Linux Lunacy Two

What I did on my Summer Vacation

Charles Shapiro 28 Oct 2002

Day 0

The trip started with the Linux Lunacy Two Cocktail Party, where I met Randal Schwartz and had the pleasure of telling him that I'd read his book while riding the subway. The cocktail party was held on the top floor of the hotel where the cruisers stayed.

Day 1

Getting on board a cruise ship is always a slow and onerous process. The main reason for this is that the ship must be cleaned and out of last weeks' cruise, resupplied, and ready to go out again for a week in a scant 8 hours in port. Wending your way on board always involves long stretches in waiting rooms punctuated by huge mobs of people queueing up for impossibly small ticket windows. Think Kafka or the movie Brazil.

After the usual round of panics and misunderstandings, we made it aboard and started to explore the ship. Neal had set up a registration table on one of the decks, but I got hung up trying to get myself fed and didn't actually make it that far. Eventually we managed to get ourselves settled into our cabin and everyone accounted for.

I met Steve Oualline while I was still going onto the ship. He is a wonderful, prototypical old-school coder dude -- very smart, somewhat difficult, clearly a master of his trade. One of my co-workers is going to be him in about 25 years. Steve's written several good technical books, including Practical C and a book on the vim editor. He has also written some fiction, although that's a lot tougher to publish.

He did tell me a funny story about working on a machine which used high-pressure water to cut tennis shoes soles out. The company involved had already paid for it, so they shipped every shoe sole they produced back to the company while they were debugging the machine. One day, they get a phone call from the manufacturer, and the guy is pretty mad. Turns out that they'd selected "9R" for a debugging shoe sole, and this guy had a pile of 10,0000 9R shoe soles. But, alas, no lefts. The old stamping machine had cut two mirror-image soles out at a time. So when the machine went into production, it spent the first couple of months cutting out 9L soles.

I also hooked up with Adju aka Edge, the juggler on board for the week. We agreed to meet later in the week and maybe pass some club.

day1.txt (Day one)

Day 2

Spent most of the day in class, got about 1,000 lines of notes. This was a very fun and cool class; Theodore Ts'o is dynamic enough to keep me and about 20 other people awake and taking notes through a quick but thorough walk-through of about 91 mb of source code. Very daunting; I took about 1,000 lines of notes here.

Day 3

Spent the morning riding horses in Mexico. This was way fun, if slightly dangerous. Galloped my (somewhat reluctant) horse a few times, a first for this inexperienced cowboy. The ranch featured more than one Mayan ruin site. The cowboys also put on an impressive horse show to try to funnel some more money out of us at the end, including a guy who could lie his horse on its side on the ground and stand on top of it to do rope tricks. Alas, I had to stay sober for the afternoon classes.

Spent the afternoon with Theodore Ts'o again. This was a more focussed course, probably the best in the group I took this time. Notes are here. Staggered up to the bar after spending way too much time typing notes and ran into Adju, who told me that he was real interested in hanging out and maybe even passing some club.

Day 4

Spent most of the day on Georgetown, grand Caymans. This is an entirely tourist-based economy. I went ashore on the tender and ran a couple of miles. After I cleared the landing area, I found myself in a lower middle-class neighborhood much like where I live at home. Saw a guy workin' in his yard -- but with a machete and a fire rather than an axe and a mower. I also nearly got myself killed a couple of times because the cars run on the left here, so crossing a street or running over an intersection involves looking in a different direction from what I normally do.

That evening is Linus Torvalds' chance to hold forth. He does Q/A sessions rather than talks now.

Both Doc Searls and I brought minidisc recorders and tried to use them to record the hours' worth of Q and A with Linus Torvalds. Only difference was, mine worked and his did not. I talked with him briefly about it and learned that while I had grabbed the instruction book and carefully gone through it with the device, figuring out all of its capabilities, he had promptly lost his instruction book and was not even aware how to mark a track on his minidisc. This seems to me to be an anthropological distinction between geeks and the rest of the world.

I spoke to Linus and he acknowledged his "Software is like sex.." quote. He told me that the most damaging thing that he had heard was when someone at the very first Linux conference had said in response

to him, "So. How do you know?".

A fellow cruiser and I managed to squirt the recording of the conference from the minidisc recorder and through a double-ended miniature phono plug cord into his sound card and onto his disk. From there we were able to create an Ogg Vorbis file which he uploaded to the website run by his college. We told Neal about it and he put the URL from this file in his geek cruises newsletter, from which a reporter from C|Net picked it up and wrote an article proclaiming that kernel 2.6 would be available around June of 2003. This got coverage in slashdot, C|Net, and Linux Today. I am suitably impressed.

