Wednesday
I showed up early and did a conference call for one of EFF's legal cases. After that, I found our booth on the show floor. My first impression was that the show was very tiny compared to LWCE; there seemed to be only about two dozen exhibitors.
I ran into Bill Pollock and his colleague from No Starch Press as they were setting up their booth; I gave them some BBCs and they gave me some Red Hat manuals.
Wednesday was a set-up day, so I saw the familiar scene of forklifts, masking tape, packing crates, carpet rolls, and cabling. I'm getting entirely too accustomed to the trade show set-up experience. It's always funny to see the contrast between a show floor's appearance one day and its final form the next morning.
Marc turned up with all of our booth stuff in his car -- panels, bumper stickets, t-shirts, hats, press releases, and so on. We unpacked it and got the booth into shape; I'd also brought some BBCs, which I set out on the table.
I dropped by the LANL booth and got a demonstration of LinuxBIOS and netbooting a cluster (which used BProc -- very, very impressive). Those folks are real cluster wizards, and very friendly. Ronald Minnich gave me the story on everything that was going on; I was also interested to learn that Erik Hendriks (the author of Two-Kernel Monte, whom I'd lost track of for two years) is working at Los Alamos in their cluster group.
I finally got to tell Erik about my idea of making a procmail recipe which allows you to boot kernels by e-mail -- sending them as attachments with a certain subject line. He was amused.
(Later on, I wrote to Michelle about the fact that LANL is a weapons lab, and their funding comes from a nuclear weapons engineering agenda.)
Nearby the LANL booth (well, everything was nearby everything else) I found the FSF booth, containing Steve Bibayoff and Bradley Kuhn. (It turns out that FSF is now making their classic GNU shirts in two new colors; I used to have one shirt in each color in which they were issued -- beige, black, maroon, green -- but now I've fallen behind. I bought the new blue version but held off on the gray until a future show.) I also ran into Scott McNeil -- who arrived to set up the Free Standards Group booth, right next to EFF. And I saw Chris DiBona and Don Marti and was reminded of the good times in 1999 over at the CoffeeNet.
Steve and Bradley and I got a quick dinner together and wandered up to the BOF rooms where Lee and I did the evening EFF BOF session on the effects of antiterrorism legislation on civil liberties. Lee gave a thorough explanation of the legal rules surrounding communications surveillance in the U.S. and how they had been altered by the USA PATRIOT Act. I wrote things on transparencies and tried to fill in details.
I also did the "CIPA, COPA, COPPA, CPPA" contest -- "Each of these pieces of legislation pertains to children and the Internet. What is each act's full name, and what does each one do?"
After this, I had dinner again with a group at a Chinese restaurant. At one point, some of the folks at our table got into an extended discussion of PC hardware. A man at the next table asked whether he could ask us a computer question. We said he could, but then he asked something about the Windows "Add/Remove Programs" feature, and we had to interrupt him and let him know that we were all Linux users (except for Bradley, who was a GNU/Linux user).
