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Ratsnatcher gets HOT HOT HOT in this classic road tale that
looks at the steamy underworld of Bay Area Linux advocacy.
Loosen your collar for this one!
Here is my report, which I share with my Pigdog friends first (as
always)...
So, first, a word about how I got there.
I highly recommend George as a driver. He is one of the finest drivers
that I've ever met. His Honda, circa 197x, has a "hostage"
passenger door like a police car. It can only be opened from the
outside. You might imagine that this would make one claustrophobic,
but I found that it provided exactly the opposite car ambiance; I felt
quite secure in fact. That was especially important, because George
is also a STUNT DRIVER who can maintain a speed of 80 miles per hour
-- OR ABOVE -- even when exiting the freeway to side streets that have
speed limits posted as 25 and 15 miles per hour. I was impressed by
the braking speed of his Honda. Hondas from the 70's corner very
well, too, especially when the tires are as over-inflated as his
Honda's tires are. He keeps them that way just for handling. I know
the engine in his Honda is tuned to an extreme tolerance, because we
kept accelerating even after the needle on his speedometer was as far
clockwise as it would go (no kidding!)!!
But I'm getting ahead of myself...
I met George outside the communist headquarters building in San
Francisco. It was a bit early in the day for me (about 3:30 PM), and
I hadn't eaten yet, so I was relieved to find that George was hungry
also.
"It's cheap hamburger day at McDonald's," he said, "My tastes run
towards CHEESE burgers, but these regular burgers are CHEAP!!!" Or
something like that. I think it must have been $.29 burger day. So
we ran over to McDonald's. Time was of the essence because George had
parked in a special 4:00 PM tow-away zone. And the burgermeisters
were too slow there! We waited in line for approximately 45 seconds
until it became painfully clear that the Mission St. McDonald's was
too fucking slow for emergency fast food...
So we drove to the San Bruno McDonald's, where George consumed three
plain hamburgers, and I had a chicken bun -- reminiscent of my high
school cafeteria years. I should mention that first we also stopped
at the Public Library there in San Bruno, where George checked out a
book on recreational mathematics. He also caught and scolded some
Cambodian nationals stealing Library materials, but that's another
story...
After that we journeyed onward to Cisco Systems -- AT HIGH SPEEDS...
On the way we chatted congenially about Forth. George was/is a big
Forth hacker who attends the important N. Calif. Forth users group
meetings when he gets the chance. I was impressed with his
comprehensive knowledge of Forth history and the various offshoots and
Forth related projects, such as MISC (Minimal Instruction Set
Computer) architecture, and the latest developments in Forth.
Apparently George got involved with Forth way back with the Timex
Sinclair. (Hell, I had one of those too, but I had a hard enough time
with the built-in BASIC!) He eventually acquired a big Commie-64
system with a 5meg HD (!!) running Forth, and he currently hacks an
MS-DOS-hosted Forth system. That's just some background on George that
I thought you might be interested in (George: slap me around if I'm
giving away too many secrets).
Okay, so that "MS-DOS-hosted Forth system" thing probably made your
skin crawl. It should be noted that George is trying to put together a
Linux workstation to hack Forth on. He'll probably use Gforth. I
think.
Even with all of our stop-overs, we ended up at Cisco Systems a good
two hours before the SVLUG meeting. In fact, we were the first two
people there. We came in the wrong door, and encountered the
beautiful and charming Cisco information-desk hostess, of building J,
who seemed to know NOTHING about the SVLUG meeting but nonetheless
signed us in and gave us Cisco visitor badges.
We were there a good two hours before the start of the meeting, so I
suggested that we kill time at the nearby Computer Literacy Bookstore.
The Computer Literacy Bookstore is a gigantic bookstore that has
nothing but computer related books. It's approximately the size
of Cody's Books in Berkeley, except it is ALL computer books. It's
like the Stacey's computer book section with grow pills. That is, it
is computer book NIRVANA.
George looked for Forth books. There were none. NONE. Can you
believe it? (haha) And he complained within. We were informed that
even the coolest and most important Forth books are out of print. They
don't exist anymore, except in used book stores...
At this point, you're probably getting pissed that I keep talking
about Forth when this is supposed to be a report on the SVLUG meeting.
