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Beanie Award Wrapup
The awards began predictably enough as Hemos narrowly took home the Hemos award. It amazes me how many people actually abstained rather than vote for Hemos, but alas, he still won. *grin* The award for Best Dressed went to Tux. Sadly, no one ever thought to nominate or vote for the fine women of FreeBSD, and Tux didn't even bother to show up for the award, leaving me with no one to hug. *pout* However, an Anonymous Coward was on hand to accept the Favorite Comment Poster award, as was CmdrTaco for the Favorite Author award. The Best Slashdot Story went to Quickies, and the Cluestick award for FUD went to Microsoft. Also, the pair of "Bully" awards for domain bullying and patent bullying went to Etoys and Amazon, repsectively.
The fun awards done with, it was time to get a little more serious (but not much) for the two grand awards. Best Unix Desktop Eyecandy went to Enlightenment, and Best Unix Earcandy went to XMMS. Best Desktop Theme went to BrushedMetal, which everyone uses at least a part of. The Best Perl Module award went to CGI, the best Apache Module award went to mod_perl, and the Best Open Source Text Editor went to vim. It's good to see things that I couldn't do my job without get some recognition, although I could probably have said the same about any of the nominees (except for Emacs, but that's a different matter entirely *grin*) The "Most Deserving of $2000" award went to Debian, while the Best Book award went to Programming Perl. Finally in this award category, the Non-graphical and Graphical Interface awards went to Pine and The GIMP, respectively.
The award for Most Improved Kernel Module went to USB, probably because it went from non-existent to usable in so short of a time. Alan Cox won the Unsung Hero award and immediately donated his winnings to the DVD defense fund, proving that he is indeed worthy of the name hero. Best Newbie Helper went to Tom Christiansen, famous for helping newbies find their way out of #perl (I'm kidding! Okay, only a little. Tom still rocks in my book.) and Most Deserving Open Source Charity went to the FSF. Best Open Source Advocate went to Linus Torvalds, surprisingly enough, but advocating by doing is one of the best ways to do it.
Finally, the Big Award for Most Improved Open Source Project went to the GNOME project. All of the nominees in this category were projects that at some point people shook their heads at, and now use on a daily basis, but GNOME just happened to beat out the rest.
Also, a new award for "Best Merger/Acquisition" was announced and awarded to VA Linux/Andover.Net to follow that day's news. All in all it was a good night, with lots of free beer and getting to know people who I'd only seen before on IRC or through e-mail. I imagine it was that way for a lot of people there.
Then I discovered that Enlightenment sucks.
It ran slowly, used icons for things (ick), and made a general mess of my X session. I won't even get started on the customization menu ("transparent" window dragging? WTF?). Maybe somebody really loves Enlightenment, but that somebody is not me.
So then I found Sawmill. Sawmill has the Bluesteel theme, and yet doesn't suck. It has no icons, has genuinely useful customization, and lets me attach a theme to as many or as few windows as I'd like. (I usually pick one xterm for Bluesteel, just cuz). So, I voted for Bluesteel anyway simply because Shinyblue wasn't available.
Enlightenment may suck, but its prettiness can be ported...
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
vim has always been 'Charityware' - if you use it, you are encouraged to make a donation towards a charity working with orphans in Uganda. On Friday, Bram Moolenaar announced on the vim mailing list that vim had won the award, and that the money would go to that charity.
Which I think is pretty cool.
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life