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I've just recently returned from Linux Conference Australia 2003, held in Perth, Western Australia. I've had an incredible time, and this has easily been the best technical/Linux show I've been to since ALS was still operating. I've got a write-up below, and some notes on what happened, what's the plan for next year (It'll be in Adelaide, and I'm greatly looking forward to it!), and a photo round up. A number of other articles have appeared, and Kate MacKenzie's write up in The Australian was good as well, in addition to Telsa Gwynne's excellent write-up and Linux Magazine Au has some articles as well. Update: 02/04 02:42 GMT by T : ilovestuff points out ZDNet Australia's coverage as well.

I was actually invited to come to present the hacker survey that OSDN had done in conjunction with the Boston Consulting Group. However, upon looking at the conference plans, it was quickly apparent that that would be one of the few non-technical presentations, which was a pleasant change from my normal conference regime, in which the technical stuff seems crammed into one half day. I've heard that OLS is quite similar, but have not had a chance to attend. Nonethless, obviously my work withstanding *grin* the presentations were excellent - read the program to see for yourself.

I was able to attend Tridge's keynote, having only arrived Wednesday morning, a ARQuake presentation done by Wayne Pierkarski (we've mentioned it before). The afternoon was spent at Conrad's presentation on sweep, which is a hella cool audio app. Finally, the Q&A was Rusty, BDale, Tridge and Linus. Some of the typcial questions were asked, but there were some other questions 'round about DRM, IPv6 and some of the more social questions that were interesting. I think the DRM issues is one of the areas that some people are greatly concerned about, while other people have adopted a more Pollyana approach to it.

Unfortunately, on Friday, while I was presenting, there were two other presentations that I wanted to attend, but alas, had to speak myself. Rasmus, as usual, did a number of talks, and I was able to catch part of PHP printing with PDF, which was informative. Alex Reeder, part of VA Linux Japan also did a presentation on his work with bioauthentication, and my final piece of the show was Horms' presentation on Perdition, a mail retrieval proxy he's been working on.

But presentations aside, which were as a rule exceptional, I think one of the best parts was the relaxed feel, and the amount of interchange between just about everybody here. Almost every one that you talked to was fluent in Linux, programming or what not, which made for easy conversation with everyone there. The Perthites who really managed to put this together also did an exceptional job. To be frank, this is the only show I'd ever consider travelling 13,500 miles for.

I'd encourage anyone who attended or was part of it to post below -- and here's to looking forward to next year. One of the most amusing pictures though has to be the Linus in the penguin suit. The hats are off to the organizing team for their hard work -- and the speakers who traveled afar to be part of this. And from the wonderful uses of pizza box - yet more zaniness.

You can also check out some of photo round ups from Leon, Noel, and, of course, Marc Merlin's done a great round-up, as well as group round-up and one final one.

Overall, I highly highly recommend this show -- probably one of the best on the planet -- and for those in know, 23 will fall.

po8 writes "The 2001 Annual Linux Showcase (ALS) is offering free registration until October 15, to try to increase attendance. If you're in the Oakland, CA area, perfect! If not, plane tickets are really cheap right now." In the past, this has been the Altanta Linux Showcase, which was always one of my favorite shows to attend. If you can make it, definitely check out - run with USENIX, it tends to be a more programmer/developer oriented show, rather then marketing.

keithp writes: "XFree86, Gnome and KDE are sponsoring the first XFree86 Technical Conference to be held concurrently with ALS in Oakland this November. We're looking for people interested in presenting novel and exciting stuff they're doing with XFree86 at all levels -- from X server hacks to toolkits, applications, theming and 3d graphics. There's also space for tutorials, BOFs and working groups -- if you're involved in an X-related group interested in getting together for non-electronic communication, we've got just the place."

The webmaster responsible for putting Red Hat Linux in service for the Royal Family steps down, The A in ALS stands this year for "oAkland," DSS hackers can rejoice for the moment, and visions of Perl will soon adorn at least two continents. For more on these completely explicable statements, read on in tonight's episode of Slashback.

007 would prefer not to be required to go reinstall Linux. You may recall that in addition to various other pieces of head-adornment, the members of Britain's Royal Family rely on Red Hat, by way of their webmaster, Mick Morgan.

Brian writes: "Looks to me as if the Queen's webmaster is pulling out. See the letter at http://www.open.gov.uk/services/letter201200.htm. Let's hope the new owners keep Linux eh?"

