I was recently invited to speak at the XBMC Devcon hosted by Boxee in Amsterdam. It was a privilege to meet the talented and hard-working team behind XBMC and boxee. For those unfamiliar with XBMC, it is a homebrew media center application for hacked Xboxes that rivals anything created by a commercial organization; you haven’t experienced digital media until you have used XBMC. Boxee hopes to do what Firefox did for Mozilla, or what Ubuntu has done for Linux: bring the application to the masses. They currently have a port for the Mac Mini available for limited Alpha testing (unfortunately, it looks like all of their Alpha invites have already been exhausted…for now).
I must give props to Avner and his team for hosting a proper event for hackers — like the last Toorcon Seattle, the entire event had an open bar, all day and all night, with an appropriate mix of caffeine and alcohol available at all times (and who said athletes were the only ones who use performance-enhancing drugs?).
At a conference dinner event at the Supper Club, dessert was presented in a … novel … fashion: on a naked woman. After dinner was served, a man dressed in leather walked in and laid down on the table what looked like a body wrapped in cloth; the cloth was peeled back to reveal a (mostly) naked woman. He then proceeded to paint her entire body with chocolate, and then topped her off with whipped cream and chocolate ganaches, all to a soundtrack spun by a funky house DJ. Of course, you then had to get your dessert — no hands allowed. The chocolate was quite sticky, which made for a number of hilarious photos.
Thanks again to Boxee for the conference and my respect to team XBMC for showing the world what kinds of incredible applications the homebrew scene can create.
