[Bitscape takes a few silent moments to prepare himself for the long ramble ahead...]

...

...

Must.... summon.... the creative.... and memory... focusing... mental.... capacities.... such.... that.... the.... tale.... of... this.... day.... can.... be.... presented.... in.... an.... intersting..... entertaining..... and informative..... manner.

[A few more moments while Bitscape boogies to the sound...]

...

...

I think I'll light a candle or three...

[Bitscape splurges and lights ALL the candles.]

Alright, enough doddling. As I recall (without actually looking it up), last year, I spent as much time writing a rambling about the event as the time spent at the event itself.

Heehee. Given the volume of info in my head's buffer right now, this one might be very similar. I have decided one thing, however: No Keslin porn until this rambling is completed. Otherwise, it just might never get completed. Thus, this is my vow.

My solemn vow.

lol.

Alright, have we had enough of the opening ceremonial silliness now? I thought so.

This morning, bright and early, Zan Lynx arrived at the Louisville Compound in his vehicle shortly after 0700. After taking a place in the passenger seat, I requested that we make a brief stop at the ATM. Once that was done, we were off!

A brisk and trouble-free ride down 36 followed by I-25, and we were there at 0800. The Marriott at the Tech Center, with plenty of time to spare. So we went to a nearby McDonalds and had ourselves a little breakfast (well, for Zan Lynx, it was a second breakfast; for me, the first of the day).

At 0830, we returned to the hotel, proceeded directly to the registration room (we did not pass go, nor did we collect $200). The staff had some difficulty finding Zan Lynx's badge. Finally, they just printed him a fresh one, and we were set.

First destination: Main auditorium, to hear the keynote. David Sifry, CTO of Linuxcare, was the honorary speaker. His talk focused on comparing the Internet and open source movement with the pioneers of the wild west, forging into the unknown. (I can already almost hear the groans from those outside the U.S. Oh well.) A good choice of subject for the keynote; inspiring and somewhat generalized, setting a positive tone which would resonate throughout the day.

At the beginning, he had some trouble getting his laptop to work with the projector. After much tinkering with all the connections, it was determined that the only solution was a hard reboot. Once it started booting again, the display came up. Then we, the audience, were treated to a nice long fsck session, while he continued to talk about pioneers.

At the login: Debian/unstable. Woohoo! A brave sid user. He started X (enlightenment), and then...

VMWare, booted into Windows, to load up PowerPoint.

This, of course, necessitated some explanation (at least with this audience, it did). So he went into a side tangent about Linuxcare's policy regarding which software to use. All the company desktops run Linux (even the sales pukes). If a task needs to be done, and there is an open source solution available for Linux, use it. Obviously. If not, then if there is a proprietary solution for Linux, use it as the next best alternative. Failing that, run it under Windows in WMWare.

In this case, he knew of no software under Linux that was adequate for his needs. Nothing mature enough, stable enough, or possessing all the needed features. So he used PowerPoint(y hair). On with the speech.

(This story does not end here, but I'll get back to that later.)

[This room is getting hot with all these candles burning. Looks like maybe the snow has stopped falling outside.]

He talked about how people governed themselves when they were settling the west. There was no federal government, so vigilante justice was frequently used. Squatters who had no government-recognized claim on the land where they lived would band together. As a group, they would intimidate anyone who threatened one of their members, including the "legitimite" owners of the property. Eventually, the government could no longer ignore them. Thus, "squatter's rights" were born.

Eventually, the winners in the west turned out to be those who had gotten there first, or were very inventive. The losers were the speculators, the loners, and the... other group I forgot. Bleh.

So anyway, the first pioneers were the people in the early days of the Internet, back in the 80s. The settlers came along later, in the 90s. The early arrivals at the commercial web were companies like Yahoo and Amazon.com. Because they were established early on, they are the winners. (Although I might argue that this conclusion is nowhere near certain.)

The losers once again, are the speculators, a.k.a. dime-a-dozen dot com companies.

And then we have the spammers and scam artists. I guess the Internet has its own brand of vigilante justice for those, doesn't it? (Nevertheless, he made the point that they will continue to exist until the fed comes along to regulate.)

And open source had similar parallels. (And I paraphrase from one of his slides: "God help us when the feds get involved in this one.")

Um... So that was the keynote. I think I pretty much covered the jist of it. The beginning in a day of open source fun.

After that, the question of where to go next. Choices, choices. So many choices. Birds of a Feather sessions ran all day, three at a time concurrently, in different rooms, each session scheduled to run hour and a half. The talks in the three large main rooms started at staggered times (11:30, 12:00, 12:30, etc), and each had an hour scheduled, plus leeway time between talks. Then there was the mighty exhibit hall. PLENTY of activity to fill a day.

(Advantages of not going as company-sponsored representatives: No booth duty! Free to do whatever you want the whole day. No requirements to dress semi-professionally (last year, the rule was no jeans). Disadvantages: You pay your own ticket, and it uses up a vacation day. A worthwhile trade, IMO.)

