SFist Team Party Crash: CodeCon Reception

The event was being held at Jillian's at the Metreon. We would have told everyone to come down and have dinner on Google's dime, but we didn't want our cover blown. But yeah, pretty much anyone could have walked in if they felt like it. If Google spent as much time and money feeding and sheltering the homeless as they do recruiting the "90th Percentile," then we think there'd be a serious dent put in the Bay Area's pet problem.

The food? Satay beef skewers, quesadillas, pizza, make-your-own hamburgers and other stuff you can eat with one hand and find in most college dorms. Pretty good, but nothing particularly interesting. And certainly nothing like what they serve at their own cafeteria. All the free draft beer and wine you could drink certainly did smooth everything over, though.

The first and only person SFist actually knew was the aforementioned Niall. He was a little miffed -- felt we stacked the latest Westside Organics contest against him. How were we supposed to know that he's a lot better at using Technorati and MoveableType than he his at composing Haiku? Rest assured, Niall, the contest voting by the staff will be completely blind. Now get cracking on the poetry.

One of the sponsors, or at least invited shills, were Red Herring, who have risen like a Phoenix from the ashes of the Dot-Bomb. We had a chance to chat with reporter Irina Slutsky, who was working on a piece about bloggers who make money. We were joking about the infamous Nick Denton, who was rather demure about his financial success (especially considering the pay scale of his blog writing minions). You'll have to pick up the next issue of the magazine for the really choice quote. We promise it will make you laugh. In the meantime, we told Irina to get in touch with our own publisher, and in true SFist style, shamelessly plugged ourselves to get a mention. But now we can remark that Red Herring's coverage of the Mark Jen fracas at Google was out of date by twenty-four hours -- we, of course, wrote that he had, in fact, been fired. Considering the issue's date was February 21st, that's going to be quite a bit behind the times when it hits the street.

We also recognized the one and only Craig Newmark. We chatted about the 24 Hours on Craigslist movie. He liked it, and had seen it about a year ago, but didn't know if he'd want his mother to watch it. He also talked about his own interest in citizen journalism, and when we mentioned we'd just met Dan Gillmor the other day, he remarked that they'd certainly been trading emails. He promised that however it shakes out, Craigslist would be there to publicize the efforts. We thought we were holding up Craig on his way out, but he had time to play some pool with an attractive young woman on the table rented by Google for the event.

Finally we cornered Ian Goldberg of OTR (Off-the-record) chat. From Toronto along with his co-presenter Nikita Borisov, our sources told us that Ian and Nikita's extremely-secure chat scheme that incorporates the concept of 'repudiability' (since the individual messages are unsigned and therefore not attributable to their author by a third party). We have a feeling that if Ian and Nikita weren't foreign nationals they'd be spirited away to Dick Cheney's compound. Instead it will probably be Gitmo.

Ian and Nikita were there with their 'manager' jbash, and joked that they had submitted their paper to Slashdot for some link love. They didn't take it. Then jbash wrote up a short, descriptive post titled "Rockstar Cryptographers," and the post went up. Note to self: offer sexing-up services to raging nerds and maybe we can get the 'Fist on Slashdot.

After a while of wandering around trying to get the nerve to jump into a conversation, only to get scared when "authentication schemes," "recursive algorithms," and "massively parallel" came up, we started looking for Cat Okita, who we're told was the first ever woman to present at CodeCon. Unfortunately we couldn't figure out who she was (and to the other woman with braids who we did accost, our apologies) or she wasn't there. Other folks we meant to harass were Jim and James of Hot or Not (which is as good a use of PHP as we've ever seen) and Fyodor of NMAP fame. Maybe they were there and we just couldn't find them. Next time.

We did get a chance to talk with BitTorrent Bram, who was featured on the cover of the Red Herring issue they were handing out. We like the new haircut -- as our partner in crime remarked, "He looks sooooo much better." (This was the first time 'Lil SFist failed us -- the flash went off, but no picture on the memory card) We remarked to Bram, "Too bad about all those torrent trackers going down." (The MPAA had instigated another wave of shut-downs just the day before) Bram's reply? "Fuck 'em." Bram obviously has cable and a netflix account. We, on the other hand, are scared s**tless that we'll be cut off from our source for new Iron Chef episodes. Considering that Bram is now looking to "monetize P2P," he certainly doesn't want to be seen as supporting piracy, lest his company be blasted by a salvo of subpoenas by private organizations now empowered by the DMCA.

The last person we wanted to talk to was Dan Kaminsky of OzymanDNS. Any coder with a taste for Shelley has to give good quote. But we never got a good opportunity, and saw him being interviewed for the CodeCon webcast, so we figured folks could listen to him discourse there. We did chat with Adam, a specialist in supercomputing with shock-purple hair, who recently moved here from Minneapolis. Welcome to San Francisco, Adam! We're sure you'll leave your heart here. We tried to find out if there was an afterparty, but the social barometer read "ready for bed." So we went to chill out to classic hip-hop at the House of Shields as spun by Logan 5. All in all, a good, geeky, Google-sponsored night on the town.