Linux Lunacy III Cruise

Voyage Details

• Ship: M.S. Amsterdam (61,000 gross registered tons, flagship of the Holland America line).
• Route: Toured Alaska's Inside Passage, departing from Seattle, Washington on September 13, 2003.
• Ports of Call: Juneau (where speakers met with the Juneau Linux Users Group - JLUG), Sitka, and Victoria, British Columbia (where speakers met with the Victoria Linux Users Group - VLUG).

Curriculum & Key Speakers (The LAMP Suite)

• I presented on Perl.
• Linus Torvalds conducted his now-annual kernel Q&A session.
• Guido van Rossum presented on Python.
• Ted T'so gave extensive sessions on the Linux kernel and filesystems.
• David Axmark presented on MySQL.
• Bruce Perens covered Linux in tiny embedded applications and international wireless connectivity.
• Keith Packard presented on graphics in X and fonts in Linux. It was on this cruise that I discovered Keith was a fellow resident of Portland, Oregon, forming a great local connection.
• Other speakers included Mick Bauer (Security), Greg Haerr (Programming), Charles Roth (online collaboration), Ian Shields (IBM), and David Fetter (Databases).

Community and Highlights

• Unlike standard technical trade shows, Geek Cruises allowed speakers to bring their families along; Linus, Guido, and Bruce all brought theirs.
• The cruise was covered in detail by Doc Searls in his classic Linux Journal article, Linux Lunacy 2003: Cruising the Big Picture, Part I.
• Fun Fact: In his article, Doc Searls wrote: *"Randall Schwartz did Perl"—casually misspelling my first name with two Ls!