Yet another yet another. Pittsburgher Kevin Lenzo wants you to know that June 13-15 in Montreal marks yet another Yet Another Perl Conference. They're also looking for sponsors worthy enough to fund their deeds of derring-do. Suggested reading includes parent organization the Yet Another Society and YAPC Europe (which will be terrorizing Amsterdam sometime in early August, CFP soon), and darn-near required reading includes the (and I quote) "kick-ass" Damien diary going at the Joy of YAS.

Do you ever suspect that some people code Perl strictly for the interesting conferences?

Hey, is there good barbeque in Oakland? In a clever move which might have caused Sherman some consternation, one of the coolest things about the city of Atlanta will shortly be appearing in Oakland, CA. A notice sent out by Usenix announces that November 6-10th of this year will be the next manifestation of ALS. Maddog Hall is sure to be there, so play hookey from work or school to go visit. The announcement reads, in part:

The ALS 2001 Program Committee invites you to contribute your ideas, proposals, and papers for tutorials, invited talks program, refereed papers track, workshops, work-in-progress reports, and symposia tracks. We welcome submissions that address any and all issues relating to Linux and the Open Source world.

The Call for Papers with submission guidelines and suggested topics is now available at http://www.linuxshowcase.org.

Submissions are due June 5, 2001

Revenge of the -- oh, I won't say it. A coward who failed to sign his name writes: "DirecTV stuck on Sunday a week before the Superbowl and wiped out 98% of hacked DSS cards. Supposedly DirecTV wrote to an area that is write once thereby making the cards go into an infinite loop. Now the hackers have found a way to bypass that sequence in the ROM in the form of a DPBB (Dead Processor Blocker Board). The board has a simple Atmel ROM that glitches pass the looped part of the ASIC on the DSS cards. DSS hacking is back."

Thanks to Jeremy White of Codeweavers for sending over some of the previews of Wine 1.0. I had a chance to see this during ALS, and was very impressed by what they are doing. 1.0 has Gnome/KDE integration, as well as new (better) config program, and some new launcher features. As well as doing this, they've also WineHQ, for all the Wine news that you can drink.

To all but a handful of a handful, a perfect filesystem would be boring: files would be where you expect them to be, corrupt files would never be an issue, and a power outage would result in nothing more than a few moments of darkness rather than minutes or hours of lost work. Even so -- perhaps a clue that the perfect example is far, far away -- the news on the Linux filesystem front is pretty exciting of late. In a low-key technical session Friday morning at ALS, kernel hacker Daniel Philips announced to the world the minor revolution he's planning -- which could end up replacing Linux's old standby ext2fs (and it's coming replacement ext3fs) with his Tux2 filesystem. Though Tux2 is an ext2 cousin in many ways, it carries at least one crucial improvement: according to Philips, you can literally pull the plug on a system running Tux2 and expect not to lose files or spend minutes watching fsck crawl by.

Phillips, an expatriate Canadian now employed by Berlin-based Innominate AG, claims 25 years of computer programming experience. He's had stints in everything from database design and game programming to embedded controller system development, and in a dual life which may sound familiar to many computer programmers, Phillips worked through music school by hacking Fortran code. With that background, perhaps it's unsurprising that just a few years after first encountering Linux, and a year from joining the ranks of the kernel hackers (there's a +5 informative thread in Zack Brown's excellent Kernel Traffic), he's come up with what could be a sea change in Linux filesystems.

A Filesystem You Can Live With And Pull The Plug On The central point of a journaling file system is that in exhange for a small hit in performance, file integrity is assured by an ingenious mechanism: rather than being written directly (and riskily), filesystem changes are instead first recorded sequentially in a running list -- the journal -- the contents of which are then acted upon in turn. If the system should crash for any reason while a change is not yet accomplished, the recovery time upon reboot is greatly abbreviated, as long as this "edit decision list" remains intact. Journaling file systems are on the way from multiple projects, and rather than being theoretical, wouldn't-it-be-nice daydreaming, at least one is availble right now: the ReiserFS developed by Hans Reiser is even an option at install on some recent Linux distributions.

Why another, then? Wrong question: Tux2 is not a journaling filesystem. Phillips says that Tux2 offers Linux users the chief advantage of a journaling filesystem (namely, keeping files safe in the event of a system crash) but without a journal, and does so more efficiently.

"The big deal is when you compare it to journaling, which is a popular solution, and you see that it's just plain writing less blocks. That's a big savings. It's also not constantly going back to wherever the journal is on the disk to write to the journal, so there's a lot less seeking involved. So those two things together means that it should significantly outperform journaling." Perhaps more importantly, Tux2 is not actually a wholly new filesystem per se; it shares so much in common with ext2 that it is built as a patch to ext2, with the filesystem converted at runtime. How does Tux2 get around keeping a journal to do the things that a journaling filesystem does? Atomic updates are the key. (See also: soft updates) Instead of a journal, Tux2 uses what Phillips terms a "Phase Tree algorithm."