Well, damn, Linux is probably one of the best platforms to fool around
with Forth on, just as it's a good place to fool around with just
about every other language. Not that I'm into Forth, because I'm
pretty much a C/C++/Java freak, I just find it interesting that some
people still do Forth and like Forth... haha... So enough about
Forth.
Back at Cisco, we ended up in seats that were about four rows from the
front. Pretty good seats, actually.
Shortly thereafter, the whole place became PACKED.
Some total FREAK wearing polyester sat down next to me and booted
Linux on an IBM Thinkpad. Of course, IT WAS fucking cool; but it was
clear that he was just showing off; because immediately he started
screwing around with some TCL scripts or something; he wasn't taking
notes with it or anything like that. I'm sorry, but you don't
nonchalantly hack scripts in a high charged atmosphere like this one.
I admit that it was cool to see though. Laptops running Linux are
cool. People with Linux laptops are cool. Maybe not cooler than
you, but they are cool. Just because they have Linux on a laptop.
Really.
Apparently, this meeting represented the biggest attendance that the
SVLUG has ever had. And I believe it. There were a shitload of
people there. The big conference room at Cisco Systems is not the
usual. For a long time, SVLUG met at Carl's Junior.
After some housekeeping stuff, they introduced Linus. (woo woo!)
Linus looks a lot LESS geeky then a lot of the people who use Linux.
In fact, Linus is a very normal looking person. He doesn't have the
extreme geek look. He's an EXCELLENT, and effective speaker. And I'm
not just saying that. I would tell you if he sucked.
Also, he looks very Teutonic. He looks like a German, especially with
the little round glasses he wears. The only computer geek
person that I can even compare him to, as far as raw stature goes,
would be Arthur Van Hoff, who is one of the Java dudes. Arthur Van
Hoff is a HUGE man like Tjames. In fact Hoff is the computer hacker
version of Tjames, if Tjames grew up in a Scandinavian country...
But Linus... Linus has less of an accent that I do. Really! I have a
worse Dayton, Ohio accent than Linux has a Helsinki one.
I was a little bit disappoint that Linus didn't talk about his general
philosophies and the history of Linux and where he sees the whole
thing going. Those are the things I really want to know. Instead he
gave sort of a technical seminar on SMP. And that's actually okay.
That's what he does -- work on the kernel. And SMP stuff in the
Kernel.
He gave the kind of tech talk on the Linux kernel that you might pay
for in a big conference setting. It was a technical seminar about the
trials and tribulations of getting Linux to be a kick-ass SMP system.
It was very good... in that sense. And then he fielded questions.
So in summary, that's what Linus is doing these days: working on SMP.
He is spending a lot of energy on making SMP work right.
There are also some HUGE, and special cacheing improvements in the
file system that he talked about, which are also important as per web.
I'm not talking about cacheing the actual data, but cacheing the
information about how to get to it.
But I can only be vague about these things, because he didn't
elaborate. Reading between the lines, I feel that the main thrust of
things is to improve the web server abilities of Linux in general. It
already kicks ass over NT, but with the new directory-path/inode
cacheing stuff Linus was talking about, Linux is going to look real
good -- much better than NT in raw numbers...
And that's about it. It really was a technical-type seminar.
But here are the interesting little things that I gleaned:
- Linus's development machine has 512megs of RAM and two
processors.
- And he is the only user (of course).
- Best quote:
"MIS people have sick little minds."
The reason that I think Linus came to this meeting is that they gave
him a fucking computer! Yes, it's true. He won the "Open Source
Software" award, created by O'Reilly, RedHat, and some other
companies. He was bribed, the way I look at it...
They didn't just give him ribbon; they gave him a 333Mhz Pentium II
machine with a case that has a Penguin engraved on the front! Then,
to top it all off, 3Com gave him a Palm Pilot because Linux has
recently been ported to it.
And Rick Moen of BALUG gave him a six pack of Red Tail Ale.
Not a bad day's work.
THAT IS THE REPORT.
Wow, I just realized that I've really run out of steam here at the
end. On the other hand, I don't have a lot more stuff to pack into
this report. I would love to tell you about Linus, but he really
wants us to all think that he's a boring engineer guy.
Oh well... It was still worth going to. Not as fun as Larry Wall,
though.
George dropped me off at the most convenient BART station.
The end.
vwbugger@pigdog.org
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