Pudge : Note that the last entry was called Day 5, but was in fact Day 4. It has been corrected, and those responsible have been sacked. Without further ado, Ziggy:
Cruising through Glacier Bay National Park
Yesterday was a very busy day, and we seemed to need the downtime this morning. We arrived in Glacier Bay this morning, but the first GeekCruise scheduled event wasn't until 10:00 a.m. when we gathered on the bow for a group photo.
As we walked through the theater in the front of the ship, we arrived on the bow in the midst of some Pretty Big Ice (tm). While on the bow (and even while we were posing for pictures) we witnessed some impressive bits of ice calving into the sea. Although the glaciers here are quite massive, we were quite surprised to calculate that these glaciers are roughly 50 years old. That is to say, they are only about a dozen miles long, and moving a 4-6 feet per day, there aren't centuries worth of glacier ice in this bay. (Welcome to Alaska; for more ancient ice, Greenland and Antartica are better sources. Perhaps we'll see that on the next cruise...)
Cruising the bay was so beautiful that we couldn't sequester ourselves talking about regexes and breadth-first searching for object methods. So we spent the morning wandering around waiting for the next few bits of ice to crash and drop into the bay.
Classes resumed in the afternoon, when we were away from the more impressive glacers. (We passed one or two others later in the day, but only at a great distance.) The big event of the afternoon was fishing, or more precisely, Orca spotting. Someone in Randal's class saw a whale come quite close and everyone in that room raced to the window faster than you can say 'foo'. mjd was starting his two part Advanced Perl class next door, and everyone in that room raced to the window quickly as soon as they heard the commotion coming from Randal's general direction.
Later in the evening Uri Guttman gave a brief project update on something that he's been working on since TPC3 called 'Stem'. Uri has founded a company called Stem Systems to develop this software and write haiku about it. It was unclear to many in the audience if this was something akin to a user paper, a VC presentation begging for funds, a really cool hack or a buzzwordy vaporware announcement. The real answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
Following Uri, Tim Bray gave a brief overview on what he's been doing for the last year, tied into a spiel on developing meaningful technical standards. In brief: the OSI 7-layer taco network is bad, the XML standard by the W3C is better, and Perl is good (a single, common implementation is sometimes the most effective route around a bureaucratic standards process).
A few people have been mentioning that the classic conference mixers (i.e. BOFs) that are usually found at TPC and USENIX haven't been scheduled this week. So, as soon as a few people mentioned this, and we noticed that there was a *LOT* of interest in Steve Roberts' Microship project, we immediately scheduled a BOF at 10 p.m. on the Lido deck (sure beats meeting in hotel lobbies). We hacked out a good few ideas on how to develop the Microship software in a manner that a few volunteer hackers can write interesting bits of code to run on Steve and Natasha's boats as well as their website. (Note to those looking for volunteer labor: code your project in Perl, not NewtonScript. You'll find more volunteers that way.)
Tomorrow, we dock in Ketchikan, and return for Jon Orwant's Internet Quiz Show (hosted by Larry Wall).
Until tomorrow, Z.