Immediately after the keynote, Zan Lynx and I were torn between going to the Linux Security Birds of a Feather session, led by Kevin Fenzi (who has occassionally given talks at BLUG in the past), and the XML BOF session, led by Uche Ogbuji. Both were happening simultaniously. Unfortunately, you can't be two places at once. We decided to go to XML land.

The birds of a feather sessions took place in tiny little rooms, with I'd guess about five short rows of chairs, and a little area at the front for the leader to speak. They provide for a much more closed in, cozy environment in which everyone in the room can easily hear anyone else who is speaking. Much more personal than the big rooms where the talks were held (but also a much smaller capacity).

Uche Ogbuji (say it 3 times fast) began by asking how many of us were familiar with XML. I raised my hand halfway. Several other people raised their hands. He gave a brief basic intro to how the tags work, and how it's a simplified derivative of SGML, and its purpose as a vehicle to store data in a common and easily decipherable format.

He said where to go with the session is up to us. What did we want to talk or learn about? There's no set agenda. The topic specifics will consist of whatever people want to discuss.

So, we talked about.... XML! Haha. Um.... brain fuzzy.... How it can be used as a datastore, interaction with SQL and database, and the beginnings of a standardized query language for accessing data stored in XML objects. Oh, and how implementing the DOM for XML bloats things up, especially when one is dealing with large objects.

I asked about progress in coming up with a common DTD for the various open source word processors to use. We have all these projects such as Abiword, OpenOffice, and KOffice, and they all aspire to save documents in xml format, but to my knowledge, there is no common DTD between them so that real interchange of document data can occur. Is this being worked on? Does a standard exist?

Short answer: It's a long way off. Yes, there's docbook, but that's made for writing technical manuals and program documentation. The term "word processor" is so generic and all-encompassing that defining a "word processor" DTD is a pretty tall order. Different features are supported on different programs, so getting them all to agree on a single set of tags is... challenging. Apparently, there have even been some attempts to do so, but that fell apart, for the time being, at least.

So that is a problem to which no solution is presently at hand. Goodie. I end up asking the stumper question. Hehe.

Of course, it was also pointed out that even in situations where the DTD is not known or understood by the application, the data is still there in a way that is at least somewhat accessible. Of course, since it's all stored as ASCII, if worse comes to worse and bring it up in vi to find out what's going in. Ideally, an application would also allow you to view and manipulate tags, and their attributes and childern, even if it doesn't recognize the tag or what it means. That is some comfort.

Oh, and another interesting thing: There's a big push by some of the big players (especially database vendors), to throw out the old syntax for defining a DTD, and replace it with a newer, more complicated, more data-typing-friendly format. They're apparently quite close to getting it through the w3c as the next standard. Something Uche is not happy about. Interesting.

Oh, and the urls that were passed around. I didn't have anything to write on, so I don't remember all of them, but I did cache a few. One person recommended xmlhack.com. Uche Ogbuji has written columns at IBM's developerWorks. (Another audience member strongly recommended that anyone interested in the subject read all of Uche'S archived columns.) Uhm, that's all I can remember right now.

<very old reference>
So maybe my memory isn't really that good. Sue me.
</very old reference>

After that was over, coming out of the XML daze, it was nearly 11:30. Zan Lynx and I split at this point. He went to see what was going on at the Linux Systems Administration BOF session. I used the restroom, and then wandered into the latter portion of a talk about the Two Holy Desktops. (I had actually intended to see the whole thing from the beginning, but the XML stuff was too interesting to leave in the middle.)

When I entered, Kurt Granroth, one of the core KDE developers was discussiong the philosophy and goals of KDE. Much of it, I already knew by rote. Still, it was interesting to hear the ideas coming straight from someone directly involved with a project. (On morality vs practicality, KDE prefers practicality. Hackers vs developers, KDE wants developers. Usability vs coolness, KDE favors usability, etc.)

He talked about how KDE was a bazaar style development from the very beginning. There was no gestation during which the initial code was developed in a closed environment. In fact, there were 10 developers planning it together before a single line of code had been written. Also, there is no singular benevolent dictator leading the project. Decisions are made as a group. This, in some aspects, contracts ESR's famous proclamations regarding Cathedral vs Bazaar style development.

Oh, another thing he said about usability, and how it is defined: What is easy to use? Is Macintosh easy to use? NO. You sit a person who has used Windows all their life in front of a Macintosh, and they will tell you it is most certainly NOT easy to use. Sit a person accustomed to Macintosh in front of a Windows machine, and they will decry its non-intuitive interface.

The point? Intuitive is whatever you're used to. If a Linux desktop strives to be intuitive, it must act like what the user is accustomed to. 95% of the population is accustomed to... guess what? Hence, if KDE wants to be intuitive to most people, as "intuitive" is defined above, it must mimic a certain platform we all know and hate.

