It's too late to write anything about it now. Enough good things have been said of how it has been run and the whole vibe of the event, but I'll add my two cents anyway (and my mug made it to the newspaper article).
WiFi The WiFi coverage was awesome. Except a lot of people who had borrowed laptops for the event had no clue how to get it working, not to mention requiring kernel upgrades to get it working. Just for the sake of recording it, this is how you set up a franken-net NAT quickly.
iptables --flush iptables --table nat --flush iptables --table nat --append POSTROUTING --out-interface eth1 -j MASQUERADE iptables --append FORWARD --in-interface eth0 -j ACCEPT echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.1
Then everyone else joining up on that hub can pick a 10.0.0.xx IP and set my machine as a gateway. But after nearly everyone got their WiFi working, the environment got a bit more interesting.
There were a bunch of decent hacks - some of them functional, but not technically brilliant and vice versa. For example, the flickr offliner was an interesting hack - but without offline writes and conflict resolution, it wasn't really cool enough. Or the first prize winning Map canvas hack, which never worked with zoom or pans - which was sad because being able to convert from YCoordPoint to YGeoPoint would have made a lot of cool hacks possible (and was just an overlay of canvas painter on a map div). But I wasn't a judge, merely tech-support.
And when the hacking was all done, we partied out the night, to the rhythms of TAAQ.
--When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
-- Samuel Johnson