Brand new cat­s.

I have been play­ing a bunch of their Ja­va games that say they are in­com­pat­i­ble with unix & mac­in­tosh com­put­er­s.

They work great, sound and ev­ery­thing, ex­cept for the high­scores (re­quires IE 4.0 or lat­er). Since I am not even spoof­ing the us­er agen­t, I am will­ing to guess there is a chance of that work­ing too.

But why is ya­hoo say­ing it does­n't work? I have not a guess of a hint of a shad­ow of a rea­son.

As I men­tioned be­fore, I was at the 3rd CafeL­UG event on fri­day and sat­ur­day.

It was a pret­ty large even­t, rough­ly 1300 pople, 63 con­fer­ences.

I had two of my own, and here's how they wen­t:

Fri­day: The PyQt/PyKDE one. Au­di­ence: about 50 sit­ting, 15 stand­ing. I had no time what­so­ev­er to pre­pare this. But I was luky enough to have some­one (thanks Cris­tian!) lend me a note­book, and so I spent the pre­vi­ous con­fer­ence (pf/OpenB­S­D) work­ing on mine :-)

I kept it on a low lev­el, noth­ing too com­pli­cat­ed, since I on­ly had 60 min­utes, but the au­di­ence seems to have liked it. Or at least they found my at­tempts at ex­pla­na­tion fun­ny.

Any­way, noone was dis­gust­ed enough to tell me to my face, and I had a gen­er­al feel­ing of it hav­ing been good.

I was able to show a quick do-noth­ing app in 20 lines of code, and show sig­nals and slot­s, and re­al­ly re­al­ly push the idea of in­ter­pret­ed lan­guages as bet­ter for hob­by pro­gram­ming (which I think is the right path). Not too many ques­tions right then, but about a dozen kids at­tacked me with ques­tions on the hall af­ter leav­ing.

Sat­ur­day: My gener­ic KDE-­for-be­gin­ners speech. Au­di­ence: 100 sit­ting, 10 stand­ing. I was a bit too heavy on the philo­soph­i­cal, but it went down nice­ly. Sev­er­al of the guys from fri­day's PyQt ses­sion were there, so more ev­i­dence it did­n't suck too bad­ly.

It was fun, peo­ple were sur­prised by Og­g-rip­ping from Kon­queror as usu­al, some fun, sev­er­al ques­tion­s.

All in al­l, a nice cou­ple of ses­sion­s, and I think I did well, which en­cour­ages me to do it more of­ten. Who knows :-)

Which OS are You?

Bad news, I sup­pose, is I don't re­al­ly like slack­ware.

... oh, screw it, why not say what it does­n't need? It's bet­ter for my blood pres­sure.

• It does­n't need Be refugees whin­ing about how BeOS was so awe­­some and Lin­ux desk­­tops suck. You know what, guys? If BeOS was so cool, and Lin­ux sucks so much, how come BeOS is dead? Now put a sock in it and go prac­tice your OS­­-necrophil­i­a.

• It does­n't need win­­dows users say­ing "it's not like win­­dows, it suck­­s". If Lin­ux was just like win­­dows, you would say that there is no rea­­son to switch, so put a sock in it, be­­cause you can't have it both ways.

• It does­n't need Mac users say­ing how there's no point work­ing on it be­­cause OSX is al­ready as good a unix desk­­top as there's gonna be, so why both­­er?. Put a (de­sign­er) sock on it, be­­cause in or­der to use OSX you have to buy an un­­god­­ly ex­pen­­sive (ex­­cept the 12" ibook, that's kin­­da cheap and cute) com­put­er that pro­­vides on­­ly ad­e­quate per­­for­­mance, and I am a cheap bas­­tard.

• It does­n't need old unix gu­rus ex­­plain­ing how there's no need to work on KDE or GNOME be­­cause Win­­dow Mak­er is lighter, and all that's need­ed is a way to keep their xterms sort­ed. Put a sock in it, be­­cause xterm suck­­s, Win­­dow Mak­er is fea­­ture­­less, and you can't do any­thing use­­ful for a reg­u­lar us­er with just xterms and Win­­dow Mak­er, so you are com­­par­ing ap­­ples to ap­­ple or­chard­s.

Most of al­l, it does­n't need any "What lin­ux needs on the desk­top" ed­i­to­ri­al­s.

On oth­er news, I will be speak­ing about Lin­ux on the desk­top at the UADE in Buenos Aires, Ar­genti­na, this sat­ur­day, and about PyQt/PyKDE pro­gram­ming this fri­day.

More in­for­ma­tion at the CafeL­UG site. If you read it here and men­tion my blog, I will pay you a beer (of­fers lim­it­ed to a max­i­mum stock of three beer­s).