He also discussed some of the cool stuff that's cooking up in KDE. Anti-aliased fonts. (Which he was using on the machine his slides were running on. Very slick looking.) Mmmmmmm....

I left before Kurt was finished to go to the adjacent room.

Next was the most anticipated speaker of the day for this viewer. As I entered, there were a half dozen people casually chatting with the man seated at the front. His name? Scott Draeker, CEO and founder of Loki Software.

[All bow.]

I'm never going to remember all of it at once here. This guy had LOTS of good stuff to say.

[Bitscape decides to blow out the candles before he himself melts. Too bad. They made a nice low level ambient light source.]

Scott Draeker: Gaming. What is the gaming industry? The gaming industry now enjoys an $8 billion revenue stream per year, including all platforms and consoles. Hollywood is a $7 billion / year industry. In terms of dollars, gaming is bigger than movies. Woah.

In years past, games have been developed primarily by programmers. Now, that is not the case. A modern game development team will consist mostly of artists, level designers, musicians, and graphic artists. Two or three programmers go along to write the code. Therefore, a game in this era can be thought of as consisting more of content than of being a "program". In that respect, as well as several others, the gaming industry has become very similar to the movie industry.

With production costs and development times increasing, in order for game publishers to truly make money, they must be available on more than one platform. It is not enough to just sell a huge title on the PC. In order to recoup costs and make a decent profit, it must also be ported to one or more of the consoles.

Porting to minority platforms. In the past, generally speaking, the method used to port to a less common platform (typically Macintosh) consisted of the game publisher contracting out the work to a porting house. Several porting houses would each give a bid on the cost and amount of time it would take, so of course, the publisher would likely go for whoever had a decent reputation, and could do it cheap and quick.

Predictably, this often resulted in crappy versions of games being released for Macintosh. The porting company would rush to get it done as cheaply as possible, so often the efficiency would be poor, buggy, and without regard for the experience the user would have.

How is Loki different? They don't contract to port the game for the publisher. Loki says, "You've got a popular game. If you give us the code, we'll do all the work in porting, producing, and publishing it at zero cost to you. You've already got the code; there's no risk that you'll lose any money through this. But for each copy we sell, you'll get a very large royalty. You can't lose any money. You can only make money."

For the game publisher, it's a no-lose situation.

For Loki, it's a strong incentive to keep their customers happy. Since Loki is doing all the support, and getting a slice of the pie for each copy that is sold, it pays off to make a painless installation, full glossy manuals specifically for the Linux version (as opposed to throwing in the Windows manual, along with an inserted sheet of special instructions as an afterthought), and generally do everything they can to ensure that the user has the best experience possible.

I can say personally: When you buy a Loki game, it shows.

Some things discussed during question/answer period (which was actually sort of going on intermittently throughout the talk):

Getting the games into retail stores. Scott Draeker said that at this point, in a lot of ways, it's easier on their side to just ship things to Linux-friendly online stores. But he acknowledges that everywhere he goes, he hears people who want to be able to go down to "the store" and buy Loki software. They're trying.

It's very difficult to break into the brick-and-mortar retail market. One thing I didn't know is that CompUSA actually charges suppliers something on the order of -- what was it? something between $20,000 and $30,000 I think -- a promotion fee, to put any game for sale on store shelves. Yowzer, that seems backwards!

Many of the other large retailers operate in a similar manner.

One store that does carry Loki games (without any such insanity) is Fry's Electronics. Unfortunately, they have a very limited number of outlets. None in this area.

Maybe next time, I'll just buy from tuxgames. Or SoftPro, if they start stocking again. Gotta get Tribes 2 when it comes out.

Speaking of which, he said that Tribes 2 is very close to coming out. The Windows version has gone gold, and the Linux version is ready to go. In the first Linux version, there will be a compatibility problem with the Windows version which will be fixed with the first downloadable update (probably to be released around the same time the game reaches consumer hands). Yummie.

He mentioned another thing that one thing that Microsoft has done very well in the gaming arena. The release of DirectX at no cost to game developers (beyond the cost of basic Windows development tools). This has caused it to become nearly universal in games written for Windows. The API has made it very extremely for game developers to take advantage of 3d hardware accelleration, sound, and networking capability without even having to bother with the underlying protocols and interfaces. Therein lies the evil genius.

Underneath the API calls the games make, nobody knows how things work (except Microsoft, although even that might be questionable). Networking code. When two boxes running a game talk to each other, not even the developer of the game has any info as to how the information is being exchanged. How are the packets formatted? What data gets passed? Is there a way that somebody who wants to write another client on the other end can connect? Only if they're using the DirectX library.

Loki has run into this problem when porting games, and trying to make them network compatable with the Windows versions. Their solution? Turn on a Windows client, and run a packet sniffer. Painstakingly dissect the data and try to figure out what the Redmond it is trying to say.