"I originally called it Tree Phase," he says, "and then Alan Cox mentioned it on the Linux kernel list. He called it Phase Tree on the Linux kernel list, and I decided I liked that better." The Phase Tree algorithm is simple at heart, but takes a little while to grasp -- at least it did for me. Happily, Phillips has written a lucid tutorial on his own site. Probably the best explanation is the one found on Phillips' project site: the exerpts which I found most illuminating are these:

All accesses to filesystem data are performed by descending through a filesystem tree starting at its metaroot.

Normally, three filesystem trees exist simultaneously, each with its own metaroot. One is recorded on disk with a complete, consistent tree descending from it. A consistent second tree, the 'recording' tree, in the process of being recorded to disk, descends from a metaroot in memory, and some of its blocks are in dirty buffers. A third tree, the 'branching' tree is in the process of being accessed and updated by filesystem operations, also with its metaroot in memory. The branching tree and is not required to be internally consistent at all times. In particular, some blocks that are free in the branching tree may not be marked as free in its block allocation maps but held on a 'deferred free' ('defree') list instead.

At some point the recording tree will be fully recorded on disk and its metaroot can be written to disk so that it replaces the metaroot of the recorded tree. This causes the filesystem to move atomically between states, as desired. At this point, the recording tree becomes the recorded tree, and the branching trees metaroot is copied to become the new recording tree. This event is called a 'phase transistion' and the interval between two such events is called a 'phase'.

"The problem is, it's not nice to block filesystem transactions. If you're using a KDE desktop or similar, you find your desktop moving in a very jerky way while the blocks are getting written -- no good. That's why we make another tree by copying the metaroot -- that's how we always start, we never start one by going up the tree -- meanwhile this second tree is undisturbed by that and can be written to the disk in peace."

This additional copy allows the user to work without noticing a system slowdown, while the intermediate branch is copied. Thus, there are always three "trees," and in the event of a system crash, recreating the system's correct state is as easy as identifying the latest succesfully written tree. "Each new tree is always incremented higher, so this is easy," Phillips says.

"There are a couple of other places where [Phase Tree] is obviously better than journaling. For instance, removeable media -- your removeable media is usually slowest, and you don't put a journal on it, because if you did, it would be really, really slow. So you put the journal on your hard disk, and the data on the removeable media. As soon as you pull your removeable media out, you have instant corruption, because you've removed yourself from your backup. Phase Tree doesn't do that -- you can just pull out your removeable media and you have something current up to the last tenth of second, quarter of a second."

Sleepless nights and database integrity Phillips' work with Phase Trees began a decade ago, when he implemented a system with similar functionality for a specialized database called Nirvana which he had developed on his own. "I would have implemented this on a Unix filesystem at the time as well, except I didn't have one available."

Was there a Eureka moment in 1989? "Oh yeah. I dimly recall having a a week of sleepless nights, tossing and turning, trying to figure out if it was even possible to do something abot this, and eventually convinced myself that it was. And as I recall, it was quite tricky to get it to a hundred percent state, not 99.99. I could smell the idea in there, but I couldn't find it's actual realizaton for some time. After that, the generalization of its application to a general file system is pretty obvious."

Still, the idea stayed with him until he realized it would be an interesting way to improve the performance of Linux systems.

Like the puzzle with square pieces sliding around a single missing square, only scant disk resources are used to accomplish the extra data's movement because the information is moved incrementally -- in blocks rather than all at once. That means, says Phillips, that "It really adds very little [disk] overhead. Something on the order of 1 percent."

Additionally, it has one more feature which may appeal to the fsck-hater in you: "Really, it's nearly a defragmenter already," Phillips says. "It would be trivial to add that functionality."

The dual advantages of lower overhead and -- most importantly -- a close relation to the ext2 file system should make it an easier transition for most users. Tux2 is actually built as a patch to the ext2 filesystem; standard ext2 filesystems are converted to Tux2 at mount time. According to Phillips, that conversion takes on the order of a tenth of a second per gigabyte on a typical system.

Fly In The Ointment Though Phillips downplays their significance, patent difficulties may lie ahead for Tux2 as well. Network Appliance applied for a patent in the early 90s which covers similar ground -- a few years after Phillips had implemented it in his database.

"What really steams me in this is that their [patent] application came three years after my invention," says Phillips. "I hate to use the word infringe, because that makes me sound like the bad guy -- but it seems as though my [method] doesn't infringe beause it uses a different algorithm. In fact," he says, "I've got two things: I've got prior art, and I've got a better algorithm ... We can fence them in [legally], so their best strategy is to be nice, but they haven't figured that out yet."

