Dirac Angestun Gesept

Another year, another USENIX, though this time without jet lag or TSA grief or any of that. There’s something to be said for that, though I think it would have been easier to deal with the stack of books I wound up with after the game show if I’d had a hotel room to dump them in and a suitcase to pack them in.

This year’s schedule was odd. Instead of the old 2/3 or 3/3 tutorial/technical split of days, they had 6 days of tutorials and 5 days of technical sessions that overlapped, and you could register for a mix of them.

I’m not sure how I feel about the new scheme yet; they did use the extra time to put together one-day mini-tracks for things like Extreme Linux and the like, and each day had a mini-keynote (all of which I liked, and which were worth slogging over to Copley even in rush-hour T conditions) instead of One Big Keynote. However, it seemed like there was less going on at any given time (fewer conflicts, but fewer options if you weren’t interested in either main track) and as Camilla mentions the vendor displays have been really sparse lately, so my old trick of “hmm, that session looks like a good time to collect vendor giveaways” no longer works.

(When the entire set of book publishers is smaller than the O’Reilly booth used to be, and the rest of the vendor display is less than a dozen tables spread around the perimeter of a portion of the exhibit hall that used to be packed full….)

I decided to bug out early on the last day; I was short on sleep and figured I wouldn’t be likely to have much attention span for the last couple of sessions. I grabbed a quick lunch, did some browsing through the Upper Newbury Music Trifecta (CD Spins, Newbury Comics, Virgin Megastore), and then hopped on the T. I figured I’d swing by CambridgeSide to see if Best Buy had a CD I wanted cheaper than either Newbury or Virgin, then head to the office to clear out the backlogged email so I wouldn’t feel quite as guilty about it over the weekend, and gave me a chance to scope out the shuttle bus between Gov’t Center and Lechmere as well.

As the train pulled in to Park Street, a woman with two young children got up to get off through the rear door (by the unused driving cab). The train stopped, the door started to open, and one of the kids fell down the stairs, managing to catch his head between the leaves of the accordion door as it was opening. The kid was screaming, the mother was freaking out, and another bystander and I were jumping to push the door aside and free the kid’s head. Scary enough to give me a jolt of adrenalin I wasn’t expecting.

After that, helping a gaggle of teenagers find the shuttle buses at Gov’t Center was fairly anticlimactic. The bus ride was reasonable, the stops (particularly “North Station”) are not necessarily really close to the T stations, and they didn’t seem to really care whether you had taken a transfer or not. I’m glad I don’t have to ride that segment daily, though.

A quick buzz through the mall, picked up some CDs at Best Buy, then to work, and on home once the email was at least shoveled out somewhat.

It feels like it’s been a long week that flew by. Very odd feeling.

This was, as always, loads of fun and one of the highlights of the conference for me.

After being royally skunked in the final round every time in the past, I’ve finally managed to win instead of coming in a distant second; I now have a spiffy Google lava lamp to show for my efforts. It’s not blue, though.

Oh, and some books and hats and t-shirts, including one of the no longer being sold printed 4.4BSD Daemon shirts, autographed by Marshall Kirk McKusick himself.

(It is, however, XXL and therefore a bit large to actually wear…framing for display is being considered instead.)

I’m at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference all this week.

The conference has Wi-Fi coverage, so I can still do some blogging; though I didn’t bring a laptop along (I’m commuting to the conference by T and don’t want to have to haul it along, especially with the Constitutionally-dubious behavior of the MBTA these days), the Palm web browser appears to work well enough to post with.

(Yeah, like that’s a surprise.)

Today’s Boston Globe has an article The Geek Mystique that (triggered by a trademark lawsuit between The Geek Squad and Geek Housecalls) talks about the term and how it’s become “so cool”.

“Geek” has a long history in the English language, and, until the technological age, was the term applied to carnival performers whose talent consisted of biting off the heads of live chickens and snakes. It later became part of the technical lexicon, describing the technologically astute who just as voraciously ate computer bugs, said Brian Jepson, an editor at the technology book publisher O’Reilly Media Inc.

Jepson said he first noticed the term geek gaining positive connotations in 1993, with the introduction of the “geek code”, a method used to compress data to speed up e-mail when modems were painfully slow.

