The white rabbit vanishes

Easterhegg 2008 in Cologne has now vanished, like the rabbit down the hole in Alice in Wonderland and – besides the souvenir mug and T-shirt – what’s left besides memories? I hope to try and answer that question.

It’s been a wonderful long Easter weekend in the Rhineland, including the unexpected sight of snow every day. Cologne itself is a fine city, with a history stretching back 2,000 years. It has a fine local style of beer – Koelsch. Finally, it also has a cheap, modern and efficient public transport system (trams, buses, local rail), that’s still growing. Looking at Germany more broadly, I’d guess Linux and open source software is more popular than in the UK judging from the dozen plus Linux magazines available in newsagents there compared with our paltry 3 or 4.

Easter Monday’s planned post didn’t happen as I stayed up till 4 am working on revising the first bit of the translation of the current Datenschleuder, the Chaos Computer Club’s magazine. The current edition contains a copy of the fingerprint of the German Interior Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble. How it was obtained, I don’t know, but a few hundred geeks now able to fool a suitably configured fingerprint scanner into thinking they’re a German government minister draws attention to the dangers of adopting biometrics widely, especially for trivial purposes. It also mentions the existence of Chaostreff Bristol, the first successfully established Chaos group outside the German-speaking world.

The name of Bristol Wireless is now better known in Germany and elsewhere (there was a strong Dutch contingent too). Unfortunately, I missed meeting the OpenWRT crew in that were Cologne, so we’ll have to make up for that when they visit Birmingham in May.

Although there was work going on all over Easterhegg, there was loads of fun too: in any direction you looked folks were laughing. Technology is a means to an end: it can be fun; it all depends what you do with it, which brings us round full circle to the reasons why Bristol Wireless was established.

Since I last mentioned photos of the event on Flickr, there’s now a Flickr Easterhegg 2008 group, which is well worth a visit.

Finally, some special thanks: C4 (Chaos Computer Club Cologne) for organising the whole event, the kitchen/bar crew for 24/7 service, Elmar (mcfly) for the initial invitation, Frank (toidinamai) for the chauffering, Yannik (yankee) for somewhere to sleep and everyone for being so kind about and tolerant of my rusty German. 😀