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When Geeks meet.





If you're coming from the Palo-Alto area, you really should take the 101
because it's faster, but if you have the time, drive along the El-Camino
to get a feel of the area...

The San Jose Linux Users' group meets about once a month at a Carl's Jr.,
which is a pretty sucky burger joint, that happens to have a "conference
room", i.e. a door you can close and a screen you can pull down to use
with a projector. No 2-hour-late arrivals will be accepted, everyone is
pretty punctual here, and my 26 minutes of tardiness got me a few painfull
stares.

No messing around with menus and orders, get a burger or sit down quietly.
a different lecture featured every month, I like our Israeli meetings
better, but they lack the technical side somewhere...
This time the lecture was about smarter file systems, Hans Reiser
developped something that sounds close to Novell's suballocation scheme
but (thoretically) better and faster. It uses Balanced Tree Algorithems
(the article is all online if you want a URL, just shout, I don't have it
handy) to save space. the problem is that the guy can't lecture, I would
have started snoring had I not started some interesting conversation with
people at my table (Dan Peri, with whom I work, and Jim Dennis who writes
for the Linux Gazette, and some woman (the only one in the room!) whose
name I missed). People in the silicon valley are mostly pretty dry geeks,
I must say... Dan told me of one San Francisco meeting he was in (that LUG
is no longer active for mysterious reasons), which took place in a chinese
restaurant and was much more lively.
another thing I noticed was the impressive collection of accents. 3
different american ones, one English, at least two russians, one that
sounded a bit Australian, one had the touch of what I thought was an
Israeli accent.

Oh Yeah, and there was this one guy with a cute Finnish accent... :-) Just
my luck it was the first time he actually showed up.

Linus is a cool dude, very open and friendly like I more or less expected
him to be (building an image on 3-4 newspaper articles is hard). He was
pulled into an interesting conversation with a few guys after the lecture,
it was mainly about compilers and linux platforms (apperently Linus
himself can't memorize the number of platforms the kernel has been ported
to, after counting the Nintendo playstation and all, it totals at around
10 or so). People ask him why MILO won't boot kernels after 2.1.35 on
their Alphas and he answers that he still uses 2.1.27 at home... he loves
GCC, and it's thorough linting capabilities, but he admits it's pretty
slow, especially it's noticably slow on his 300Mhz Alpha, compiles the
kernel at the same speed as a Ppro/200...

Finally he gets up, I catch him on his way out the door, shake his hand,
and we actually persuade him to autograph our copies of Metro with the
article about him from a couple of months ago
(http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/05.08.97/cover/linus-9719.html)
but spared him the embarasment of a picture (although I did have a camera
ready, but we already fealt out of line with asking for an autograph,
since Linus seemed a bit uneasy with the situation (he's a shy guy, you
know...) , Linus promptly zooms into the night in a dark blue Japanese car
I had no time to identify...

We take the 101 back home, fade out. I hope next time I get here they get
the sense of setting the meeting in a bar, I want to buy the guy a beer...
:-)


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