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

• OzHaskell

Historic information

The old "who's interested" table:

Name	IRC Nickname	Email	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