Gordon Haff: “Imagine, if you will, that it s the late Nineties. A certain software company based in Redmond, Washington has recently released Visual Studio 97 thereby bundling together many of its development tools for the first time. Now imagine that the company decided to release those tools for free. What do you think the general reaction would have been? Applause for Microsoft s generosity? Or widespread condemnation for using its market power to make such a transparently anti-competitive attack on other makers of development tools?” Thought provoking observations. Note, however, that “open source as competitive weapon” isn’t limited to large vendors—it works equally well (and, in many ways, better) for the upstarts (see Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss, etc.). In fact, it works so well for the upstarts that even the upstarts have upstarts (see, e.g., Canonical). Can something that levels the playing field so dramatically be called predatory? Predatory has one-sided, unfair advantage connotations. In open source, it goes both ways. With Eclipse, it was IBM doing the disrupting; but with MySQL and JBoss, IBM is on the other end of it. At the end of the day, the real winner is all of us—after all, who can argue that the state of IDEs and middleware isn’t better today than it’s ever been?

To promote Linux with the students I held a gaming tournament tonight. The sixteen participants played two rounds of four-player-tetrinet-games, as well a single elimination bracket of Frozen Bubble. It was very chaotic, but in the end we had two winners: Elridge Nikki Gordon (tetrinet) and Beteab Gebreyesus (Frozen Bubble), and they got winner certificates (the names of course not printed but hand written). Unfortunately, we did not manage to pull through the Tuxracer competition, but it was still fun. For them at least, for me it was only stress. But the good kind of stress.

Y’all remember Wil Wheaton? He was Gordie in Stand By Me, Wesley in The Next Generation, then disappeared, then started blogging, wrote some books, … Now he’s reviewing Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes (contains spoilers). The first is now available. Wil’s resentment of how the writers treated his character on TNG has been known for a long time. Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of the review is Wil discussing the lines he was given:

[….] I also got to say lines like, “So you mean I’m drunk? I feel strange, but also good!” In fact, John D.F. Black — who I didn’t realize at the time hated me — also wrote Justice, where he gave me the awesome line, “We’re from Starfleet! We don’t lie!” Thanks for that one, too, Mr. Black.

But the review is not just snarking agains former bosses, it is a real review. It contains a synopsis (spoilers, beware!), a personal behind-the-scenes memory, a (very!) memorable quote, and an interesting take on the “bottom line”. I’ve always liked Wil’s writing. This one is not an exception.

While I've smiled for a lot of photographs at speaking engagements around the world in the last year or three, to the best of my knowledge Elizabeth Gordon-Werner is the first person who ever painted me during one of my talks. Pretty cool. She has the painting of me online, along with lots of others from this and other events at her Art Smitten site.

After a very tasty breakfast of gorditas in the market, I sat through talks all of Thursday morning, which were all quite good. They were visionary talks, talks about where Debian was going to go, and what we can do to get it there. After a brief lunch, we returned for the talk of debugging debian-installer. I've been lugging around my laptop, jamaica, through the entire conference. It's an old A20m, which means that it's a rather bulky looking thing, that is quite heavy. What makes it noticable is that it's been epoxied together, after having been dropped one too many times. People marvel that GNOME runs reasonably on it. Anyway, during the talks, my wireless card decided it didn't want to work any more. Pulling it out and letting it cool down seemed to get it responsible again. Strange. After the afternoon talk on how to find security problems within Debian, I went back to the hotel to change. You see, we were going to a Formal Dinner. I had not packed for a formal dinner, thinking that all functions would be casual at the very most. Still, I pulled out a pair of pressed slacks, an ironed shirt and a colourful tie. When I left my room, it became apparent that Formal actually meant "clothes without any holes". We all packed into the coach buses from yesterday and drove into town. This was actually quite difficult for the drivers, because the streets were very narrow and the buses were incapable of turning around corners. I think it took us fifteen minutes to park, which mostly consisted of doing a 30-point turn. We disembarked and walked into a large building. Two of the walls were made of stone, the rest were made of stucco. There was a small stage presiding over a floor full of fold-up tables which were arranged in a Debianesque spiral. I decided that I was going to be at the nexus of activity, so I sat down at the central table and reserved a seat for AJ. As people seated themselves and started talking, there was a sudden commotion. Holger was running towards AJ with a plastic crown, deposited it unceremoniously on his head, and continued sprinting past. This drew applause and photographs, along some cheering of "Long Live the DPL!" AJ looked decidedly uncomfortable. It's probably for the best that Debian isn't a monarchy. Our evening got more and more interesting. A mariachi band came in the door and started playing. Soon after they started singing, rain began to fall. This made lovely sounds on the tin roof above, which made me a little sleepy. Right about now, a brawl sprang up near the front door. There was some shoving involved and quite a bit of yelling. Soon, the combatants were separated and some of them left the building in anger. All this time, the musicians were playing louder and louder. As the music crescendoed, the rain fell harder and the wind blew stronger, until we had to close up the shutters to keep the water from blowing in. And the band kept trying to play over the rain. Then, slowly, the roof began to spring leaks. We were lining up for food then, and by the time I got to the buffet table, water was pouring into the trays. I managed to get something reasonably dry and scurried back to my seat. Which was wet. After I got some food inside of me, I experience the final act that capped our evening. We were chatting a bit about the strange weather we were having indoors when suddenly, water started cascading down one of the walls. It made a tremendous roar and the floor of the building quickly flooded. As I was photographing the events, the lights suddenly went out with a pop. We were plunged into darkness. I made my way back to my seat and someone eventually found the fusebox. The lights were restored, one by one, and it was soon time to leave. I don't know how the organizers of next year's Debconf are going to be able to top this: ceremony, live music, fisticuffs over a woman, an indoor waterfall, and drama. This was a night we're all going to remember.