Someone asked Scott Draeker what he thought of some of the ever-increasinly restrictive EULAs put on games by some companies, prohibiting activities as benign as making screenshots for use on your own desktop.

His reply: "You got an extra hour or more? I could go on and on about this topic."

(My frank answer would have been, "Yes, absolutely! Take two, or three if you want!")

He then informed us of his former occupation before founding the mighty Loki. Intellectual Property Lawyer.

Wow.

He then basicly said that the whole intellectual property thing is like a pendulum, which swings back and forth, back and forth, between the interests of the makers of creative works maintaining control over them, and the interests of the consumers in the public. Right now, the pendulum is very much the side of the people who want control over what they produce. In the years ahead, it may swing back the other way. We'll see.

He answered various other questions about... various things I forgot.

Regarding Indrema: "The only thing I've seen them produce is a press release."

This followed by a playful "ooooh" from the audience.

Someone asked about the recent rumors that have been going around regarding some Loki developers leaving for other higher paying jobs, and the lack of any games being released for several months.

"I won't deny that we have had hard times."

He talked about what the future of Linux games would be. In order to really become a viable market in the eyes of larger distributors and average joe customers, a killer game needs to be created that is initially developed on Linux, and available only for Linux until somebody decides to port it elsewhere. That would truly cause a switchover.

It doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be a huge multimillion dollar production. The gaming industry, like the film industry, can and has been known to turn up surprise hits out of nowhere. Also, millions can be spent on something the industry thinks is a surefire winner, and it might fall flat.

Diablo was not expected to be the enormous hit that it was. Then the company spent millions developing Diablo 2, and it wasn't that much better.

If someone comes up with that unexpected surprise that everybody loves, and develops it on Linux -- whether it's open source or commercial -- THAT will be the turning point.

Scott Draeker of Loki Software. What a great speech, and I think I forgot most of the rest of it.

After that bit of inspiration, it was time to break for lunch. I recommended Garcia's, recalling how yummy it was last year. We ate a quick, delicious meal, served up hot and fresh. So quick that we actually made it back in time for the desktop panel discussion.

Members on the panel included the illustrious aforementioned Kurt Granroth of the KDE project (he is also employed by SuSE to sit around and work on whatever he happens to feel like doing), Michael Hammel, who used to write the Graphics Muse column in Linux Gazette, wrote Artist's Guide to Gimp, and currently is senior editor at Linux Weekly News, Daryll Strauss of the XFree86 Project (employed by VA Linux), and David Silfry, CTO of Linuxcare. (For those with short memories, he was the guy who gave the keynote.)

The guy running the panel, whose name I forget and don't have in front of me, asked a series of questions regarding Linux on the desktop. Questions such as is it ready, what applications are wanted most (David, from business perspective: Something fully compatible with MSOffice. Kurt: Software that I can easily use to capture tv shows and burn them to VCD.)

Oh, and here's a bright spot (continued from way way back there): During the panel, David mentioned that after he had given his keynote, Kurt had come up and shown him KPresenter as a possible replacement for PowerPoint. David said that the last time he had tried it a while ago, it had been inadequate. But after playing for a while on the recent version Kurt showed to him today, he said it looked like this would do all the stuff he need. So he will likely go back to his company and recommend it to all the would-be enlightened pointy hairs for regular use within the company.

Three cheers for open source!

So, the Linux desktop: In some ways, looking very good. Much improved from a year ago. In some areas, still needing a lot of work.

There. That was an easy summary.

At 1500, when the panel was briefly interrupted to announce the other talks that would be starting, I split off from the desktop debate to learn about something I was less familiar with. Paul Everitt, CEO of Digital Creations, was about to talk about "Open Source Content Management" (I know NOTHING about that, now do I?) On the spur of the moment, I decided to bounce on over. A couple minutes later, Zan Lynx joined me.

Paul Everitt began by showing a slide (displayed through the Konqueror web browser, interestingly enough) asking anyone who uses Linux at work to raise their hand. A significant portion of the audience, myself included, did. Then he asked how many use Linux on the desktop at work. Again, my hand raised along with several others. He commented about how the percentage of people who raise their hands gets higher and higher with each passing year.

Then, he went into talking about what content management is. And no, I'm not even going to try to reproduce the description here. Too pointy hair even for me.

(Okay, so maybe that last sentence really didn't make any contextual sense, since I'm not a pointy hair at all. At least I hope I'm not. Eww.)

Well, anyway, he told lots of funny anecdotes about their competitor, uhhh, something about baseball tickets, development demos not being available for testing without supervision from the competitor's people present, and...

I think the quality of this writing is quickly degrading as the night passes.

Yep, just like last year. I'm up all night writing. And I haven't even gotten to a couple REALLY funky parts yet.

Um, okay, highlights:

One of the funny things Paul Everitt talked about, which again seems extremely odd to me, is how negotiating contracts with some businesses to sign them up for web content management systems (a complete turnkey solution!), if you quote them a price that sounds reasonable to normal people, they will not consider you a credible source.