"I don't want to suggest that NetApp got the idea from me -- I don't think they did, I think they developed it independently. The only little problem is the chronology of it. I concieved the whole thing, essentially everything that they've written in their patent, so I was kind of upset when I saw it. I would have gone on to do in on a Unix file system at the time, if I'd only had one available. We know it's stupid, but you see people patenting things all the time on the web -- just because it is a business idea that is now being done on the web." The approach that Phillips has to the dispute is to simply keep working. "I don't want it to become a distraction, I just keep doing what I'm doing."

Do penguins have calendars? Phillips says that Hans Reiser has approached him regarding integrating the file protection capabilities of Tux2 with the additional features of ReiserFS. "But it's pretty obvious where the priority has to be," he says, noting that ext2 is the default file system, and isn't going away any time soon. "Ext2 is what everyone has by default, and that's too big to ignore."

Does Phillips anticipate Tux2 becoming the default file system in Linux systems? "Well, who knows what's going to happen?" he laughs. "It could. But you can be sure of one thing, Tux2 will live a fairly long life as an independent patch that people apply, and I will be the 1st to apply it. But sure, of course I'd like that."

With a caution that fits someone whose last job was in embedded controls, Phillips warns against putting Tux2 in too soon: "It has to be proven, it has to be 100 percent. Because that's the whole point of this, is to 100 percent. So I think any bug which is not an ext2 bug already is just not acceptable."

And ultimately, like any other possible low-level change, "It's up to his high penguiness." Besides which, "it's quite clear what the next Linux filesystem standard is going to be. Well, it's my opinion that ext3 is going to be the most popular standard linux filesystem next year. And a couple years after that, well, I certainly will be using tux2 all the time, and we'll see where it goes."

The current status is heavy development: "I want to give it as a Christmas present to myself and start using it in my root system for my own development," says Phillips, "as soon as I port it to [the 2.4 kernel]." Soon after that, the code will be released to the developers on the Tux2 mailing list which Phillips has been assembling, who will work to make a public release in the months that follow, a process which Phillips says will likely take six months to a year.

"There is a prototype for kernel 2.2.13. I'm not going to release it -- I have my reasons for that, and the main reason is that the amount of cleanup to make it presentable to the public is roughly the same as the amount of work I have to do to bring it to [a newer kernel]. Probably if I'd done nothing else but worked on it for a couple of months, I'd be using it now, but I've done a few other things [in those months], like change from an industrial control systems job where they wanted me to do the next version of the control system in Windows NT to a nice linux job where I can hack the kernel."

Does this have anyone else itching for 2.5?

When Slashdot reader magenta was invited to participate in the Loki Hack Contest attached to Atlanta Linux Showcase, his first thought was, "There must be someone more deserving of this high honor; after all, I'd never even seen Civ:CTP. But after a few exchanged emails and a bit of chatting with various friends who all told me it would be a good idea (thanks, Ross and Joel), I reluctantly decided to accept the invitation, and booked myself a cheap flight to Atlanta." (More below)

The Hacking Contest Nobody Tried to Win -by magenta

I am very glad that I decided to enter.

First off, nobody there, including myself, cared about the potential for prizes. There was a great feeling of camaraderie, of friendship. Thirty people (including Loki Entertainment's representatives; very few people, as it turns out, actually signed up, probably due to some of the FUD spread on Slashdot regarding Loki's intentions) talked to each other as though they were old friends even though we'd never met each other online, much less in real life. We all exchanged ideas for hacks, bounced ideas off each other, and discussed means of implementation. The attitude was the opensource mentality at its best.

And then we saw the source.

The official Loki Hack '99 t-shirt has a slogan on the back. The slogan is "I saw the source and lived." This slogan is incredibly apt. At the risk of offending Activision (which I certainly don't intend to do), Civ:CTP isn't exactly the best-engineered program around. Imagine the original release of Mozilla, put into a blender on frappé, shoved into a toaster oven and let to sit on medium heat for a few days. And then microwave it. The individual pieces of code weren't too bad (if not inelegant), but the entire package wasn't arranged in any semblance of order. The first hack I wanted to perform was XaoS-like smooth zooming on the map, so that when someone clicked on a zoom button, it would do it smoothly. I couldn't find, nor could the Loki people tell me, where any sort of useful callback would be. After tracing through about 10 levels of indirection, going past hard-coded constants and multiple redundant and nonsensical calls to seemingly-random parts of the source, I gave up and decided to work on other things.