This is a message sent to debconf-announce, pretending to be a small introduction of how you are to behave in MX, to avoid problems interacting with other people. The hacklab closes at 9:00 during debcamp and at 00:00 during debconf (although it might change now that food is served in the restaurant close to the hacklab). After that the only places that can be occupied are the pool area during the week and the backyard of the hotel buildings, where the backet fields are. Swimming after 6 is absolutelly forbidden, so dont even try to do it naked (you face being expelled from the whole debconf by the hotel). This place being a vacacional centre is occupied by families during the weekends (mostly) so we have to interact with non-geeks and non-grownups. Avoiding the just-learnt swear word in Spanish while having lunch has a bonus glass of water for breakfast. Talking about breakfast... Is not included in the food, so everybody has to find its way out. The same restaurant offers a set of 4 combinations which include juice, cafe, fried mashed beans and a selection of 4 differenf dishes on each (scrambled eggs mexican style; fried tortilla chips with tomato sauce, cream and chicken; ... The restaurant also permits ordering a la carte things. Please, ask a Spanish speaking person to help you if in trouble. For the more adventurous, there is a small market outside the Oaxtepec complex where you can have an incredible breakfast with local food and delicacies for some 40/50 pesos (3euro). Keep in mind that they use local ingredients and ways to prepare the food, which includes the use of tap water to wash the dishes, and frying the tortillas and gorditas in the same "plancha" (heated metal plate) where they cook the beef and other animal meat. Avoid getting into arguments about those details with the locals, since it cannot be changed. After few bad experiences we have been informed by the hotel staff that the toilet paper has to be dispossed in the plastic bins you will find beside the toilet bowls. Otherwise they will get stuck and you dont want 6 people on a room not to have a toilet to use, do you? It is hot and sunny, so do NOT forget sun protection creams. We have few cases of skin burns. Finally, remember that waiters expect and live of tips, so dont forget to leave a 10% of the total cost on the table when you leave.

Gordon Haff: “Sometimes the folks over at Groklaw just need to take a deep breath and pop open a cold one. You’d have thought Linspire was making fur coats out of little kittens or something.”

Apparently it's been a month since I've said anything. No wonder people say I don't update this blog enough. A few weeks ago, Simon came to visit/make supper for some of us down here. It was good to see him again. Unfortunatly, after he left my fridge had stuff in it, so I had to leave it plugged in. That stuff I mentioned was mostly flavoured vodka and ice cream.

The weekend after Simon visited, I visited Victoria to see Gordo, who was on his last weekend on the west coast. I partied it up pretty hard with him and had quite a walk around Victoria saturday night while trying to find Esquimalt.

Before my mother arrive last saturday I figured it was a good idea to get rid of the ice cream and vodka in my freezer. So, I got to watch spaceballs with some friends while mixing some vodka smoothies.

My mom and auth Faye were down last week. I was partial tour guide, partial tourist this last week as we explored big basin, Stanford and San Francisco. It was fun to have visitors for once. I even got a lamp, some bowls and some wine glasses out of the deal.

Tonight, I went out to the Dana St. Roasting Company to see what was going on in Mountain View. To my surprised, tonights show was belly dancers. There was some very impressive dancers. It was a good night to go out.

(less than 900 emails to catch up on)