Linux Fest Northwest

I attended Linux Fest Northwest 2007 at the end of April and, boy, am I glad I did.

Highlights

Even though I’m no fan of crowds, it’s fun to get out and meet fellow geeks. There were a lot of impressive displays and cool things to learn and discuss.

Some of My Favorite Geek Moments:

• The ActiveState guys gave me a demo of their Komodo development IDE, which I’ve been playing with on Ubuntu and really like.
• Chatted with a Free Software Foundation rep about the FLOSS movement and what it’s like to work with Richard Stallman. She also gave me some cool stickers. 🙂
• The MythTV display. MythTV is a free & open source PVR, or personal Digital Video Recorder. Thanks to donated hardware from Silicon Mechanics, MythTV’s display of the normal, and HD, recording and playback capabilities was amazing. From what I’ve seen, MythTV puts most PVR/DVR solutions to shame, including Windows Media Center and Comcast’s local DVR service.
• Finally saw Second Life, who also had a display. Pretty amazing, although still mystifies me how people find/make time to spend so much time in a virtual world, when there’s not enough time in my actual world.
• Chatted with the Silicon Mechanics folks about their company, servers, and their commitment to the Open Source community.
• I won a cool raffle prize. 🙂