So, if you’re not used to the Globe, you might wonder whether Jepson actually said that the “geek code” was a data compression mechanism or if the Globe reporter screwed up somehow.

Well, Jepson’s blog entry makes it pretty clear:

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. A free copy of one of my books to the first person who posts a comment reconstructing what I originally said.

I just saw an interesting BBC article on the Nepal Wireless Networking project.

This is a creative use of Wi-Fi gear to bring remote villages in Nepal online, allow the residents to learn about computers and the Internet, and cross the digital divide by crossing the mountains and cultural differences. This is being done on a total shoestring (donated gear and effort, combined with grant money) and is helping the villagers communicate and trade with the rest of the world.

Very neat stuff. You can even buy bags, shawls, and handmade paper items from Himalayan Handicraft, which they hope to have the rural Nepalese students themselves running in the future.

With all the bad news around, don’t forget that there are folks making a real, positive, difference around. You can contribute too.

I’ve made a couple of changes to the setup of this blog recently.

The more obvious change is the blogroll; I’m planning to add to it slowly, over time.

The less obvious change is that the RSS 2.0 feed is now a full-article feed, in yet another case of seeing a good idea on Electrolite and shamelessly adapting it. This should be handy for those of you using RSS aggregators or readers like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon.

A student in Germany was busted for plugging his laptop in while waiting in a train station.

German prosecutors say they’re investigating the student for pilfering less than a cent’s worth of electricity.

I wonder if he knows the potatoes-in-the-computer guy.

In many cases, you can tell whether someone of a particular age group was a watcher of US children’s television shows just by saying a word or two. “Conjunction” is a good marker to spot those who watched Schoolhouse Rock, for example.

Another favorite is “The Year Without a Santa Claus”, by Rankin-Bass Productions. Of course, nobody remembers it by that name…but if you say “Heat-Miser” or “Snow-Miser” they’ll recognize it.

“But so what?” you may ask. “This sounds like random pointless nostalgia to me.” Well, yes, but if you’ve been reading Slashdot or Groklaw lately, you know that there’s a new Miser in town.

Yep, Darl McBride is the SCO-Miser!

Here, revealed for the first time, is his theme song. Read more about SCO Miser »

The Guardian has a lovely little story of why working in retail, particularly computer retail, can be less boring than you’d think.

In Computer’s chips turn into potatoes, we see:

Staff at a department store in the German city of Kaiserslautern called detectives after an angry customer tried to return a computer stuffed with potatoes to the shop twice on the same day.

and my favorite quote, from one of the techs at another computer store:

“If they are running for a long time they get hot and in theory it would be possible to cook a potato in a computer, but who would try that?”

Who indeed?

Perhaps this guy has some insights.

UPDATE 2003-01-14 14:40 -0500: CNN also has the story but their shorter version doesn’t have the fun quotes from Roman Zukoan.

Mike Kozlowski writes in Unmistakable Marks (via Electrolite):

I’ve never edited a movie in my life, never mastered a video DVD, and never even considered making a multi-track music recording. Neither have you, if I might be permitted to play the odds here.

Gee, I guess that DVD that my wife and I gave to her parents, made from a video transfer of their old family 8mm movies, must have been an illusion.

After all, nobody really uses iMovie and iDVD; we must not have paid the $50 for the last iLife box just to get the iDVD upgrade.

I’m not particularly musical (my last music “production” was playing cello in 6th grade), but I’ll certainly play with GarageBand when it ships. Sure, I might produce the musical equivalent of one of those old Mac-printed newsletters that used the “San Francisco” font, but I might not….

UPDATE 2004-01-11 02:02: Mike Kozlowski has updated his comments (pointing both to the Electrolite post and this as well) and is now more clearly saying that he thinks the “content creation” focus is sapping energy they could be using for more “integration of the computer with digital media devices” (a list which includes cell phones and PDAs, which are nicely supported by iSync; cameras, handled by iPhoto; and iPods, handled by iTunes. The only devices on his list not already having an iApp are TVs and stereos…but my PowerBook already has audio and S-Video out!).

Me, I actually remember the MacTV and the Performa-with-a-tuner-card. Only students in cramped dorm rooms, or my gadget-crazy father, ever bothered watching TV on them. (Or perhaps I’m just “permitted to play the odds here”, to quote Kozlowski.)