But I saw the source, and I lived.

That is such a cool concept. Namely that I saw the source. The source to a very commercial, very proprietary program, from a very un-opensource company. Activision put a lot of faith and trust into this experiment, and hopefully they will find that it was well worth it. In just 48 hours, a couple dozen programmers who had never seen the source before added in some incredible changes. I rewrote the map generator to generate quasi-fractal terrains with randomly-combined algorithms. The person sitting next to me changed the game logic so that different civilizations would have different abilities (rather than just being different in name, one tribe could run faster but be weaker, while another one could produce technology more quickly but not generate wealth, or whatever), which was no mean feat considering the network-play mechanism. Various people ported SDL (the low-level graphics API written by Loki for the purpose of having DirectDraw-esque functionality in Linux) to varying other APIs, such as Clanlib and GGI. One person, whom I now consider myself friends with thanks to this experience, added in hooks so that during a network game, you could launch an arbitrary program (such as tetris) while waiting for other people to finish their turns, and also added in hooks for publishing the gamestate to an external server, so that people can watch the game from the outside, getting a play-by-play summary for example.

I saw some very cool things. One of the reasons I chose to work on the map generator was that unlike the main program, which took several hours to build fresh and 10 minutes to link (on a quad Xeon-600 with a gigabyte of RAM), the map generator was implemented originally by Activision as a COM object. Sam of Loki decided to take the next logical step when porting this code to Linux by making it a separately-linked set of shared libraries to be linked at runtime. Of course, Linux doesn't have any good COM implementations, certainly none which are readily-available and behave the same way as MSVC's, so what did he do? He basically reimplemented the most important functionality (QueryInterface, AddRef, and DelRef) in about 10 lines of C++, confirming my suspicions that without DCOM, COM is just a C++ refcount garbage collector.

The competition (or lack thereof) was basically the embodiment of open source. Twenty or so talented hackers teamed up to make sweeping improvements on someone else's code, without any real desire for glory or money. Most of the Slashdot naysayers were saying that Loki was obviously trying to take advantage of talented programmers by conning them into giving up quite a bit of labor for free. Well, Loki certainly didn't get it "for free," as they went out of their way to be as helpful and giving to the "competitors" as they could. They provided everything, short of travel; they even rented a hotel room that people could take turns crashing and showering in, and when the hotel-catered meals weren't enough, they happily went and got food for us as needed. And of course, the best thing that Loki did was deciding to do this to begin with. That and coming up with a very flexible NDA which only restricts our usage of the physical code for the next five years, which of course, we weren't allowed to leave with anyway.

I can't properly describe how incredible this competition was to anyone who wasn't there. Particularly I know I can't describe it to people who are driven by money and recognition, rather than the love of simply coding. Again, there was no feeling of competition there. Nor did there need to be. As bad as Activision's code was, it wasn't bad enough to stop people from simply having fun and doing very cool things. It surprised everyone there how productive they could be under the circumstances. It certainly surprised me.

Hopefully this experiment will be a positive lesson to Activision and other companies that opening the source can lead to wonderful consequences.

In any case, I would definitely like to thank the wonderful people at Loki Entertainment for enabling this to happen, especially Sam, who tried his best to help me whenever I was stuck on a piece of code, and Scott, who stroked everyone's ego in nice ways. I would like to thank the people I met there, especially Chris and Ryan, for being so cool to work with and knowing what this contest was really all about. I would definitely like to thank Activision, who made this possible to begin with; I look forward to seeing the results of this experiment, on every scale.

People who don't know any better sometimes think magenta's real name is Joshua Shagam.

chris writes "The Linux Weekly News, in conjunction with the Atlanta Linux Showcase are producing an onsite, web based daily showguide. It is running on the showfloor. See what is happening at ALS. Roving LWN volunteers will be covering the show and the conference sessions. " Well, the show's just started to get underway, and I'm about to be trampled by attendes flooding through the gates. That's my update.

Mandrake writes "Enlightenment 0.16.0 came out this afternoon. Come play with what we've been toiling over for the past few months. Lots of new features from 0.15 - come check it out. Maybe now we can go and get some sleep. If you are at Atlanta Linux Showcase this week, we've even got shirts to hand out."

I've been corresponding with a gentleman recently about the various US-Linux conferences -(thebazaar, LinuxWorld, Atlanta Linux Showcase, and LinuxExpo)-what goes on? What do people want to do there? I'd like to open the discussion floor up to this-click below for more details. So, we've been talking about what types of booths there are, what sessions there are, and what Birds-of-a-Feather sessions there are, and how often the show doesn't do what you want. That begs the question of what people are looking for? What do you want from a show?

