BATCH FILE
01:02 PST 05 MAR 1999
A few more things I forgot to mention: Thanks to Kethryvis for gifting unto me a sheep plush toy. I have named it Muttonhead and I swear not to abuse him...unless nobody's watching. Scott James Remnant from segfault.org took some pics of the show, including ones of me, Rob Malda (who I met very briefly), Trae McCombs and Christine (the UFie who got the refund cheque). Finally, I have close to 200 e-mails to get through (not including mailing lists or spam) so please bear with me if I take some time to get back to you. :-O ALMOST TOTAL RECALL
00:40 PST 05 MAR 1999
Hey, I'm back in beautiful Vancouver again, with an update that's a little closer to being on time :) and that report of Linux World Expo as promised. The highlight of the show was, as expected, Linus "Da Man" Torvalds' keynote speech. He was introduced by the president of VA Research, Larry M. Augustin. Larry's one smart dude. His company won the awards for the Science & Engineering as well as the Computers categories. Most of Tuesday I spent orienting myself on the exhibit floor. I was tired after the trip, so called it an early night. One item of note was my badge: I guess they couldn't fit all the letters on it and it came out as J.D. "Illia Frazer. I was therefore some minor Web personality named "Illia (no closing quote). Charming. On Wednesday I did my shift at the VA booth. Not only are their machines rippin' cool, but they're going to release a very spiff product called VMWare later this month as a public beta. Briefly, it runs virtual machines on your desktop, which means you could run, for example, a BeOS session in one window, a RedHat Linux session in another window, and a (gack) Windows sessions in yet another window. No specs on it yet, but rumour has it that VMWare will be sold for around US$300.00. I'm there! The chap who pulled a shift before me at the VA booth was none other than Scott James Remnant of segfault.org, a nice English chap who spoke funny. :-) I'm glad I met him; later we hit some parties put on by LinuxWorld, VA, RedHat, etc. and drank Guinness. At the VA booth (it's all VA, have you noticed?) I also got to meet Trae McCombs, the founder of themes.org and now the manager for Linux.com!! Congrats on the appointment, Trae. I know you'll do a great job with the site. A little after 2:30PM a wave of UFies hit the booth. Off the top of my head, I remember meeting Kethryvis, Jon, Sierra, Christine and a really cool bloke who works for Cisco. Christine, by the way, is one of the very few who managed to a Windows refund. I saw the cheque. She says she'll be colour copying it, then cashing the cheque. Mike Warfield from the Samba team showed. I know there were many others, but I can't remember them all. My apologies if you weren't mentioned. I did finally get to meet Eric S. Raymond in person. Bright guy, and dammit, he does remind me of the venerable Obi-wan. :) The show as a whole was one very interesting, very detailed blur, but the one overwhelming feeling I got from it was the enormous steamroller effect that was building up. Linux has, obviously, accelerated into the mainstream, and in a manner that makes its success seem inevitable. I have some thoughts about the social and political elements of Linux that I'll be putting into an article in the next few days, so I won't go into that now. But in general, the Open Source movement made its voice heard at the Expo. My thanks to VA Research and Chris DiBona (VA's Director of Marketing) for inviting me to the Expo. I understand there'll be another Linux World Expo in August of this year (!); if the next one is anywhere near as good as this one was, I highly recommend you go, even if you know diddly-squat about Linux or Open Source. It's a great place to learn more about what is rapidly becoming the first, most viable threat to the Imperial Monopoly ever.
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