You have to give them some ridiculously high fee to install and customize software that's freely downloadable over the Internet. (Not that they either know or care that such is the case.) If you give a bid that's absurdly high, then they will believe you to be a competent partner to solution with, err... solution to partner with, or... something.

Open source as marketing. Their competitors, who have crappy proprietary content management turnkeys, spend many millions on marketing in order to get themselves the recognition to be hired by buffoons who are willing to spend millions on crappy proprietary solutions, which is then spent on more marketing. Even still, with all this marketing, nobody in the room even recognized any of the names of these competitors' products.

But when he asked how many had heard of Zope, a majority of people raised their hands. Digital Creations, being the tiny company that they are, do not have millions to spend on marketing to inform the public and the rest of the industry of what they sell.

So how was it that so many people knew about Zope, but not the products which compete with it? Open source. It's on the Internet. Anyone can download it. And they do. And they tell others about it. The word spreads. When they get it, many people also learn that Digital Creations is the company that created Zope. So when the pointy hairs come along, wanting to throw bucketloads of money at some company for support, guess who is going to be at the top of the list?

Tada! Digital Creations.

Another interesting tale he related about the Internet World Convention. Naturally, being the creators of the world's premiere content management system, Digital Creations would like their systems to be able to make use of content in formats commonly used by the unwashed fools^H^H^H^H^H public. Guess what format that is? (Hint: As long as this format continues to exist, there will be bitching, moaning, and wailing all around the world by the people who know better.) It's just one word.

Yes, you guessed it.

Well, Paul Everitt, wanting to do the best thing for his business, approached the enormously huge booth to see if he could talk to anyone about working together to integrate the data output by this unnamed company's products into his content management system. He was able to get to talk with someone who was apparently fairly high up in the organization -- a senior level manager -- to whom he presented this proposal for a business partnership.

The response? A very calm, nonchalant, matter-of-fact statement. "If people want that, they'll use IIS on NT." No hesitancy. No contemplation. Nothing to worry about. An attitude that this is simply how things are, and there's no reason for anything to be different.

"What about the users who are running servers on Solaris, and want an easy way to publish from your products? What about people who are running Linux-based web servers? It's the fastest growing platform on the market. We could help you with an easy solution to reach these segments of the market."

"If these segments of the market want to publish from Word, they'll switch to NT." No emotion. No big deal. Nothing new here. End of discussion.

He said it was like rubbing up against the cold, bleak surface of the Empire. Chills down the spine.

[Snow is falling outside again. Lots of it.]

Damn, I'm right up at 30k so far for tonight! Content! Content! Content! Content!

Paul Everitt wrapped up his talk by giving a neat little demonstration of the Zope content management system. I have to say, I was quite impressed. I'm gonna have to download it and play with it myself. Some very impressive features. Total web based control, support for transactions which can be rolled back, an ftp interface right into the web database. I suppose this is all old news to people who have been using it for a while. But I'm just now beginning to see the light. Hehe.

(Not that intend to give up use of my tailor-made perl scripts anytime soon, mind you. Parting with those just wouldn't do at all.)

After that, it was getting late in the afternoon. Time to visit the exhibit hall before it's over. A significant departure from last year, when even while we were off of booth duty, we still spent a majority of the time in the exhibit hall. Not so today. Just one pass through the place was all that was necessary.

Zan Lynx and I split up for most of it. Relative interest in booths really is a very personal thing, and unique to each individual. Going through solo allows for one not to feel rushed when someone else gets tired of a place, but you're still interested, and not feel bogged down when someone else spends an inordinate amount of time at a booth you would likely glance by and pass.

In my tour, I made it a general point to at least say a minimal "Hi" to the people representing each organization in the place. I covered most of them, although I think I wandered past a few that were busy talking to other people, and I didn't really feel like waiting, nor did I make it back later.

Anything especially memorable? The tummy.com guy. The first one I talked to. He was a former VA Linux employee who been laid off. The same one who led the panel. We talked a bit about the economy, and things in general.

Um... The Debian booth. Picked up a Potato cd. A good thing to have around, especially since I didn't have any cd's newer than... an old Hamm beta version? Ew. Talked with a woman who is just learning Linux. A recent convert from the CLUE meeting. (I remember seeing their booth last year, and I had meant to go to one of their meetings. Then I promptly forgot all about it.)

She was looking for a job in which she could use Linux that would pay less than... a really low amount. The reason being that if her income goes too high, she loses her federal housing assistance. Crazy. So she needs like a minimum wage job (or very near minimum wage) where she can use Linux. She wants to get out of her current Windows job, and go back to school. Not something one sees every day a trade show. I can see it coming in the want ads.

"Want to use Linux at work. Must pay low. Willing to be trained, but pay must remain low."

