Rob's Return/LinuxExpo Wrap Up

Our drive back proved much less eventful then the drive down, and now having had a nice nap, I'm ready to post a final batch of rants and rambles about the Expo and my experiences there. Hit the link below to read more. And now since I'm back, I should be reading email again, and of course posting articles more regularly.

Saturday was a much busier day for me than friday. First off I sat back and watched the excellent Digital Domain/Linux presentation. Watched their reel, and enjoyed hearing about their distributed computing Linux based renderfarm. They talked about many of the problems associated with getting a 200 machine farm online- including that whole temperature thing, and the bandwidth problem with IO intensive image work (specifically compositing in this case). It was pretty cool.

After that I bit the bullet and started going through every booth with a bit more of a fine toothed comb. Chatted with the SuSE boys for a bit, and walked away with another CD; I've been meaning for some time now to just set up a low end machine and just start testing distros. With Debian 2 RSN and these SuSE CDs sitting on my coffee table, I feel out of touch. Looking forward to it.

I actually chatted a bit more with the corel NetWinder developers. At the same time Raster and Mandrake sucessfully ported Enlightenment to the cute little boxes. Once they got it up they really exposed the current major flaw with the machines- the video is slower than watching paint dry. No problem though- the boys from Corel have hired an XF86 developer to write a new accelerated server for the chipset which should make the video a killer performer. The funny part is that Corel's booth was just sooo tiny, but they were totally crowded the whole time. They raised a lot of eyebrows, and with good reason. And the developers were slyly willing to comment that this is just the first version of their new machines- the future will be much cooler.

Talked to RMS for a bit. Bought Dave an Emacs manual so he could have it autographed. And Richard blessed my computer *grin*.

I watched a quite enjoyable presentation from Lars on Linu[x|s] anecdotes. He's a funny guy. Not exactly a public speaker though. Tons of funny stuff involving Linus testing memory management (playing Doom) and debugging his terminal emulator (reading net news) as well as practical jokes between the too (aliasing a kernel oops message). It was cool.

ESR was up next to present his Homesteading the Noosphere paper. He did an excellent job, and although I know he gets a lot of criticism from a lot of people, his models are pretty darn accurate. He commented on how at first the only free software was demos. Then games. Then developer tools. Than an OS. What's next? Why, the Gimp! Applications are the next thing that Open Source will produce. It struck a lot of chords in other ways too- the ego issues show exactly why Slashdot works so well- my ego apparently sits at the center, but everyone gets credited when they submit stories. In a lot of ways, Slashdot is an application of the same princibles that make open source work, but shifted over to the news stuff. The scary part for me is hearing it and comparing it to the Mystery Project. Nate was so impressed that he's inspired to finish it RSN...

I also wanted to hop in on the Birds of a Feather session with the guys from MySQL. They are a cool pair, doing cool stuff. They commented a lot about what they are doing, and what MySQL will be doing. They talked about Sub Selects coming soon, and also about their stance against transactions- they'd rather be 5-10 times faster, the speed is just more important. I have to agree, but only because The Mystery Project (he mentioned it again!) is gonna be searching through a ton of data, and while transactions, and even foreign keys are nice, that gigantic speed boost is pretty nice too *grin*.

After that we were exhausted. A quick nap and we hit the road not long after. After a fairly event free 15 hour drive, I'm back in my poof chair with my laptop gently warming my lap and causing me to fear what might be happening to my genitals. In other words, things are back to normal.

Lastly I just wanted to comment on the experience as a whole. I'm just amazed. Friday night, sitting in the bar, I looked over one shoulder and saw Linus happily sitting on the floor, chatting with Alan Cox and other developers. Jwz was in another corner. ESR chatted the night away with tons of other folks. Every where I turned I saw another nametag and a face. Names and faces that are doing the stuff that we talk about here every day. The hundred conversations flowed together, and no matter what direction I turned my head I could overhear excitement and energy. This is a room where people were clearly stoked about what is happening, and what they were doing. And each of these people are just nice folks. They just happen to have obsessive compulsive hobbies that are changing the world.

Oh, and did I mention that I got to shake Linus' hand? I had a great weekend. I hope I can go to more of these things in the future.