Our second annual Geek Cruise, Linux Lunacy II, combined master tech classes and fun shore excursions with a week-long tour of the Western Caribbean.
There are trade shows, there are master classes, and there are sea cruises. But until Neil Bauman came along, nobody thought to combine all three. The result is a sum that's a whole lot more fun than any one of its parts.
That's why Linux Journal has sponsored two of Neil Bauman's Geek Cruises, so far. The first was Linux Lunacy, and the second was Linux Lunacy II. Both sailed for a week on the Caribbean. The first headed East, while the second headed West. The next will head North, from Vancouver up through Alaska's Inside Passage.
In real estate they say the three things that matter most are "location, location and location". Geek Cruises carries that principle to an extreme. How many hotels move from one ideal setting to another, treat you to food and room service around the clock, and put two pools, two hot tubs, a tennis court, a basketball court, a bar, a cocktail lounge, a volleyball court and a kids' playroom up on the roof?
For that matter, how many schools?
On Linux Lunacy II, more than 120 Geek Cruisers boarded Holland America's ms Maasdam in Ft. Lauderdale on October 20 for a loop around the Western Caribbean, stopping at ports of call in Cozumel, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica and the Bahamas. Sessions were held en route, gathering in meeting rooms, dining rooms, bars and theaters. The formats ranged from keynotes to lectures to master classes to Q&As.
The speaker lineup could hardly be more top-drawer for every subject --
I did the keynote, on "How Linux Got to be Everywhere While Nobody Was Watching". I judge it a success, since one guy told me it was funny almost all the way to the end.
The settings were geek-friendly too. Neil provided power strips so cruisers could plug in laptops, projectors and other peripherals. He also arranged with Digital Seas to provide wireless live Internet connectivity, which can be very handy for checking out URLs and doing other research while following a lecture. Throughput each time I checked it ran around 150-250kb downstream and 85-120kb upstream. Not bad for a boat connected to the Net by a satellite 23,500 miles above the Equator.
Charles Shapiro, a Senior Software Engineer with nuBridges, took copious notes on the cruise, including over a thousand lines of them during the full-day Introduction to the Linux Kernel by Theodore Ts'o. (He also published them on the Web <http://tomshiro.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/ALE/LinuxLunacyTwo>.) Charles writes, "Theodore Ts'o is dynamic enough to keep me and about 20 other people awake and taking notes through a quick but thorough walk-through of about 91 mb of source code... The course covered the major elements of the Linux kernel from about a 1,000 foot level -- just enough to be able to find the major subsystem where a kernel might be having trouble or figure what parts need rewritten for a modification."
I sat in on the same class, and found it a rich source of grist for Linux advocacy. From Charles' notes:
So far Linux is winning, for a variety of reasons.
It's almost 100% original GPLed code, with perhaps 8K of borrowed code, such as the Jacobson PPP code which nobody wanted to rewrite. GPL is good in several ways. The BSD internals have not changed in a good 12 to 15 years, which is good for experimenting with novel TCP/IP implementations, but bad for efficiency. For example, the TTY character queuing assumes that it is a vax. The character queue is a bunch of tiny nodes in a linked list, instead of just an array. This is due to hardware limitations in the VAX tty hardware. But Linux has gone through three or four complete re-implementations of the network layer, hence inefficiencies like this have been ironed out. It is not locked in to yesterday's design decisions. BSD also has stuff like "cylinder groups", which uses the fact that each track on a disk has a constant number of sectors to minimize horizontal seeks on disk platter stacks. Unfortunately, modern disks do not have this constraint -- they are constant density not constant sectors. Lots of complexity in BSD's disk access code was devoted to trying to heurist this out, but it never really worked and eventually was dropped -- but the cylinder group code still persists in the disk access code. ext2, by contrast, has block groups (which work) but not cylinder groups (which do not).
Greg Haerr attended Ted's More Than You Ever Want to Know About Filesystems talk, and said it "expanded my understanding of the key details in the design and implementation of the 2.5 kernel. In conjunction with Linus' talk, I left with insight into how the kernel guys go about making Linux superior, and a better understanding of the way it's managed."
Linus actually spoke three times: once in a long Q&A, and two more times on panels. One of those panels met on shore, in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, with the Jamaica Linux Users Group (JaLUG). The setting was The Ruins Pub & Internet Cafe, which is set back in a jungle of palms and banyan trees beside a perfect waterfall.
That meeting took place early in the morning, after which most of us headed to Dunn's River Falls, which cascades for hundreds of yards over limestone boulders on its way to the sea. Dunn's is an interactive river: the idea is to climb it upstream from bottom to top. It's a little scary but a lot of fun. We probably set a new record for the number of otherwise smart people carrying digital cameras up the middle of a cascading jungle river.
This mix of purposes -- intensive tech sessions between visits to paradise -- made for some tough choices. Charles Shapiro writes,
Spent the morning riding horses in Mexico. This was way fun, if slightly dangerous. Galloped my (somewhat reluctant) horse a few times, a first for this inexperienced cowboy. The ranch featured more than one Mayan ruin site. The cowboys also put on an impressive horse show to try to funnel some more money out of us at the end, including a guy who could lie his horse on its side on the ground and stand on top of it to do rope tricks. Alas, I had to stay sober for the afternoon classes.
On the boat, eating, drinking and shmoozing (along with swimming, reading, watching movies and gambling in the casiono) are round-the-clock options. The expert on all this, and much more, is Perl guru Randall Schwartz, who has been on every Geek Cruise since the beginning. Linux Lunacy II was his thirteenth.
I asked Randall if he ever felt like Bill Murray's character in the movie "Groundhog Day", living the same events over and over again. He said no, that every cruise was different and new, with its own unique character -- and a new cast of characters every time.
Randall expects to be back for Linux Lunacy III, of course. So does Linus. And so do some of the other regulars, including the our usual assortment of folks from Linux Journal.
We're also moving the schedule up to September 13, when we sail out of Vancouver for for Alaska's Inside passage aboard Holland America's flagship, the Amsterdam. "It's an incredible
ship", Neil says. And he ought to know. The itinerary includes Victoria, Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan and Hubbard Glacier.
Last year our family went on another of Neil's cruises to Alaska. The sights run from stunning to spectacular. The whole trip flanks jagged snocapped mountains feeding the sea with rivers, streams and some of the most spectacular glaciers in the world. There's nothing quite like floating next to the business end of a glacier for half a day, watching huge hunks of it "calve" off into icebergs the size of buildings. And that's just what you do on the boat. The shore excursions include helicopter trips, dog sledding... all kinds of fun stuff.
Commitments so far suggest there's a good chance we'll sell out early. Visit the GeekCruises site <http://www.geekcruises.com> to find out more and sign up.
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.