So, I’m almost done with USENIX 2002 here in lovely Monterey. Tonight was the dessert reception at the aquarium (yes you read right). At one point I was eating an eclair while one hirsute hacker near me disputed with another about the relative virtues of assembly programming on the VAX versus M68K as a large grouper and two small rockfish looked over their shoulders and moved their fishy mouths as if to disagree with both of them.
I took some pictures mostly of fish and one of some famous hackers, which are famous if you’re a geek like me.
Tomorrow, after a couple of last sessions, it’s off to San Francisco for a WEEK of UNINHIBITED HEDONISM. Woo-hoo!
Be My Blog 
I haven’t been to that aquarium since I was a child.
Absolutely gorgeous pictures! My favorites are the jellies 1 & 2.
I don’t mean any disrespect, but it seems like the main hackor in the linuxgods picture is demanding–and receiving–a blow job from a lesser hackor while a co-main-hackor is looking on. Could this be the seedy underbelly of so-called ‘nerd-dom?’ If so, please sign me up.
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Er, I meant ‘hacker.’ Can you tell I’m a complete rube?
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THE HORROR
Hmm, well that would mean that Jim Gettys, the old school Unix hacker and main man for the HTTP specification and the X Window System, was receiving oral satisfaction from Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux operating system, as slightly junior Linux demigod Ted Ts’o looked on.
…
I really hope that isn’t what I just documented.
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Re: THE HORROR
The jellyfish really scared me. If I ran across one while walking down the street, I would most certainly run away as fast as I could. Mr. Torvalds should be orally satisfying Roy Fielding. Mr. Fielding was actually the main man behind HTTP 1.1. He was also co-main-man behind Apache, libwww-perl, and libwww-ada95. Sorry, I just have to be cocky about my fellow alumni after having to sit on hard seats through all the various graduation ceremonies for the Kate.
Sorry, I just had to say COCKY!
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Roy Fielding
And still the man is not finished yet. You should check out Roy’s PhD dissertation – now known as “the REST paper“. In certain circles it’s caused a minor earthquake.
The REST hypothesis is that URIs and HTTP are sufficient to encompass any desired computational communication pattern. Furthermore, this style has desirable characteristics: standards-based, can be made reasonably efficient, can be made secure, requires no new elaborate hardware or network building.
The immediate implication is that the technologies du jour — SOAP, and complex RPC-like layers on top of the web — are both Bad and Wrong. You already knew that they sucked, but this paper will show you why they inherently suck.
The paper is really long, so you might want to check out some of Paul Prescod‘s popular articles on the topic.
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Re: THE HORROR
YOU ARE ALL SHATTERING MY UNIVERSE PLZ STOP REPEAT PLZ STOP
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those jellyfish pictures are fuckin VIVID!
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I keep misreading USENIX as ‘UNISEX’ and wondering what’s so exciting about that….
Nice jellyfeesh!
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