Funk Babblings

It's been a while since I've done a real update, and now I have a collection of geeky stuff to share....


A couple weekends ago I went to the fifth Ohio LinuxFest.

I was a little late, then when I got there I went straight to browse the booths for a while, then ran into some friends and co-workers. After lunch I went to an overly-short gathering of users and people (like me) who aspire to be users of that open VoIP system. I also went to a presentation on the Cfengine sysadmin tool, but the friend I was there with knew more about it than the presenter.

Then I went to a fun presentation by Catherine Devlin introducing the Python programming language with a visual solar system simulation. I already knew a little bit of Python and prefer Ruby, but it was good to see more of the Python side of things.

Things really picked up after that, when I went to a demo of MythTV, presented by somebody from Novell whose name I missed. (Ever since the second OLF I've been a bit disgruntled about Novell's participation in OLF, but this may have redeemed them.) The presentation was highly entertaining and also pointed out features I didn't even know MythTV had.

Next things got somewhat off-topic in a way I enjoyed, as Drew Curtis of Fark talked about the media. It was a bit like On The Media, but funnier and a bit more lowbrow (though not as lowbrow as I'd expect from Fark).

Finally, I heard Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center (and formerly of the Free Software Foundation) give a talk that was surprisingly entertaining and accessible. (At least I was surprised that a talk on the legal issues of Free Software could be so entertaining and accessible.)


One of the booths at OLF was promoting Penguicon, a "Science Fiction and Open Source Software Convention" held every April in a suburb of Detroit. I've thought about going before, but next year Randall Munroe of XKCD fame will be there, so we might have to go.

By the way, I wore my XKCD regular expressions t-shirt to OLF, and got many approving comments. Then I wore it to a bellydance dinner performance that night and discovered one other person in the room who claimed to know regular expressions. (He said his name was Ken, but I neglected to ask him if his last name was Thompson.)

Today coding_horror talks about geek exercise, including gadgets for exercising while programming or gaming.

Also today, ah_graylensman points out that people are working on LOLCODE, a programming language in which you say things like "HAI" and "KTHXBYE" instead of "begin" and "end".

Finally, after growing up watching my dad build things with them all the time, I now have my own (power, compound) miter saw. And for geek points, apparently they all have laser targeting guides these days.

Now if only the motion-sensitive light switch we bought for the kitchen worked properly with the fluorescent lights in there.....