And in the way of plugs, ALS is currently seeking sponsers for a huge LUG party down there, as well as for the speakers. So, if you are willing to contribute, or your company is, please step forward and help out. LinuxWorld has also exhibit-only badges can be registered for from their web site, for the Feb. NYC show. Update: 09/14 12:01 by H : Natalie Vercauteren from LinuxWorld asks to e-mail her with BOF proposals, if you want anything in particular at LinuxWorld NYC.

I've been corresponding with a gentleman recently about the various US-Linux conferences -(thebazaar, LinuxWorld, Atlanta Linux Showcase, and LinuxExpo)-what goes on? What do people want to do there? I'd like to open the discussion floor up to this-click below for more details. So, we've been talking about what types of booths there are, what sessions there are, and what Birds-of-a-Feather sessions there are, and how often the show doesn't do what you want. That begs the question of what people are looking for? What do you want from a show?

And in the way of plugs, ALS is currently seeking sponsers for a huge LUG party down there, as well as for the speakers. So, if you are willing to contribute, or your company is, please step forward and help out. LinuxWorld has also exhibit-only badges can be registered for from their web site, for the Feb. NYC show. Update: 09/14 12:01 by H : Natalie Vercauteren from LinuxWorld asks to e-mail her with BOF proposals, if you want anything in particular at LinuxWorld NYC.

I've been so busy on the code frenzy that I've been behind on the quickies! Tragic! First lets get the serious quickies out of the way: chris sent us the Atlanta Linux Showcase Tutorial and Conference program for the 3rd Annual ALS, comming up October 12-16, 1999, in Atlanta Georgia. Registration is open. Bl0w0ff noted that The dockapp warehouse has been upgraded and redesigned. k-rist sent us SimShatner. Here is a site selling a video history of Atari with interviews with the guys that did Pac-Man and all that early stuff. Someone sent us a link to another place you don't want to see a BSOD. Want some Blair Witch Parodies? irishmikev sent is a Southpark Parody and stairs sent The Blair Family Circus Project. How about a pair of strange places to put a server? Gareth Walwyn sent us one in a potted plant and GFD noted thatLinux Today has a story about a box that runs in a real Pizza Hut Box. If strange Linux boxes ain't your bag, someone submitted Apple Fritter which contains strange cases for Apples (Legos, Radios, and more) Jade wrote in with how to apply for the position of Sith Apprentice. and rjh pointed us to the iMaul (seems like a lot of stuff is coming in pairs today) Evan Vetere noticed that despair.com has new de-motivators. Matthew McCabe sent us tuxtiles which is taking votes on designs for "Linux Blankets". Since we're mentioning merchandise, I gotta plug Think Geek which is the first place I've seen with good stuff. They mailed us a box of freebies, but I actually woulda bought most of the stuff they sent me (mugs with #include <beer.h> and some sweet perl shirts and other cool stuff). Most of the "Geek" sites just sell crap but most of this was actually clever. We probably should also note that Copyleft finally has the new Slashdot shirts from our contest winners, they look great. ralphb was the first to say that Time Digital has an article on Slashdot.

I've been so busy on the code frenzy that I've been behind on the quickies! Tragic! First lets get the serious quickies out of the way: chris sent us the Atlanta Linux Showcase Tutorial and Conference program for the 3rd Annual ALS, comming up October 12-16, 1999, in Atlanta Georgia. Registration is open. Bl0w0ff noted that The dockapp warehouse has been upgraded and redesigned. k-rist sent us SimShatner. Here is a site selling a video history of Atari with interviews with the guys that did Pac-Man and all that early stuff. Someone sent us a link to another place you don't want to see a BSOD. Want some Blair Witch Parodies? irishmikev sent is a Southpark Parody and stairs sent The Blair Family Circus Project. How about a pair of strange places to put a server? Gareth Walwyn sent us one in a potted plant and GFD noted thatLinux Today has a story about a box that runs in a real Pizza Hut Box. If strange Linux boxes ain't your bag, someone submitted Apple Fritter which contains strange cases for Apples (Legos, Radios, and more) Jade wrote in with how to apply for the position of Sith Apprentice. and rjh pointed us to the iMaul (seems like a lot of stuff is coming in pairs today) Evan Vetere noticed that despair.com has new de-motivators. Matthew McCabe sent us tuxtiles which is taking votes on designs for "Linux Blankets". Since we're mentioning merchandise, I gotta plug Think Geek which is the first place I've seen with good stuff. They mailed us a box of freebies, but I actually woulda bought most of the stuff they sent me (mugs with #include <beer.h> and some sweet perl shirts and other cool stuff). Most of the "Geek" sites just sell crap but most of this was actually clever. We probably should also note that Copyleft finally has the new Slashdot shirts from our contest winners, they look great. ralphb was the first to say that Time Digital has an article on Slashdot.

