looking east

I have participated in the First Beijing City Aesthetic Marathon today, running for about 20 minutes through the hutongs and markets around Tianshuiyuan. The Beijing City Aesthetic Marathon is an art project initiated by HOIO (Samuel Herzog). It’s a sportive challenge and a way to discover Beijing at the same time. The 42.195 kilometres of the Marathon are run in sections by different persons. Every runner is asked to take HOIO into the part of Beijing they consider the most beautiful and exciting route through the city. Sections can be as short as one kilometre and as long as what can be done by a person in one hour (that’s the maximum battery lifetime of the camera). Each run is filmed by Samuel Herzog. You can see an overview of the previous runs here.

Samuel Herzog will be in Beijing until Saturday July 19th, if you are interested in taking him through your favorite part of Beijing, you can contact him at hoio[at]bluewin.ch.

The next Beijing Open Party will take place on July 19th at the Thoughtworks offices in Beijing. If you want to give a talk, you can propose it on the Beijing Open Party google group. Alternatively you can also just show up at the party and propose your topic. The party’s original announcement can be found here.

Event:  BeijingOpenParty July: Summer Daydreams (仲夏梦舞)
Date: July 19th
Time:  13.30 - 17.30
Address:  Room 1105, 11th Floor GuoHua Plaza, No.3 Dongzhimen South Street, Dongcheng District, Beijing, China, 100007, see map.

Here a few impression of last weekend’s coding for fun event at Exoweb, unfortunately I didn’t take many pics.

Technologies applied included: Pike, OpenGL, Flash, Chipmunk, Twitter, cURL, Festival, C, Boarduino, Arduino, LED, and many more.

Update: Martin has offered me to add his pics to my flickr account. Thanks, Martin :).

We would like to invite you to a weekend of coding for fun at the Exoweb offices in Beijing on June 28/29. The event is an experiment in which we are trying to bring together developers in an informal way to encourage them to share their projects and coding experience. So, it’s basically like a Hackathon. Everyone brings in their computer and hacks on their own code. People could also give short presentations or demos of their current projects if they want. And if you don’t have anything to hack on you may just look around and watch or join others.

Registration: here
Time: 11am - open end
Date: Saturday and Sunday, June 28/29th, 2008
Location: Exoweb office, Tianshuiyuan Shangwu Zhongxin A-505, 2 - Tianshuiyuan Dongjie, Jintai Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Map: here

Yesterday I attended my first Beijing Open Party, a monthly techie unconference event which takes place at the offices of ThoughtWorks here in Beijing. It’s similar to Barcamp, and it’s great fun. This was the first time they were proposing an English track, however, there was only one presentation in English yesterday. Topics ranged from Django over programming in different languages to event-driven architectures and StarDict. About 60-80 (estimation varying depending on who I talked to) people attended the event.

The party started with a stand-up in which everyone introduced themselves, and a presentation on NGO work after the earthquake in Sichuan. After the intro, people were asked to propose their topics, and give a quick talk about what they were going to present. Presentations took place in four different rooms, and there was a total of 12 talks.

I don’t know yet when the next Beijing Open Party will take place, but I will post it here as soon as I find out.

Yesterday, the Quadcopter group of the Beijing LUG met at the Exoweb office to assemble the pieces of the boarduino  microcontrollers. We had lots of fun, and I learned a great deal about hardware, soldering, resistors, LED’s, analog, and digital pins, as well as microchips. Although the Quadcopter group’s final goal is to build a quadcopter, the microcontrolles we built yesterday were rather an educational experiment in which we tried to understand the internals of the boarduino.

The boarduino is an Open Source arduino clone which can run the same software as the arduino. Unfortunately, we didn’t succeed in loading the bootloader to the chip yesterday, so we will need to wait for next time to start programming.