Bright and early on Saturday morning (after quite a Friday night) I clawed my way out of bed and headed through to AIMS in Muizenberg for the first ever Cape Town StarCamp. Needless to say it was full of big minds, crazy concepts and plenty opportunities to learn.

On Saturday I found two talks particularly interesting. First up was Alex Halderman of Princeton University who presented a very interesting (and not too technical) talk on electronic ballot systems. Alex’s presentation covered his personal experience of researching Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine. As part of his research, the “tamperability” of the device was explored and was found to be very vulnerable to attacks. When concluding he presented a number of options to ensure the safety of electronic voting systems and I highly recommend you read his very interesting research paper.

Next up was Phil Barrett with a fascinating talk on User Experience and mechanisms for building software to improve user “interactability”. This idea appeals to me on many levels, as discussed in a previous post.
 
During this presentation a crazy thought popped into my head and I bounced it around a little with Phil. Rather than explain it in this post I’m going to run a few more A/B split tests on the Quirk site and report on the results (this will only happen next year though).

On Sunday there were also some great topics and speakers included Adrian Roussow on Drupal, even I plucked up the courage to do a short chat on my involvement with the Google Earth KML development.

Special thanks must go out to Neil for pulling a very informative event together and for supplying me with my first Wii experience.