FullCodePrevise

We're safe and sound in balmy Sydney, where we await the arrival of the Australian team. We're planning to take it pretty easy on Friday with a bit of tinkering, a bit of touristy stuff, before we descend into the lower levels of the hotel to prepare the conference rooms for our engagement on Saturday morning.

The main controversy, or at least, frustration that has erupted so-far involves the server platform we'll be working with. The organizers want to have a live staging site available during the event so that people from outside can actually see the websites grow over the course of the 24 hours. Something that none of us have ever done before. Unfortunately, we were given the impression that we would be given access to a box with our choice of software installed. Naturally, we chose the trusty Linux-Apache-PHP combo. But when the server went live yesterday, I pinged it to view the HTTP headers and was shocked to see a Win32 flag sitting amongst the rest of the signatures. Apache running on Windows for a production server? You've got to be joking.

The interesting thing that has transpired is that this situation actually levels the playing field. The Australian team will be equally disadvantaged, since they wanted a Linux box set up as well. But we know this is not make or break. The most important focus is to ensure that the message and user experience of the site is reflected through every aspect of the design and functionality, and we are confident we can make something great regardless.