s Database as of March of 2009!

After the initial shock, I contacted the technician responsible (who of course was on vacation) and asked him why there was so much logging. His answer was another shock:

“I have no idea. We bought the source code and rebranded the software. Frankly, we do not have examined the full behavior of the program.”

The solution was simple: “We have to delete the log file” – No shit, Sherlock.

Here’s my solution to them:

• Keep a log within a reasonable amount of time (e.g. a year) Most of the employees found there had either retired or left the hotel
• Keep the usefull data, like who logged in from where, and edits of the database. Keeping a record from just viewing the client’s profile is idiotic.
• Clear the log if it exceeds some disk space.
• Test run your f#*%ing code.

The Eponymoys Anonymous

The report says: “His name was found at an Anon Manifesto, circling the globe. Alex Tapanaris seems to have written 2 documents about the structure and the beliefs of the Anonymous. His name was found on a PDF file used to transfer the documents. He has lost his sleep due to the fear of being arrested and the phonecalls of journalists. [...] His website www.alextapanaris.com has vanished from the web [...] ”

Let’s bash that point by point:

• “His name was found at an Anon Manifesto, circling the globe.” - Anon manifesto? Where was that and why does a Google search shows no trace of it??? (except the Greek sites that reproduced the article from the newspaper?)
• “Alex Tapanaris seems to have written 2 documents about the structure and the beliefs of the Anonymous.” – Structure like what? m00t is the God, mods are fags, and Beliefs, like “You are Anonymous.You are Legion.You do not forgive.You do not forget.And You do not matter.And you are an idiot if you believe the 5 sentences directly above this one.“
• “His name was found on a PDF file used to transfer the documents.” – lol PDF
• “He has lost his sleep due to the fear of being arrested and the phonecalls of journalists.” – Arrested for what? About posting memes like Advice dog and Milhouse? Or viewing gore pictures and posting his penis? Did he took part on a raid? I thought that Anon is safe behind over 9000 proxies. Be serious dude, you are exposing yourself too much.

Advice Dog - possible felony

• “His website www.alextapanaris.com has vanished from the web” – Well it doesn’t seem to be a DDoS attack, most probable is that he shut his own website down.

This is all a publicity stunt from Alex himself. He declared himself  ”hacker” and an Anon. This is a great insult to the Anon community if he had any clue. I bet that thousands of searches with his name were made during the publication of his story, and lots of them lead to some of his work as a designer. Well played Alex.

Also a journalist that respects his profession would have AT LEAST made a research to about the Anonymous before publishing a story like that. Hell, even a 3-second viewing of the E.D. page would have shown what Anonymous is, and Alex isn’t.

Alex Tapanaris right after the 10.000 Google Searches

Here’s a few tips on how I cope with the issue.

Use Ignognito mode or Private Browsing in your browser

This is the first step, the most common one and safe. If the history is deleted, then the user becomes suspicious of someone using his/her “important” PC. By leaving the history intact the user never suspects anything . This functionality allows the user to surf without leaving any cookies, logs, login codes or history. Currently I have tested it with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox

Use Portable Apps or any other USB powered sandbox.

This software is epic. Load your favorite programs on a USB stick, and enjoy your convinience anywhere. These programs do not require any installation or tweak and they leave no trace.

Optional: Install XAMPP on USB with Portable Apps.

Did I mention that this software is epic? Yes it IS!