Tim Witham somehow convinced me to participate in the Penguin Bowl at Linux World Expo, which forced me to actually attend LWE for the first time (my previous attempts to go there was always stopped due to them rejecting my talk proposals.) Man, what a zoo. If there was ever anyone doubting that big business loves Linux, they should have just seen all the huge booths, and loads of marketing people milling around. Linux is real in a big way. Pretty scary if you stop to think about it... So I hung out and manned the Gentoo booth for a few hours (as I'm now their kernel package maintainer for I seem to be a glutton for punishment...) That was fun. The booth was set up and run very professionally, which was in sharp contrast to some of the other booths in the .org section. It's nice to see that Gentoo has some good people with very good people, development, and organizational skills. Then off to the attend the Penguin Bowl. It was me, Andrew Morton, and Tim (current CTO of OSDL) against 3 Apple FreeBSD people (Jordan Hubbard, Stuart Cheshire, and someone else who's name I don't remember, sorry.) We held our own for the whole game, but the other team was almost always just ahead of us. It came down to the last round, in which each team had one minute to list as many filesystems in the Linux kernel as they could, and write them down on a big piece of paper. We were 250 points behind, and every answer was worth 500 points. After one minute was up, we had to step away from the paper and the judges tallied them up. The other team had 14 filesystems listed. We had 15. Our last item on the list was |devfs|. So yes, |devfs| won me a beautiful glass penguin trophy. The irony of it all...

posted Wed, 11 Aug 2004 in [/conf]