The Mandelbear's Musings

Spent last Tuesday at the trade-show section of Linuxworld. Nothing really new, but there were a few developments that pleased me greatly (not even counting the fact that Microsoft wasn't there):

1. HP was showing a couple of "thin client" machines running Debian. They're based on Mini-ITX boards and AMD Geode CPUs. The larger one (to be released sometime next month) has an option for a PCI expansion card. Can you say "recording"? Unlike thin clients from Wyse, etc., they have enough onboard flash to hold a reasonable number of local applications. This is the future of "thin" clients, folks: machines that get information from the Web, but do most of the processing locally. Why wait for Firefox or OpenOffice to load through a knothole when you can load them from flash? Disk and CPU are cheap; bandwidth is expensive. And it's Debian, not some commercial distro.
2. Three manufacturers shipping Linux on laptops. One was Lenovo (heir to IBM's Thinkpad line); they only ship to large customers at the moment. But it runs on all their machines!
3. Creative Commons was there. I dropped off my card.

Saturday, I spent the afternoon at the 15^th Anniversary Linux Picnic. Went by myself, since the flower_cat and chaoswolf had to go to the Baycon picnic, and super_star_girl wanted to sleep in (she starts High School on August 28^th). The food arrived late, and the ice cream even later, but it was the usual crowd of happy, friendly geeks, so nobody minded.

Monday, Friday and Saturday night had practice sessions with Joyce. Mostly just working on the concert set, though last night I tossed "Guilty Pleasures" into the mix to see how it would sound with drum. Sounds good. Joyce is a folkdancer; songs in 5/4 and 7/8 don't faze her a bit.

We're heading down to Worldcon Tuesday as soon as the Y.D. gets done with her freshman orientation. Hopefully the flap over whether filk program participants are real "Program Participants" will have been cleared up by the time I go to the Green Room looking for my badge.