ALS Wrapup

Ladies and gentleman, both Hemos and I arrived Safely back in Holland yesterday afternoon. After spending all night catching up on 3 days of reply required email, writing a paper, and finishing all my homework, I finally now have a chance to sit back and write a summary of the whole event as best as I can muster. So it that link and read on if you're curious.

It was a lot of fun. People everywhere, tons of booths, and penguin merchandise as far as the eye could see. One of my profs (Dr. Jipping: Hello! Don't fail me in small machines!) has a simple measure for any conference- the number of t-shirts you acquire. For me, this was a 7 shirt conference. This means I can eradicate all those nasty shirts with holes in them and frayed edges. I'm afriad I was embarassing most of the city with my warddrobe, so I'm sure they thank all the exhibitors more than I do.

Highlights for me? Well my laptop suffered amazing abuse- From the coke spilled all over the screen and keyboard, to the mystic CD-ROM drive that suddenly stops closing, I knew I was in for a fun weekend. Especially when my D key joined my X key in a unified strike against touch typing- but never fear! Donald Becker came to my rescue. So not only can he write mean ethernet code, but he can fix keyboards too. Thanks a million man! it's great being able to delete charachters in vi again.

ESR has some stories to tell about his Geeks with Guns adventure. He said he'll have some details for us later, but the funniest thing that I heard him say is that RMS is actually an excellent shot. He probably has amazingly powerful fingers from all those crazy emacs key bindings *grin*. They're gonna supposedly do it again at the next show and he's threatening to make me come- hope they have extra large targets for me.

VA Research donated about 6 million t-shirts to Slashdot/Themes.org/Freshmeat which were quite popular. By the end of the show, Scoop and I went on a mad dash throughout the building throwing the remainder of the supply at anyone who would sit still, and tried swapping them for anything we could get (UltraSparcs, 21" Monitors, Switched Hubs- oh wait, no never mind, t-shirts and stickers :)

A few people wrote in to remind me about a bunch of Corel's announcements that apparently aren't getting any major publicity else where. Not only has Corel now joined Linux Interntional, but they are donating a part of the profits from WP8/Linux to LI. They also said that binaries would be available for platforms that had demand (Alpha and PPC were both whispered and shouted, and presumably x86 and Strongarm is planned already). The keynote speech from Dr. Cowpland also mentioned that Corel was going to help with Wine development, and that they would shift to KDE or Gnome when the market was ready. San Mehat also promised to send me a NetWinder after showing off his Netwinder. Mind you his netwinder was a 10 chip beowulf cluster communicating over SCSI. Hot swappable CPUs. Wow. They said they can do 40 of those things, and it still runs cool. Super cool.

There are like 30 sites that people submitted loaded with pictures. Kestrel sent me good one that even features a picture of Hemos & I showing some skin. Gasp.

No Slashdot wasn't tampered with- I obvioisly faked the poll this weekend. I don't really think there are a hundred thousand people who wanted to see OctobrX naked at ALS.

I've got a copy of Oracle sitting on my desk at home to play with, as well as a copy of Applix from Linux Central. I'm looking forward to a free afternoon to play with them. Spare time is mythical for me right now though.

Those caffeinated penguin mints are crazy. Do not take more than 6. After 7 on thursday I crashed hard. Not as hard as Mandrake though. He was hiding out at the Slashdot/Themes/Meat booth for much of saturday shaking off the fun and games from the night before. He also gave me permission to fake his death if I ever decide I'm not getting enough flame mail.

Shook hundreds of hands. Met tons of readers. Had a really great time. I want to again thank Cyclic and VA for getting us all down there, giving us shirts and machines to demo with, and just generally being cool guys to talk to. Lots of people had good suggestions for Slashdot, and many of them will probably be incorporated as soon as I get the machine stable again. Many other people had suggestions for that too, and I'll keep trying. Its definately mysql right now, and I'm working on it as fast as I can. I'm sure once I fix it I'll break something else. I think its time to hire a competant sysadmin, cuz I sure ain't that.

It was especially cool meeting up with OctobrX and Scoop and hanging out with them. Hemos and I both had a great time hanging out with them. Now, back to class. The downside to conferences is that ya gotta go back to real life afterwards to live. At least until LinuxWorld and The Bazaar. Looking forward to seeing everyone there too...

(I probably forgot a ton of things to mention in this article- so much happened so fast, but now I need to go to class. If I forgot something super cool, let me know and I'll make sure to get it in here when I get back in front of a net connected box.)