Yesterday I returned from Dresden where I attended the
Linux-Info-Tag. All in all it was a really great weekend. The event was very well organised and I had a lot of fun. We shared a booth with
debianforum.de and had a lot of visitors, ranging from people who had just started to consider switching to Linux to advanced users with detailed technical questions. As usual I also learned quite a lot of stuff myself, this time (among other things) that my digital camera (an IXUS II) works very nicely with
gphoto2 and that there's also a lot of other graphical digital camera software that works with it.
We had two copies of Frank Ronneburg's
Debian Anwenderhandbuch and I thought it would be a nice idea to give them away in a little contest.
Alexander "Tolimar" Schmehl owns a little
etch that I asked him to bring along. The idea was, that, in order to promote the name of the next release, people should draw us a picture on the little etch and the best one would win a copy of the book. I'd actually expected to see people fail miserably and in the end crown the funniest try. But I was confuted. Totally!! In fact we had two entries that were so good that we decided to split the first place and give both of them a copy of the book.
Here are (as promised) all contestants:
This entry was taken out of the rating. It was our first entry and was made by Carsten, who was one of the Debian booth people. Of course we know that he could have done much better and only produced this in order to not discourage other contestants.
The third place, personally I don't really agree with the motive but it won a lanyard anyway.
The second place, a rather obvious motive, but well done and a worthy second place. Another lanyard for this gentleman.
The two first place entries: We absolutely couldn't decide between the perfect curves of "Tux" and "A house with garden"'s 1000 little Details. So the first place was splitted and we gave a away both copies of the book.
Congratulations again to all contestants! Well done!
After deciding on the prices I had to hurry to give my talk on user friendly system administration. I had a nice number of people and I think the talk was well received. The (German) slides are now also available
online. Please inform me of any usage.
One nice incident was, when after the talk a former system administrator of the Technical University of Dresden approached me and told me that he really liked the talk. He said that he was now retired and really missed talking to the users and helping them when they had trouble with the system. After hearing so many sysads talking about their users like complete idiots, that all seem on a personal quest to annoy their sysads as much as possible, this was a nice change. I sometimes think that the "BOFH-Syndrome" is also a generation problem. But that's a different story ...
After the talks there was a barbecue outside the building, I talked to a lot of people and had quite some fun. Afterwards there was a presentation and movies, a really nice ending for an almost perfect event. (The only problem was, that there had been no Internet access until around noon, but from what I heard it was one of the University's switches that had given up. Apart from that everything worked out perfectly.)
On Sunday we went on a guided tour through Dresden and afterwards to a
museum. The museum actually is on Human Biology but there were two special exhibitions, one on evolution and one on games. As expected most of us went for the
game exhibition that featured several rooms dedicated to the history of games as well as the different kinds of games that exist (imitation, strategy, gambling, ...). All rooms had games to try yourself and all of us had a lot of fun. (We're such a bunch of kids ;)) After leaving the museum we went for a Pizza (Very tasty! I think, I am developing a weakness for Pizza with Parma and rocket.), which concluded that day.
One last nice incident happened when I was riding home on the train with
Tolimar. We asked the guy who'd checked our tickets for a later train connection. His answer: "Oh, did it get too late at the Linuxtag at the Technical University?". Unnecessary to mention that we were most thrilled! Often when talking to "normal people" I get the "what is this all for" feeling, since, how much ever you evangelise, there's such a mass of people who never even heard about the existence of FOSS/Linux. It's these little incidents that are really rewarding!!
Final conclusions:
- Great weekend
- Very good event (Thanks LIT people, you guys rock!! Also a big thank you to our host, Frank, who provided three of us with a place to sleep, really tasty breakfast and also drove us around.)
- Lots of fun
- Lots of interesting people to talk to
- An IXUS II does not work as a USB storage device
- You can do amazing things with an etch a sketch
- Knowing that my talk is being recorded gives me an awkward feeling (I tend to use a lot of "spicy language")
- The rebuilt Frauenkirche looks impressing
- Pizza with Parma and rocket is great!
Now it's peaking at just under 400Kb! The 200Kb chunk is the Berkeley DB
cache for my addressbook, and the size of that is tunable. After that
come add_module and add_alias from libc's
gconv implementation of iconv. Now I'm pretty sure the
data they are loading should be made constant and shared among all
processes. Anybody know of existing work in this area?
NP: Fear Of Fours, Lamb