AusHac2010
If you've found this page, you use Haskell, and live in Australia (or at the very least able and willing to travel here), then you're in the right place! AusHac2010 will be held at UNSW, from the 16th to the 18th of July.
If you're interested in coming, please sign up (v2.0, you must sign up to get network access), and put your name down on the list below, along with your IRC nickname if you're on #haskell. Also, if you've got something to discuss, feel free to add it to the bottom of the page in the Discussion section (just to keep the rest of the page clean and helpful).
If you need further information, feel free to email Alex at axman6@gmail.com or Ivan at Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com .
What we've got so far
Why
Because we miss out on all the fun they have up north, and we've got something to offer. It's also a great chance to meet all these people you talk to on IRC, or read their blogs, and just have a good time, while getting some (potentially) useful work done!
When
As mentioned above, the date has now been set for the 16th - 18th of July.
Where
We will be holding the hackathon in the Computer Science and Engineering building at UNSW (Bilding K17), in room 113.
Ben Lippmeier has booked the room from 1:00 pm on Friday until late on Sunday night, and is looking into seeing if those using the room before us could finish earlier, or on another day.
Who
We now have a sign up page. Please add your name and email there (your details will be kept secret) and then add your details below (so other people can see who's coming). Sorry to all those who have put their name down below, We might keep the table around, so that everyone can see who is going to be there.
| Nickname | Real Name | Affiliation | Mobile # | Arriving | Departing | Accomodation | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Axman6 | Alex Mason | Undergrad @ ANU | Friday sometime | Sunday night | Organiser | ||
| Mounty | Michael Mounteney | Haskell user | Saturday morning | Saturday evening | Participant | ||
| ivanm | Ivan Miljenovic | PhD student @ ANU | 0416 195 883 | Friday sometime | Sunday night | Somewhere cheap | Organiser |
Discussion
Possible Projects
Generic graph class
What: I (Ivan) last year floated the idea of replacing the current default array-based Graph data type with an extensible set of classes with default instances. There's various interest about this around and I've done some work on it, but if there's anyone else coming it'd be better to bounce ideas together about how to define such classes.
Who: Ivan M
Gloss-based plots
What: Either an alternative graphing back end to Criterion that only relies on OpenGL (through the use of Gloss), or a library for plotting. At the moment Gloss looks like it may only be suitable for bar type graphs, but we'll see. (We may look into writing some other library that's better suited than Gloss, as Gloss is aimed at students learning haskell, and wanting to just get something drawn)
Who: Ivan M, Alex M
GHC LLVM backend
What: The recent work dome by David Terei on an LLVM backend for GHC has shown some fantastic results, and getting it to a point where it could become the default GHC backend is something a lot of people would really like to see.
Who: Alex M, Manuel, Erik
Accelerate
What: Accelerate is a Haskell EDSL for regular array computations. The aim is to make it generate so blindingly fast code that the C folks start to cry. An LLVM backend is in very early stages of development and a CUDA GPU backend is good enough to run some first small Accelerate programs.
Who: Manuel, Alex M
Repa
What: "Regular, shape-polymorphic, parallel arrays in Haskell", a library for array computations using regular arrays, which aims to produce very efficient code which can be easily and automatically parallelised, producing very high performance computations on multicore systems. (PDF)
Who: Alex M
Hubris
What: Hubris is a bridge between Ruby and Haskell. There are two main options - working on Hubris itself (adding instances for more data types, making it easier to install, chasing the 64-bit linking bug...) or actually building something cool with it. Open to either. (Oh, one other idea - using Hubris to export QuickCheck to Ruby directly. RushCheck looks a bit moribund these days...)
Who: Mark
Leksah
What: Leksah is a Haskell IDE written in Haskell. Goal for 1.0 is mainly to fix issues in 0.8 rather than add new features, but it would also be nice to make some more progress on replacing GtkSourceView with Yi. Support for running QuickCheck and HUnit may be something we could slip into 1.0.
Who: Hamish, Jens
MPI bindings
What: The Message Passing Interface MPI is a popular library/standard used in distributed high performance computing systems . An old Haskell binding exists, but has suffered severe bit rot. It would be nice to get this working again, and then try to build some nicer abstractions on top (such as mapReduce).
Who: Bernie, Alex
Notification library
What: write a library for use with libnotify, growl, etc. (note that there is already fdo-notify and GrowlNotify, so this project isn't very original; however, a wrapper library might be nice).
Who: Ivan
Library re-builder
What: extend haskell-updater to use with cabal-install, Arch, etc.
Who: Ivan (willing to help out if anyone else is interested; is not planning on doing the conversions himself)
Accommodation
Hostels
If you're looking for somewhere cheap to stay near UNSW then there are a few back-packers in Coogee. It's about a 10 minute bus ride from Coogee Beach to UNSW. Shared rooms are AUD$30 - 40.
For something a bit further out, you could also try one of the Sydney YHA hostels. The Glebe one is walking distance to Darling Harbour, though it takes about 50 min to get to UNSW via light rail then bus. Private rooms with shared facilities are about AUD$80. Shared rooms are AUD$30 - 40.
If you want to say across the road from Central station, and don't mind hanging out with English gap-year kids, then you try WakeUp.
If you like to party then Evas Backpackers is a short stumble home from Kings Cross.
I'd avoid SydneyCentralOnWentworth. It has a pretty website but the rooms are small and dingy (benl23 stayed there in 2009)
Note that hostels tend to be busiest on Friday and Saturday nights, so it's good to book early.
Colleges
For something more up-market you could try one of the UNSW residential Colleges. This site also has more links to hotels and hostels.
Hotels
If you have AUD$120 - 150 per night and aren't organised then LastMinute is a good place to find a hotel. You get the best prices if you book 2-3 days in advance.
Related Links
Historic information
The old "who's interested" table:
| Name | IRC Nickname | Availability | Preferred date | Comment | |
| Alex Mason | Axman6 | Probably any weekend during the ANU holidays | - | Organiser | |
| Liam O'Connor-Davis | kamatsu | All the UNSW midyear break. | - | ||
| Ivan Miljenovic | ivanm | *shrug* lazy PhD student, so whenever | <=== | Organiser | |
| Tony Morris | dibblego | Nothing specific | - | Tentative, depending on health | |
| Manuel Chakravarty | TacticalGrace | I'm away 4-11 July; will probably not be able to attend all of it regardless of date | Probably weekend of the 18th July | Will help getting a room at UNSW | |
| Mark Wotton | blackdog | flexible, but weekend | |||
| David Terei | dterei | I'm away from April - start of August. Probably can't attend given proposed dates | Any weekend after August 19th | ||
| Hamish Mackenzie | hamishmack | Any weekend | |||
| Ben Lippmeier | benl23 | flexible | |||
| Stephen Blackheath | blackh | Any time | Please fix date soon if poss | ||
| Erik de Castro Lopo | m3ga | Weekends | |||
| Ben Sinclair | bens | - | Any weekend | ||
| Michael Mounteney | mounty? | Weekends | |||
| Bernie Pope | bjpop | Weekends | |||
| Stephen Gream | Weekends | ||||
| Jens Petersen | juhp | Weekends | earlier better | ||
| Matt Roberts | altmattr |