I gave a talk at OSCON 2005 yesterday about the "State of the Linux kernel". As OSCON is primarily a language conference, it was pretty lightly atteneded. Someone said that there was a Sun employee that was upset at my talk saying, "There's no technical information here." I took that as a compliment as I wasn't trying to give a technical talk, as that's not the crowd at this conference.

I ended up giving the talk again at the O'Reilly booth later in the day as the three people who were there wanted to see it (they didn't catch it earlier in the day.) As I rushed through the talk (cramming it into 30 minutes instead of 50), a crowd grew. At the end I was pretty happy about this, until someone pointed out that Damian Conway was waiting to give a talk about regular expressions and that's what people were probably wanting to see.

No wonder no one seemed to flinch when I stated near the end of the talk, "Binary drivers are illegal"

Later that evening, the Annual Portland kernel BBQ thrown by Pat Mochel seemed to be great success. There were people successfully playing some odd version of croquet, having to handle a toddler picking up the balls and throwning them in a wading pool, and lots of interesting conversation with the locals and visiting guests.

posted Thu, 04 Aug 2005 in [/diary]