Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Yesterday morning I resigned from the board of directors of Hamakor, for reasons which can be summed up as “it was taking up too much time and mental energy from things I’d rather do, such as write free software”.

I am still a member and a firm believer in Hamakor. It’s the overhead and responsibility of being a board member that I can’t afford.

Yesterday was the long awaited August Penguin 2003.

I woke up at 0615 AM, after having gone to sleep very late the night before. There were a few last minute preparations to make, and then we were on our way. Just after we passed the turn to Natanya, Ira called me on the cellphone and asked if we could pick him up, since his car had some problems. We did a quick U-turn, picked him up, and then proceeded on our way to the convention.

When we got to the building where the convention was held at 0830 AM, there was already a line of people waiting to be registered. More than 40 people joined Hamakor during the day. I immediately started running around, seeing where I could help, setting up my laptop to work with the slides projector and otherwise setting stuff up. At 0930 we started, only half an hour late, with about 120 people present.

First up was Shachar, giving a “state of the NPO” address. I thought it was a bit long and a bit “business centric” for the crowd we had, mostly hobbyists, but it certainly got the points it was intended to accross. Then we split into two tracks, a beginners track and an advanced track. I was “in charge” of the advanced track, and thus didn’t get to experience the newbies track. Reports from the field indicate that the first part, a comparative flamewar^Wreview of linux distributions went quite well, and the second part, “how to connect to the net with Linux” didn’t go quite as well.

In the advanced track, the first speaker was Lior Amar, of the MOSIX team. He spoke about MOSIX with just the right blend of overview and technical details for the audience. Not much new there for me, but a very enjoyable talk. The second speaker was Mr. Bouncy, Moshe Zadka. moshez gave a great, energy filled, talk about pypy, implementing Python in Python.

After that, the two tracks joined together for a geek trivia contest, hosted by Gilad Ben-Yossef. I took part in the contest, and had loads of fun. We got points for the right answer, and you got points for a funny answer. Unfortunately, the other team, led by moshez, could name four more Linux distributions than us and thus won.

Next we had the gpg key signing party. Since we ran out of time in the hall, we had it in the lobby. It was hot, there was lots of noise and the inenvitable arguments about the best way to do the identification stage, but we carried it through.

Afterwards we went out for food, and then Orna and I met a couple of folks from Eddiea’s Linux Development workshop who are considering working on syscalltrack at a coffee place. To my great surprise and contradicting Murhpy’s law, a demonstration of syscalltrack actually worked. Wheee! 🙂

Other coverage of August Penguin:

Whatsup story. I even commented about why Lior’s MOSIX slide was given by powerpoint. In hebrew.

Tapuz Linux forum. In hebrew.

moshez’s blog.

So, people have been asking me how OLS was, and I usually reply with “it was different than what I expected. Not good different and not bad different, just … different.”

OLS showed me a few things that needed showing, or at least reminding. It showed me that Orna and I are drifting on differnt paths. It showed me that talking about code is not enough, you have to actually write some, too (as if I didn’t know that… just needed reminding, I guess). It showed me that it’s all about what you know and what you do with it. Just knowledge is not enough, and just churning out code is not enough either. It also showed me how important people are, and that I badly need to work on my people skills. Funny conclusion from a hacker conference, isn’t it?

I’m very happy that I made it this year, and will definitely make it next year, regardless of who’s paying (this year, work did, and I highly appreciate it!). Long live OLS!