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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Conferences with Macs

Three reasons Macs make excellent companions to geek-centric conferences:

  1. iChat and Rendezvous. iChat uses Rendezvous (aka zero configuration networking) to automatically display a list of all other iChat users on the same network as you. In a conference setting this can be a great way of seeing who’s around—I met a couple of people at SxSW who I’d been hoping to run in to by co-ordinating a metting via iChat. A few panelists even used iChat to take questions during their panels. Here’s a screenshot of iChat Rendezvous taken during SxSW.
  2. SubEthaEdit, which really has to be seen to be believed. I made a half hearted attempt to get a SubEthaEdit session going at SxSW but failed to achieve critical mass. Ted Leung at PyCon seems to have got it sussed.
  3. EtherPEG. This isn’t as essential as the other two but can be a lot of fun—it’s an ethical (as in it doesn’t steal anything important) network sniffer which displays a selection of images currently being transferred across the network. It provides an often surreal insight in to the browsing habits of other conference goers.

I remember hearing Mac owners complain of being treated like second-class citizens. I haven’t felt like that once in nearly three months of owning a Mac.

Posted 26th March 2004 at 3:55 am

This is Conferences with Macs by Simon Willison, posted on 26th March 2004.

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13 comments

  1. Out of curiosity, do you do much editing in in SubEthaEdit?

    I've found it to be a great programming editor.

    dustym - 26th March 2004 07:20 - #

  2. As a matter of fact I do - I use it for pretty much everything, from making notes to editing HTML to writing Python code. I have 12 SubEthaEdit windows open just at the moment. I even set up a WebDAV instance on our development server at work so that I could edit documents directly in SubEthaEdit without having to constantly download and upload them.

    My only criticism of it as an editor is that the syntax highlighting is a bit slow - it takes about a second to kick in when I open a medium sized file.

    Simon Willison - 26th March 2004 09:19 - #

  3. In regards to being treated like second-class citizens, times ahve changed quite a bit, and with each release of Mac OS X, this seems to become less of a case. Of course there are still many locations in the corporate world where being a second-class citizen is the order of the day... Tech conferences and the web are probably two places where you can be both a Mac user and first-class citizen.

    Pete Prodoehl - 26th March 2004 14:41 - #

  4. You make me want a mac! I need to sell this damn dell and get a real notebook ;) Does anyone know of a windows program like EtherPEG?

    Ryan Stinn - 26th March 2004 14:42 - #

  5. "I have 12 SubEthaEdit windows open..." Are you saying SubEthaEdit doesn't support tabs like Firefox, iTerm, and jEdit do? ;)

    Pete Prodoehl - 26th March 2004 14:43 - #

  6. Oh I just wanted to ask, after seeing your expose shot that Dave Shea has up, how does your mac handle that many windows open? Does it crawl? My friend had a 667mhz ibook(G3 of course) and it was kind of a dog.

    Ryan Stinn - 26th March 2004 14:46 - #

  7. It's a 1 GHz PowerBook with 768MB of RAM. It doesn't crawl, but the performance decrease is enough that I try not to run that many things at once most of the time. SxSW was a special case because I was leaving a new window open every time I saw an interesting URL - there was just too much going on to actually read anything on the web until after the conference.

    Simon Willison - 26th March 2004 18:08 - #

  8. Ryan:

    From this thread, there's DriftNet for Linux, and EtherWatch for Windows.

    Jeremy Dunck - 26th March 2004 19:30 - #

  9. I've got an older G3 iBook at college, and aside from the occasional smartass remark (and a sneaking suspicion that people assume I'm gay) most people are intersted in it - and even impressed by how cool everything looks. I just added 512MB of ram to the stock 128 and the performance, which was rather sad before, now just about equals a 1.6ghz athlon. :)

    I've never tried SubEthaEdit, but with your testimonial that it's good for html editing (and does syntax highlighting!) I'm going to give it a shot.

    eric - 27th March 2004 08:21 - #

  10. At SxSW, it appeared that the wireless network was switched, dividing the conference rooms into several partitions across whichc SubEthaEdit documents could not be seen. I sat in and contributed to a few documents, but there were only two or three users connected to each one, which was a shame considering how many people I suspect would have liked to join in from across the building.

    kasei - 31st March 2004 01:25 - #

  11. Aha! That explains a whole bunch of weird network problems I was having, like not being able to see people on iChat Rendezvous who I knew were online. Thanks for the explanation.

    Simon Willison - 31st March 2004 02:17 - #

  12. If anything, I felt like a second class citizen for not using a Mac at SxSW. Simon: "Let's meet up. You can find me on Rendezvous". Rendaywhat? Grrr.

    KC - 2nd April 2004 19:12 - #

  13. I must say I've felt sometimes liken to a second class citizen at my university, Hull Uni having one of the best comp sci departments in the UK, the majority of my lecturers use Mac's, but the student body is to a degree highly uneducated, equating anything "Mac" to pre-99 OS9 systems they used back in their respective schools.

    "What, you actually use Office on your Mac? What's it like compared to MS Office?"
    "It is MS Office."

    "Fancy playing some UT? You can use my laptop.."
    "It's already loaded on my PowerBook as we speak."

    Conferences on the other hand are a different kettle of fish though, even at the comic convention I and some friends were exhibiting our webcomic at last month, 50% of all laptops there were PowerBook's or iBook's (but then not as surprising amongst graphically-orientated crowds).

    Wesley Mason - 5th April 2004 01:58 - #

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