LinuxFest 2008 wrapup

Oh, so many pale guys in black tshirts (myself included) - It was like a ThinkGeek store fashion show. Also, an excellent couple of days. What other group would think to hold its conference party at the Museum of Electricity and Radio - and then invite a live band to play at the radio museum?
There were several excellent presentations:

• Sean Boisen from Logos Bible Software presented an excellent talk on using Python's NLTK for linguistic analysis, to a room so full that people were sitting on the counters. It's well worth going through the presentation slides (in a neat browser-based format!) if you're at all interested in computational linguistics or Python hacking, go through these.
• Ted Haeger from Bungee Labs had quite a bit to say about the GPL, LGPL and AGPL, and an imagined LAGPLorsomething. Not something I had given much thought to, but he certainly makes a slick and persusaive case as to why pretty every programmer will be bitten by this eventually. Interesting cloud-based development platform Bungee Labs is working on as well.
  
• Dirk Morris from Untangle.com gave a very cool talk about software development riffing from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. An absolute must-read: it puts the whole 'programming is an art or science' debate into an appropriate frame. And he did it while dealing with one of the more annoying human beings I've ever been in the same room with. Dirk's blog entry that covers this material is a must-read. Also, his presentation sold me on using Untangle at work.
  

It would be nice if there were more exhibitors: hopefully the large turnout this year will entice more local and national companies next time around. Maybe I can do a Hadoop presentation next year?

LinuxFest Northwest 2008

Looking forward to heading up to Bellingham for the weekend to LinuxFest Northwest 2008. Must get homework done ahead of time... Must get homework done ahead of time...
There's a huge variety of topics this year. I found something in each time slot:
Saturday:

• Developing with Linux in Mind
• Natural Language Processing in Python using NLTK
• Replace Yourself with Python
• Fedora Kernel Development Process

Sunday:

• shva - A javafx web app for annotating speech
• Control Your Social Data with OpenID and Other Technologies
• Zen and the Art of Software Maintenance
• Open Source GIS - Hacking out the maps

Interestingly, quite a lot of Python stuff. Tons of fun.

Continuing quest to be king of the geeks: My TARDIS cake

Been meaning to post this for a while: here is another entry in my 42-part quest to be king of the geeks: My TARDIS grooms cake from our rehearsal dinner. At the very least, it's proof that I can look really, really dorky in any photo. I tried to convince Selina to use the cake as our main wedding cake, but even she has limits. Being a non-descript blue box made it easy for the cake decorators.

The TARDIS doesn't usually have a candle sticking out from its door, of course, but the nice staff at the restaurant thought we were having a birthday party. Every Doctor Who fan should try a tasty, tasty TARDIS sometime.

Man pages for linux software development

Maybe I'm just a bit dense tonight, but it took me about 30 minutes of searching to find this answer. If you're going to be using any of the C/C++ system calls, such as fork or dup2, and would like to have their man pages local, install the manpages-dev package like so:

sudo apt-get install manpages-dev

I'm a bit surprised they weren't included in the build-essential package.