I actually bought some heavenly hash ice cream before writing that cryptographer joke in my previous entry. I'd been writing about SHA1, and went to the supermarket, and somehow the ice cream jumped out at me, and then I got it home and said "Oh!".
The phrase "Non est hic mercatus per corios multos!" ("This is not multi-level marketing!") comes from my Latin spam (which, like much real-world spam, contains several grammatical errors). Also, it should probably be "non est hoc mercatus, etc.".
Even though I got away, it still took me about a week to produce a new diary entry.
I escaped from my captors because they forgot to say "in the negative" instead of "'no'" when they were interrogating me with coercive logic. So I was able to answer "nope", which was a correct and consistent negative answer and nonetheless allowed me to get away.
Other prisoners were not so lucky, and were forced to sit at a desk for years, calculating by hand the explicit numerical value of the Gödel number of "This statement has no proof in Principia Mathematica".
We had what was nominally an LNX-BBC meeting, but it was really more of a social gathering, and people helped me clean up a bit.
Our home wireless network is called "catenary". When Andrew managed to get a laptop to detect it, we said:
"Way to go, robot! You found catenary!"
Quinn pointed to an article by Barbara Kingsolver from Kingsolver's new book of essays. It has an interesting perspective on genetic engineering. Among other things, it criticizes genetic engineering for its supposed disregard of the important of biodiversity. Allegedly, engineers want to create one true variety of any given organism, and then have people raise only that particular variety, at the expense of all others.
I don't think most genetic engineers have conscious ambitions anything like that, but on the other hand, that impulse is very real among technology enthusiasts. It is difficult for us to believe that a technical problem like adaptation can't be solved directly by Engineering effort. Diversity as a virtue is not very deeply ingrained (heh!) in technical culture. At least, you wouldn't think so if you heard people talk about operating systems. :-)
I saw a huge number of people, including Riana, Michelle, Sumana, and my high school friends Josh and Michael. I also got to see Cody's Books and the Perseid meteor shower on Monday, thanks to Sumana's driving and sense of adventure.
Soon after the weekend, I got to meet EFF's client Bunnie and hear him give his Xbox paper at the CHES conference. I had a nice time at dinner with Bunnie and EFF folks after the conference. Bunnie's next project should be pretty interesting, too.
I was at LWCE briefly on Wednesday and for a while on Thursday.
LinuxWorld is still less fun than it was when it got started. I still remember the first LWCE very fondly. "We haven't had that spirit here since 1999." But it's interesting and still pretty well-attended by people I know.
The mix of companies exhibiting is changing. Some of the early exhibitors are out of business or in a different line of business. The processor vendors were out in force, as were some of the old-line IT companies. Perhaps it's just another trade show for them.
I saw the famous Microsoft booth and spent a little while looking at an implementation of Unix for the Windows NT kernel. It was pretty faithful, and far ahead of both MKS and Cygwin. You could write ksh scripts and you could run all the traditional Unix programs with their traditional options.
I fired up vi and typed
int main(void){
printf("Hello, Microsoft world!\n");
}
and then ran gcc to compile my program. It worked fine, of course.
Notably absent from the distribution were GNU programs other than gcc. The exhibitor who was showing me the system said it was BSD-based (in fact, running strings on several of the binaries showed the string "OpenBSD" with some frequency) and that "We were trying to minimize the number of GPL components". So no seq (from GNU sh-utils) and no modern GNUish stuff like rsync. As Larry Augustin explains in Revolution OS (which I watched part of on Thursday), people who set up proprietary Unixes in the past would typically spend a lot of time downloading and compiling GNU tools. It would have added a bit to this particular proprietary Unix.
The Microsoft representatives weren't very interested in talking about free software. At one point I was told that the product I was looking at cost only $100. (Subsequently I got a time-limited demo disk which contained software of which the use was purportedly subject to a EULA.) "I make software which is a bit cheaper than that", I said.
"Well ... you don't get 24-hour support."
Anyway, it was funny to be reminded that the Unix world has split up into a free software component and a non-free component. Microsoft, of course, was long the world's leading PC Unix vendor! But, as Jim Dennis says, "Linux is the mainstream Unix now".
On another day, I walked back into the booth to ask about Palladium. (I didn't want them to see my name, because supposedly "The best technical description [of Palladium] is the summary of a meeting with Microsoft engineers by Seth Schoen of the EFF", and being Seth Schoen is therefore inconvenient when you want to ask basic and uninformed questions about Palladium.) I was told that nobody qualified to talk about Palladium had come along to LWCE, and I suggested that they should bring such qualified people to futher LWCEs, since the free software world was extremely interested in the subject.
The nice folks at Bradford Learning decided to pay for the printing of another batch of copies of LNX-BBC 1.618 (the version from one year ago, which is still the most recently released version). So we had copies in the EFF booth, and there are lots of other copies floating around. Some of them were branded as "Bradford Learning" BBCs -- with credit given to LNX-BBC for development -- and others were printed with the traditional LNX-BBC cover art. All of them, as far as I know, had identical contents.
On Wednesday, I had dinner at the 21st Amendment with Kragen, Danny, Yoz Grahame, and Lisa Rein.
On Thursday, we had a party here, which was well-attended and made me especially glad I'd managed to clean up over the weekend. I had food from Shiki (on Third Street, where I used to live) and from Zante's Indian Pizza. I'm nostalgic, but to be properly nostalgic, as I said, you have to have other people around.
Unfortunately, Something Wonderful, a Precita Eyes mural on one of the supports for the freeway overpass above Third Street near Harrison, is gone -- it's been painted over!
The mural used to say, in a speech bubble,
It is -- I just feel something wonderful is about to happen.
Riana suggests, or maybe I suggest, that people should form a posse: Something Wonderful Has a Posse. Like "17 Reasons Has a Posse".
It turned out that at least two people I know have moved away from the Bay Area, and I only found out because I invited them to a party and they replied with observations on just how difficult it would be for them to attend.
But today you closed the door and said
"We have to get a move on.
It's just that time of year when we push ourselves ahead,
We push ourselves ahead."
And it was cloudy in the morning,
And it rained as you drove away,
And the same things looked different.
It's the end of the summer,
It's the end of the summer,
When you move to another place...(Dar Williams, "The End of the Summer")
Contact: Seth David Schoen