I've been so busy on the code frenzy that I've been behind on the quickies! Tragic! First lets get the serious quickies out of the way: chris sent us the Atlanta Linux Showcase Tutorial and Conference program for the 3rd Annual ALS, comming up October 12-16, 1999, in Atlanta Georgia. Registration is open. Bl0w0ff noted that The dockapp warehouse has been upgraded and redesigned. k-rist sent us SimShatner. Here is a site selling a video history of Atari with interviews with the guys that did Pac-Man and all that early stuff. Someone sent us a link to another place you don't want to see a BSOD. Want some Blair Witch Parodies? irishmikev sent is a Southpark Parody and stairs sent The Blair Family Circus Project. How about a pair of strange places to put a server? Gareth Walwyn sent us one in a potted plant and GFD noted thatLinux Today has a story about a box that runs in a real Pizza Hut Box. If strange Linux boxes ain't your bag, someone submitted Apple Fritter which contains strange cases for Apples (Legos, Radios, and more) Jade wrote in with how to apply for the position of Sith Apprentice. and rjh pointed us to the iMaul (seems like a lot of stuff is coming in pairs today) Evan Vetere noticed that despair.com has new de-motivators. Matthew McCabe sent us tuxtiles which is taking votes on designs for "Linux Blankets". Since we're mentioning merchandise, I gotta plug Think Geek which is the first place I've seen with good stuff. They mailed us a box of freebies, but I actually woulda bought most of the stuff they sent me (mugs with #include <beer.h> and some sweet perl shirts and other cool stuff). Most of the "Geek" sites just sell crap but most of this was actually clever. We probably should also note that Copyleft finally has the new Slashdot shirts from our contest winners, they look great. ralphb was the first to say that Time Digital has an article on Slashdot.

I've been so busy on the code frenzy that I've been behind on the quickies! Tragic! First lets get the serious quickies out of the way: chris sent us the Atlanta Linux Showcase Tutorial and Conference program for the 3rd Annual ALS, comming up October 12-16, 1999, in Atlanta Georgia. Registration is open. Bl0w0ff noted that The dockapp warehouse has been upgraded and redesigned. k-rist sent us SimShatner. Here is a site selling a video history of Atari with interviews with the guys that did Pac-Man and all that early stuff. Someone sent us a link to another place you don't want to see a BSOD. Want some Blair Witch Parodies? irishmikev sent is a Southpark Parody and stairs sent The Blair Family Circus Project. How about a pair of strange places to put a server? Gareth Walwyn sent us one in a potted plant and GFD noted thatLinux Today has a story about a box that runs in a real Pizza Hut Box. If strange Linux boxes ain't your bag, someone submitted Apple Fritter which contains strange cases for Apples (Legos, Radios, and more) Jade wrote in with how to apply for the position of Sith Apprentice. and rjh pointed us to the iMaul (seems like a lot of stuff is coming in pairs today) Evan Vetere noticed that despair.com has new de-motivators. Matthew McCabe sent us tuxtiles which is taking votes on designs for "Linux Blankets". Since we're mentioning merchandise, I gotta plug Think Geek which is the first place I've seen with good stuff. They mailed us a box of freebies, but I actually woulda bought most of the stuff they sent me (mugs with #include <beer.h> and some sweet perl shirts and other cool stuff). Most of the "Geek" sites just sell crap but most of this was actually clever. We probably should also note that Copyleft finally has the new Slashdot shirts from our contest winners, they look great. ralphb was the first to say that Time Digital has an article on Slashdot.

chris wrote in to tell us that Registration for the 3^rd Annual Atlanta Linux Showcase is open. First 100 registrations get an OS-Wars T-Shirt (I have one, they rock) brazilian brain sent us an English Translation of an Interview with Alfredo Kojima of WindowMaker fame. Scott wrote in to tell us that the July issue of Daemon News is online and Jim wrote in to tell us that the July issue of The FreeBSD 'zine is out too. geophile wrote in to tell us that Propoganda 10 is out. More excellent background images to consume your free RAM. Very yum. erios23 notified us of a new toy on jwz's webpage. BluBall sent us a Slashdot reference in Salon's Silicon Funnies. Spoofs Linux and Slashdot and even me a bit I guess (well, my name anyway). And finally chrisd (who may be biased on this one) wrote in to say that VA is one of the 10 best companies to work for (According to ZD) ranking amongst Replay, Nokia and Novell. I suspect that Nerf has something to do with it.