Wished I could've helped her, but I didn't know of any such positions.

In the odd and mildly disturbing department: Sage. The System Administrator's Guild. (I didn't think to ask how they came up with the E in that acronym. Odd.) A guild for system administrator's. Like a trade association. Okay, on the surface, that sounds fairly good. They ask if I want to know what they are, so I say "Sure." Then they give me their pitch.

"Sage. The System Administrator's Guild. An association for system administrators. Want to become a member?"

I'm like... uhhh... I'm not really much of a system administrator.

They're like, "You can become a member. You breath? You're qualified. It can look great on a resume."

I do a double take. Okay. Yes. This is a guild which anybody can join, whether they're a system administrator or not. It doesn't matter whether you don't know a bash prompt from a perl debugger. No tests to pass. No hazing rituals to suffer. So basicly, being a member means nothing. But you can put it on your resume, and that looks impressive.

Oh, and it does cost a $115 fee to join.

ROTFL.

I put the membership form he had handed me back on the table, and back away.

I will say this for them though: I like the bumper sticker. "Honk if you FSCK!" with a Sage logo at the bottom. Clever. Not quite clever enough to be worth plunking down $115 so I can say I'm a "member", but clever.

Domaingeeks.com, which is actually part of Fairplay. Based on what I learned at the booth, they might be the place to go with next time I feel like registering a domain. I told them I had registered mine with registered mine with Register.com. They said Network Solutions totally sucks. No brainer there. They admitted register.com is good, but they're also good, have quality service, and they also have web based administration, AND they're cheaper. Lots cheaper. Yep.

Got a funky little addictive rubber-ball-on-a-stretchy-string toy from the viawest folks. They do web hosting, colocation, that sort of good stuff.

Mm.. Got a tshirt from VA. Cool.

Oh, and a little cow from Linux Weekly News. Spoke with the guy there about the tucows buyout. I said that their quality seemed to be as good as ever. The place didn't seemed to have suffered any as a result. He said that he knew Liz and Michael wouldn't let the place lose its editorial integrity. If it did, they wouldn't continue to support it. I believe it.

What else did I do? Wandered by and said "hi" at the SGI booth, but didn't spend an inordinate amount of time there. It was pretty crowded. They did have some very slick looking hardware though.

Oh, met back up with Zan Lynx. He showed me some stuff he had found about the Accelerated-X server, and its performance edge over XFree86. I asked if it had anti-aliased fonts, and he was like, "Hmmm, I'm not sure. We could go back and ask."

I asked the woman there if Accelerated-X had anti-aliased fonts. She was like, "Uh, I don't know. What's anti-aliased mean?" Zan Lynx proceeded to explain.

(This led me to suspect that we were dealing with a member of this much-talked-about species commonly referred to as a "booth bunny", who are sent to trade shows not because they have any particular knowledge of the product they are selling, but because they have a certain "look" that is likely to catch people's attention.)

But then again, I could be totally wrong and off base. So not to bad mouth anyone, she was very courteous, and managed in short order to find someone could answer the question: Yes, Accelerated-X does support anti-aliasing via the XRender extension.

Still, I think I'll stick with my nice happy XFree86. I might just have to grab KDE and see how those anti-aliased fonts look on it. Kurt somehow made me think that would be a good idea.

Oh, and this other booth we looked at a little further before leaving the exhibit hall: This TGS company makes a library that runs on top of OpenGL, and is able to simulate all these realistic 3d physics. Looks very cool. Very, very cool. Some of us were very enamored by the demo simulation they had running of one of those old games where you guide the ball through the maze on the tilting table while keeping it from falling into any holes. Nice.

Download a trial demo of their library from their website (I haven't actually visited yet), and you can play with programming stuff which has realistic physics in a 3d space. Nice.

Only when he got around to mentioning the price (after Zan Lynx asked) did it become apparent that this was not something to be realisticly used by people who are in it "just for fun." Upwards of $2,000 for one license. Eeek.

I might download the trial anyway, just to mess around.

(See, if they would learn economics of scale, they might realize that if they charged $50, many more people would be likely to be interested. Then they would get something as opposed to nothing from those who take one look at that price tag, and say "No way.")

This is insane. I can see the morning light creeping into the sky. An all-night rambling! Yes, there is content here to be shared!

As we made our way out of the exhibit hall, we bumped into the same woman I had talked to earlier (the one who wanted a low paying Linux job). She was doing guard duty, making sure no one without a badge got in.

Just as we were heading away, she asked me about the shirt I was wearing. My EFF shirt. I asked if she had ever heard of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She replied negative.

I proceeded to explain how they are an organization assembled to fight for our rights on the Internet. Asked if she had heard of the CDA. Another negative. So I explained what it was, how congress had passed it in '96, and how EFF had been one of the major forces fighting it, taking the case to the Supreme Court, where the unjust law was struck down.

