The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo (LWCE) in New York City held January 30 to February 2 was an absolute blast. I had the privilege of hosting the Golden Penguin Bowl. (Please see
Resources for information on the Webcast.) We split a dozen geeks into two teams -- the Geeks and the Nerds -- to answer trivia questions that most self-respecting geeks should know. Each member of the winning team received a gorgeous, handblown glass penguin. We also had two members of the Linux community judging: Don Marti of
Linux Journal and Rob Malda from Slashdot.
We deliberately left three empty seats on each side to fill with audience volunteers. I gathered the volunteers "Monty Hall style" (for those of you old enough to remember the Let's Make a Deal quiz show) by selecting them according to whether they had particular items of geek paraphernalia on hand: digital cameras, PDAs, etc. I also asked if anyone had directly contributed to the Linux kernel source code. I prearranged to have a hero of mine, Linus Torvalds, pretend to be an unsolicited volunteer for one of the teams and raise his hand for the source code question. When I chose him as a contestant, I asked the audience if anyone could vouch for him as a valid contributor to Linux, but I don't recall whether or not any hands went up.
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The elusive Golden Penguin award |
I also noticed former InfoWorld columnist and BSD advocate Brett Glass sitting in the front row. Although I probably shouldn't have played favorites, I couldn't resist pulling Brett onstage for the Bowl, especially since another BSD fellow, Jordan Hubbard, had to cancel at the last minute. Brett is a critic of Linux and is highly critical of the GNU General Public License under which Linux is licensed, so it was very satisfying for me to see him and Linus sitting next to each other, fighting for the same goal and sharing the fun. Brett turned out to be a valuable asset for the Nerds, since he was the only one who knew the correct definition of a teergrube. A teergrube is a mail server that is deliberately crippled in order to foil mail spammers.
Linus really brought the house down when his team, the Nerds, got the question, "What are BogoMIPS?" This was one of two questions I had prepared knowing that Linus was more likely than anyone else to answer them correctly. The other involved a picture of him sleeping at a school desk. The respondents would be asked to identify the person in the photo. I hadn't planned it that way, but Linus's team happened to receive both these questions. Obviously, Linus recognized the picture and got the answer correct.
Did these questions give the Nerds an unfair advantage? Apparently not. Linus himself coined the term BogoMIPS, so he gave the answer for his team. But he spouted a different definition from the one I had in my answer database: "The number of million times a second a processor can do absolutely nothing." I got my answer from Eric Raymond's geek jargon dictionary (see Resources), which I am told is how Linus himself used to define BogoMIPS among developers. The answer that Linus gave as a contestant was also technically correct, because he said it was a meaningless benchmark measurement. I didn't quite know what to do, so I left it to our now infamous scapegoats, that is, judges Don and Rob. The audience went wild when the judges gave a thumbs-down to Linus's response. Nevertheless, Linus and the Nerds went on to win the coveted Golden Penguins.
As I said, it was a blast, thanks to the wonderful contestants, judges, and audience members. I also owe many thanks to Kathy Moran, Natalie Vercauteren, and Julia Russ of IDG World Expo for managing the event.
I also want to thank Eric Raymond, who sent me more than 70 questions to use for this Golden Penguin Bowl. Unfortunately, he sent them months ago, and due to a chronic illness I have called "brain mush" (It's a disease that turns your memory cells into something that looks like the stuff that accumulates around the drain in your bathtub -- and pay attention, because that could appear as a question in the next Golden Penguin Bowl), I completely forgot about the questions and neglected to use them. No matter -- I still have the list Eric submitted, so I can always work them into the next show. He and his wife even promised to send me more.
Software and soft head
And while I'm expressing gratitude, let me toss some thanks once again to Trolltech for its excellent Qt toolkit, which I used as the basis for the Golden Penguin Bowl software. I also want to draw attention to KDevelop, the superb integrated development environment I used to create and test the program.
I don't even recall what version of Qt and KDevelop I used to create the Golden Penguin Bowl software, but I used Qt 2.2.3 and KDevelop 1.3 when I rewrote the software to adapt it to the latest game rules, among other touch-ups. But I was impressed that I was able to upgrade both Qt and KDevelop and rebuild the software without even the hint of a problem. I just finished building KDevelop 1.4 beta 2 as I wrote this column. It started up without a hitch and rebuilt my software from scratch in just a few moments. If you can find your way around C++ at all (you don't have to be an expert by any means), you really must have a look at Qt, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to try KDevelop.
I've also heard that Qt Designer is an excellent graphical application for developing Qt-based applications, but I haven't yet given it a try. Qt Designer is an option for Qt from Trolltech that you can download for free. I recommend getting the build for your particular distribution rather than getting Qt Designer from the Trolltech site, although there are always those who feel most comfortable building their own software from the source.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to more Golden Penguin Bowls in future LWCE shows, and I hope you'll attend. In the meantime, brush up on that geek trivia.
Resources