Day 4 notes

Day 5

Landed in Jamaica. I almost missed the Jamaica Linux Users Group meeting. Neal was on the dock early, and a bunch of folks headed over there before I arrived. A small group of us showed up around 08:45, and Theodore Ts'o and I found ourselves wandering aimlessly trying to figure out what had happened and where we should go. Fortunately I managed to pull "The Ruins" out of my head, and so we walked the 7 minutes or so to the meeting.

I walked in to hear a fairly standard marketing speech by the local IBM guy, praising Linux and explaining how wonderful it was. Sounded like preaching to the choir to me.

After, I talked briefly with the Head Guy in Charge of the Jamaican Linux Users Group, and handed him the keychain PDA still in its blister pack which I'd brought over to give away. I hope he finds some good use for it. He was Donavon Campbell, donavon.campbell@digitalaccesscomNOSPAM.com.

I also talked to a Peace Corps volunteer who was involved in digital access/education on Jamaica. He said that the Peace Corps was getting more heavily into Information Technology transfer. Local infrastructure is pretty daunting -- T3s are available but are fabulously expensive, and a 'permanent' IP address (actually a guaranteed lease) is $700 a month. He's trying to persuade folks that hosting their own websites is a good idea, but so far it's an uphill fight. Most folks here are dial-up, but he said that they'd applied for a telephone line 2 months ago and still didn't have it provisioned.

Poverty and wealth are pretty much cheek by jowl here. We were in a very nice restaurant with a waterfall and water pool hard by the banquet room, but this guy's girl friend was working in a row of houses which has no plumbing, where each house is just large enough to contain a bed and the sewage periodically floods in. Construction workers here just move in to the construction site; most people squat on their land and real-estate transfers are extremely tricky.

The Jamaican Linux Users Group here is about 3 years old and still pretty small. I got the impression they don't have regular speakers or meetings.

Notes

Day 6

We spent this day entirely at sea. I was in class almost all of it. My notes are here.

Day 7

I spent this day at 'Half Moon Cay', Holland America's private bahamian island. It was originally 'Little San Salvador', then purchased (or permanently leased) by Holland America in either 1996 or 1997. I have conflicting reports on what the actual year was. Went on a 'nature hike' here. The hike was excellent and wonderful, the guide much less so. She had a good peasant's knowledge of local flora and fauna, but most of the substance of her talk was clearly from xeroxed corporate material. She also talked REALLY LOUD, so any animal with ears and an ounce of sense was long gone by the time our (relatively small) group was anywhere nearby. Still, the island is host to an interesting community of creatures, including lizards, land crabs, land hermit crabs, several varieties of snakes, different kinds of spiders, and birds. We surprised a lizard stalking a grasshopper on the trail. I also learned that locals use sea grape leaves as bread-baking pans.

The island gets a fair amount of water, but because the soil is almost entirely sand none of the water stays for very long. Every vertibrate burrows to escape the sun and the heat. The island is even home to a burrowing owl. No tree there is much higher than 12 feet or so, probably because of the periodic storms which sweep over the land. Termites build nests on fallen wood -- our guide claimed that these termites could bite and I did not care to test her assertion.

Ten people live on Little San Salvador; they oversee the desalinization plants which are the only source of water there, and take care of the gardens, 20th-century ruins, and fiberglass 'cannons' for the tourists which Holland America Lines have put on the site. Many people, including the nature guide, commute from Eleuthera Island to work on Little San Salvador. Their day starts around 4 in the mornijng with a 2-hour boat commute to Little San Salvador, and it ends with the 2-hour commute back at 4 pm. Phew. The bahamas are beautiful, but life is tough there if you want to raise a family.

In the afternoon I managed to hook up with Adju and spend some quality juggling time on the ship. Adju -- aka Edge -- is an interesting juggler who's made a specialty of prop tricks with diabolos. I was able to teach him some new stuff with right-left hand club passing.

Day 8

In contrast to getting on the boat, the debarcation process is quick and businesslike. I spent a funny half-hour or so with Eric Raymond and his wife Cathy waiting around in the theater, and then wangled through customs and the airport back to my Real Life.

Pictures! We gotz Pictures

This is a lot of prose. Here's some pictures...

• http://www.geekcruises.com/Linux_Lunacy_02/pages/
• http://www.lnxfan.org/
• http://linuxlunacy.rackspace.com/
• http://thunk.org/gallery

Sounds of the Cruise!

(Courtesy of TJ Miller Jr for webspace and technical help)

• http://www.datc.tec.ut.us/Linux/linusq-a.ogg (37 mb)
• http://www.datc.tec.ut.us/Linux/ll2speakers1.ogg (67 mb)
• http://www.datc.tec.ut.us/Linux/ll2speakers2.ogg (51 mb)

-- CharlesShapiro - 29 Oct 2002