Last week, some of the best and brightest open source companies in the bay area congregated at Hyperic Headquarters, and played a spirited game of Wii Tennis to vie for the title of Open Source Champion and its prize: The Golden Racket.

The title gives it away, Hyperic won. Specifically, Scott Feldstein (aka scottmf) rose to the occasion and took the prize:

It was a great event though – and although winning was nice, it was made even nicer by getting to blow off some steam and socialize with the other companies that came. Thanks to JasperSoft, MuleSource, Marketcetera (apparently hosting next time!) and MySQL for making the event so fun. Here are some photos for your enjoyment:

We used our new, unbuilt space to host the event. Part housewarming, part wii-fest!

Zack Urlocker from MySQL had the great idea of adding Guitar Hero to the mix. So much fun!

That’s me on the guitar. Let’s just say I’ve had a little practice…

This is actually Scott playing (left) tennis. Although this was taken earlier in the night, we can see Scott was well on his way to his winning streak.

Thanks again to everyone for coming to such a fun night. I look forward to the next round of defending the Golden Racket!

Oh by the way, your websites will no longer be hosted in 4 days

In spring of 2002 I was called in by a Company to help them with their websites (I wasn’t an employee at that time, I had a small shop of about 10 guys doing web development/business systems).

The issue? Their Host went bankrupt and they had 4 days to move 100+ sites with 50+ pages each off their servers before the plug was pulled.

If this didn’t go right, 80,000 plus doctors around the country would be very unhappy – they use the sites to look for Continuing Medical Education seminars, register, make payments, keep track of their certificates, etc. the Company would lose a LOT of money.

So – no big deal, right? Just access the servers and pull the code off and put it on our servers.

SORRY – the Hosting Vendor of the Company actually outsourced the hosting to another vendor whom they hadn’t paid and they refused to give us access at all! With the short amount of time that we had, I pulled my entire team together to go to every page, save as html, fix the image src tags and everything else and rebuild the sites by hand as static HTML (no database driven content). We got their sites back up in 1/2 day before the plug got pulled, and then a week or two later launched a Content Management system for them to be able to keep the content up to date.

This took a team of 6 72+ hours of work. Non-stop. 3 all nighters in a row with interspersing of Colin Powell 20 Minute Power Naps.

Needless to say, the Company was very happy we could rescue them, and now that I’ve moved on from owning my own company they have very happily employed me.

Congratulations, Mr Anderson, your Wii will be in the mail this week!

Given that I consider the Wii to be the foosball table of the 21st century (no disrespect to foos, of course), I am more than happy to respond to his silly antics by calling him out to swing by our office with his crew so they can see how our crew unwinds after a record Q3. Besides, we can’t have all these “web too-ooh” companies having all the fun while the infrastructure companies do all the work.

October 25th, 5:30 pm. Hyperic offices. We’ll battle for the golden racket and the bragging rights for the foreseeable future.

We’ll supply the Wii, refreshments, and of course a spectacular mule-kicking! And for any of you other open source companies in the bay – if you have any Wii skills, bring it on. Reply to the blog and we’ll send you an evite.