Then, I started explaining about the recent DVD fiasco, and how the EFF is fighting for our right to legally purchased DVDs on the operating system of our choice. She had heard about that.

She expressed her frustration at the region coding system. Nothing but sympathy from this crowd. She had wanted to send a movie that was only available in the U.S. to a friend in the U.K. Before sending it over there, she learned that someone on that side wouldn't be able to watch it on a region 2 player.

I said I didn't know for certain, but I had heard stories about region free players being more commonly available in other parts of the world than they are in the U.S. (due to greater demand).

"Yeah, but this lady wouldn't be able to afford that."

That sucks. The lower income are excluded from the "priviledge" of watching legitimately purchased movies from other countries on their own players. It's like the classic, well worn tale of the rich (Hollywood) trampling on the poor. Disgusting.

Zan Lynx reminded me that if we were to reach our talk on time, we'd better get moving.

Actually, there were 3 birds of a feather sessions about to start. All sounded good, but you can only be in one place at a time. Frankly, I thought they all looked so good that it didn't matter to me. Zan Lynx decided to go to the Colorado Open Source Projects one. I joined him.

This turned out to be the one part of the day that seemed rather lackluster. There must've been around a half a dozen people total. I was under the vague impression that it was going to be about open source projects that were being conducted by people in Colorado. Hence, the chance to get involved in a project where the developers could more easily get together in physical space. Or something like that.

Maybe it was thought that people who had started open source projects in Colorado would come to this one, and possible meet each other. If so, it didn't really turn out to be the case.

What we ended up with were a handful of people pretty much like me: Folks on the periphery of the open source / free software movement, who love the software, love using it, and might like to get involved in some way, but don't have much time [says he who types hours on end through the night until 6am], or have not really found a project with which to collaborate on.

Zan Lynx pointed out that I could be considered the project maintainer for the Content Collective code. Well, yes. It hasn't seen much active development lately, and the reason for that would be 100% in the chair sitting in front of this monitor.

Days like this do inspire one to want to get up and make things happen. In the days and weeks prior, I had been feeling rather ambivalent about the whole coding thing in general. Walking out, I feel like just downloading some code, hacking on it, making it better, and giving back the results for the rest of the world to use. It must be infectious. Being around so many great people who have done so much for the community instills a desire to contribute this goodness back in similar fashion, somehow.

Midway through the session, it was cut short for a special purpose: This year, the CLIQ had fallen short of the budget required to pay the bills. Attendance was down significantly from last year. The reasons for this could be numerous. The fact that it took place on a Friday instead of a Saturday. The dried up state of the economy as opposed to the bountiful proliferation of .com spending last year. Maybe the publicity and marketing wasn't as good.

Whatever the reason, they needed to raise some money. So an impromptu auction was going be held. The items? A bunch of tshirts featuring autographs from various members of the Linux community. A lot of them were autographed by speakers present at the event. (Yes, apparently very impromptu.)

But there were also some others. One autographed by ESR. And ONE shirt... just one... featuring the signature of an individual known as Linus Torvalds.

Liz Coolbaugh conducted the auctioning of items. Around her, the people stood in a large semi-circle which had semi-organically formed in the middle of the hotel lobby.

Most of the shirts signed by several speakers at the CLIQ ended up going for around $40-50.

When the one shirt autographed by ESR came out, that woman who is the president of tummy.com (name I can't recall) called out $100 right at the beginning. No one disputed it. Sold.

The rest of the shirts were auctioned off. Zan Lynx even bought one (Bitscape didn't, but he was tempted to).

Finally it came time for the very last item. A big yellow one with the CLIQ logo on it, signed by none other than the Great One Himself. I think bidding started at $70. But that was just the beginning.

The numbers quickly went up. $80, $90, $100, 110. Liz herself actually placed a few bids on it. There were several in the audience who obviously wanted that shirt. Everybody wanted that shirt.

Liz did a good job of hawking it. "Look at this material. This cloth has been touched by the hands of Linus Torvalds! How often do you get this chance?"

Upwards of $200, and then to $300. Driving the price up.

Then it became a bidding war between Kevin Fenzi and Luke Jones (the only reason I'm remembering these names is because I have them on the program; since they are on the program for a public event, I also consider them exempt from the general ramblings policy of "no real names without the explicit permission of the person"). It was funny watching them try to convince each other to drop out.

Then, at one point, when it looked like it might have been just about to end, Liz threw in a higher bid, which somehow led the two of them back into the bidding war against each other.

Luke bid $400.

Going once...

Going twice...

Sold! $400.

That was the end of the most amusing auction.

After that, came the unexpected surprise "Wow!" event of the evening.

The last talk of the day was given by Howard Cook, chief technologist at the Denver Museum of Science & Nature (formerly called the Denver Museum of Natural History).

He proceeded to describe, and illustrate with drawings (in PowerPoint, but we forgive him), the plans for the museum's upcoming Cosmic Atlas space exhibit.