chris wrote in to tell us that Registration for the 3^rd Annual Atlanta Linux Showcase is open. First 100 registrations get an OS-Wars T-Shirt (I have one, they rock) brazilian brain sent us an English Translation of an Interview with Alfredo Kojima of WindowMaker fame. Scott wrote in to tell us that the July issue of Daemon News is online and Jim wrote in to tell us that the July issue of The FreeBSD 'zine is out too. geophile wrote in to tell us that Propoganda 10 is out. More excellent background images to consume your free RAM. Very yum. erios23 notified us of a new toy on jwz's webpage. BluBall sent us a Slashdot reference in Salon's Silicon Funnies. Spoofs Linux and Slashdot and even me a bit I guess (well, my name anyway). And finally chrisd (who may be biased on this one) wrote in to say that VA is one of the 10 best companies to work for (According to ZD) ranking amongst Replay, Nokia and Novell. I suspect that Nerf has something to do with it.

chris wrote in to tell us that Registration for the 3^rd Annual Atlanta Linux Showcase is open. First 100 registrations get an OS-Wars T-Shirt (I have one, they rock) brazilian brain sent us an English Translation of an Interview with Alfredo Kojima of WindowMaker fame. Scott wrote in to tell us that the July issue of Daemon News is online and Jim wrote in to tell us that the July issue of The FreeBSD 'zine is out too. geophile wrote in to tell us that Propoganda 10 is out. More excellent background images to consume your free RAM. Very yum. erios23 notified us of a new toy on jwz's webpage. BluBall sent us a Slashdot reference in Salon's Silicon Funnies. Spoofs Linux and Slashdot and even me a bit I guess (well, my name anyway). And finally chrisd (who may be biased on this one) wrote in to say that VA is one of the 10 best companies to work for (According to ZD) ranking amongst Replay, Nokia and Novell. I suspect that Nerf has something to do with it.

Thanks to LinuxPR for this one. It seems that the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts have opened web-based registration for this October's Atlanta Linux Showcase. According to the press release, the first 100 registrees receive an OS Wars (it's a spoof of Star Wars) shirt. They also announced that Jeremy Allison, one of the key Samba developers, will be giving the keynote. The full text of the press release can be read here.

Thanks to LinuxPR for this one. It seems that the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts have opened web-based registration for this October's Atlanta Linux Showcase. According to the press release, the first 100 registrees receive an OS Wars (it's a spoof of Star Wars) shirt. They also announced that Jeremy Allison, one of the key Samba developers, will be giving the keynote. The full text of the press release can be read here.

The Atlanta Linux Showcase folks have put out their annual CFP (call for papers). They are looking for papers 1500-5000 words, with the corresponding talk being about an hour long. This year's Showcase is being held in conjunction with a USENIX tutorial session from October 12th to the 16th. I know I'll be there.

The Atlanta Linux Showcase folks have put out their annual CFP (call for papers). They are looking for papers 1500-5000 words, with the corresponding talk being about an hour long. This year's Showcase is being held in conjunction with a USENIX tutorial session from October 12th to the 16th. I know I'll be there.

Chris Farris writes "The Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts, in cooperation with USENIX and Linux International, is pleased to announce the 3rd Annual Atlanta Linux Showcase. The Atlanta Linux Showcase will be held at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta on October 12-16 1999. Interested exhibitors should contact exhibits@linuxshowcase.org More details will be coming via our website soon. " If its anything like last years-- hell who am I kidding? I ate half a tin of Penguin Mints. I don't remember anything except the head ache and dave and nate drinking 151.

Chris Farris writes "The Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts, in cooperation with USENIX and Linux International, is pleased to announce the 3rd Annual Atlanta Linux Showcase. The Atlanta Linux Showcase will be held at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta on October 12-16 1999. Interested exhibitors should contact exhibits@linuxshowcase.org More details will be coming via our website soon. " If its anything like last years-- hell who am I kidding? I ate half a tin of Penguin Mints. I don't remember anything except the head ache and dave and nate drinking 151.

Chris Farris writes "The Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts, in cooperation with USENIX and Linux International, is pleased to announce the 3rd Annual Atlanta Linux Showcase. The Atlanta Linux Showcase will be held at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta on October 12-16 1999. Interested exhibitors should contact exhibits@linuxshowcase.org More details will be coming via our website soon. " If its anything like last years-- hell who am I kidding? I ate half a tin of Penguin Mints. I don't remember anything except the head ache and dave and nate drinking 151.