One good sign that you're at a hackathon is that you've just powered-on a machine by shorting the appropriate power switch pins with a house key. Some motherboards, especially prototype ones, don't fit nicely into a case. So they live on cardboard boxes, and get powered-on with house keys.

At a hackathon, you make do with what you have.

One of the virtues of having all the developers together in one place is that some bugs get fixed that may otherwise have languished for a while. There a bug, for instance, in the Zaurus [1] APM resume. It showed up most recently during a late-night excursion to a nearby pub. The pub in question happened to have free wireless, so a few Zauri came along for the trip. A conversation between 3 Zaurus-wielders ensued:

"Dammit, the keyboard didn't wake after resume."

"You know the workaround? Close and reopen the lid."

"Oh, you probably just need to poll the keyboard state in keyboard wakeup."

"Hm?"

"I think it is when you suspend, then close the lid before it falls asleep."

Not everything at the hackathon is technical, of course. There are two main social events during the hackathon. Sunday night was the first—the annual Moose-B-Q.

Each year, Bob (Beck, author of authpf [2], spamd [3], and others) hauls down enough meat to feed a small army of developers. The meat is marinated in Rubbermaid tubs, and when the time comes, assembled into kebabs for grilling. This is a four-hour process. Fortunately, Bob has many lovely assistants, and the results are well worth-it. (If you want to play along at home, or have a sudden need to feed 70 hungry visitors, the Moose-B-Q recipe is available on the CD [4] in: /usr/share/games/fortune/recipes [5]).

Once the meat is devoured, the socializing begins. It's a great time, and the evening slowly (but inevitably) fades to black. For some, it very quickly fades to black.

OpenBSD: Secure by default. Free barbecue tips.

Translations:

• Russian [6] (OSRC.info)