It will be an environment designed to simulate what it would feel like to be inside a space station. A full immersion of starfields and hi-res displays on the walls, ceilings... everywhere. Stars, out in the night sky. Earth, visible from space. He was leery to use the term, but he said it was being designed to be very much like a Disneyland experience.

A simulation of what it might feel like to be inside a station on Mars, with a window viewing the outside of the planet, where astronauts in space suits walk around on the surface.

All sorts of stuff, which, if actually built, would be an amazing wonderland for anyone, child or adult. They are building it.

The Gates Planetarium is being scrapped and rebuilt. The new version will have the entire audience face the same direction. It will have an array of hi-res projection hardware, so that any sort of image can be blasted onto the dome. But that's just the beginning.

The thing will be driven by.... a whole bunch of really insane multiprocessor hardware. SGI and Onyx stuff. It will all be linked together through gigabit ethernet fibre.

The SOFTWARE they're developing.... oh, the software! A database. Multiple databases. Databases which can contain all the known stars, galaxies, clusters, astral phenomena... everything. All the knowledge accumulated by astsronamers and telescopes fed into a massive planetarium database. From Earth's surface: thousands of cities, satellite telemetry, detailed geographical information.

Now, take all of that, and imagine it being pumped out through some souped up OpenGL interfacing, and you touch the tip of what these people are working on.

After running through the hardware and software specs of what this is going to run on (operating systems: Linux and Irix), he unplugged his noteboox from the projection unit, plugged the projection unit into a nice spiffy SGI, and turned the floor over to the lead programmer on the project.

Asked for the lights in the room to be lowered. When it was completely dark, we got a good view of the screen. A space scene, starfield running inside a window (the window manager he was using looked very much like fvwm2, although it might have been another SGI window manager).

From space the scene moved closer into what was obviously our solar system. As the camera moved closer to earth, a very crisp, detailed vision of the planet's surface came into view. Zoomed in and out, and around it. He focused on a spot, and clicked and made a mark. Then he moved the camera back out into space again, hit a keystroke, and immediately, the camera smoothly made its way toward earth, gradually panned around the planet's surface, and ended up focusing on the exact spot where he had clicked.

Stars. He could click on any star in the "background", and have it bring up data gathered by astronomers about that particular piece of data. Amazing stuff.

Then, he started to put time into motion. The planets (all of them) began rotating around their axis, and went in their orbits around the sun. There was a little clock in the bottom corner of the screen, which showed the exact date and time reflected by the planets's positions. Their system is capable of calculating and projecting the physical location of interstellar objects with a margin of error of +-25 meters for every 3000 years that pass.

He put in the current date and time, which showed us where earth, and all the other planets were at the present moment.

He highlighted the Orion Belt with lines between the stars using the system's database of well known clusters. They couldn't do it in this version, because it's still in development, but in the real version, you will be able to travel to those stars and see how they're really spacially related in 3d space, as opposed to the flat 2d view we perceive from earth.

After someone inquired about it, he said, "Yes, it will be just like Star Trek's flying through space. Except this will be using 100% realistic scientifically gathered data from real sources, not just random blotches of light."

In the real version, the cities on earth will also be plugged into real satellite photographs, so the zoom into the earth's surface could go as close as satellite images can make it. (i.e. close enough to see individual people walking around on the ground)

It will be possible to plug the system into a realtime data feed. It will be modular, so other plugins can be added in. They're going to include all the satellites of all the planets in our solar system in the finished version. It's just crazy.

I would comment that the interface that they've cooked up is exceedingly slick. Circular context menus, somewhat like an Enlightenment theme I once tried out, except this thing really does it right. The icons he had on those things look cryptically beautiful from where I was sitting. Almost Enterprize E-ish in style. (As in "Starship Enterprize", NOT "enterprize solutions")

After wowing everybody for a few more minutes with the whole crazy thing, the lights came back up, and people could ask questions. The exhibit is scheduled to open in May of 2003. They may possibly make a scaled down version of the software available for people to use at home, but it's too early to know exactly what it would actually consist of, how it would be licensed, etc.

Um... If it is anything like what these guys describe and what they demoed, this thing is going to be huge. Judging by other people's comments, their reactions were very similar to mine: "Where and when can I get tickets?"

I couldn't help but think of the opening shot from Contact. Something like that, but rendered in real time, using 100% real data. Awesome.

After that wonderful demonstration concluded, Zan Lynx and I exited the building. We ate at Wendy's on the way out.

As we headed back toward Boulder, the snow began to fall. We made it back in short order.

Back at the Louisville Compound, I learned that bouncing had purchased a second hand professional racing bike, composed largely of titanium parts. Nice.

I've been kind of harboring this thought at the back of my mind that it might be good to get a bike. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Wowee. That was a very invigorating day. And now I have managed to stay up the entire night writing about it. I think I'll go to sleep.

[Clocking in at over 50k. Haha!]