From: Don Marti To: svlug@svlug.org Subject: [svlug] More party notes Rick Moen, Richard Couture, Amy Harmon (from the New York Times) and I all rode down from San Francisco, together. Then we met up with the other Linux people at the University Coffee Cafe and split up the boxes of Caldera and SuSE CDs. Rick and I had previously stuffed all the CD envelopes with "Bay Area Linux Events" lists -- I wonder if anyone will show up at a user group meeting because of this. Ian Kluft and Sam Ockman talked to Dan and Mike from Microsoft, which is covered in Ian's notes except for Dan Frumin's email address: dfrumin@microsoft.com for those people who want to write and say thank you. The Microsoft guys gave Sam five generic Linux user badges so that five SVLUG people could come in at once. I split off from the Linux crowd, since I had registered earlier this week using my company name. And I got in -- there was a preprinted badge for me. I went around and talked with the other party guests and found them very receptive to Linux and the need for cross-platform interoperability. And of course I sampled the Microsoft Food: Roast beef with horseradish on little bread * * * Little pizzas * Chicken-on-a-stick with green onion and peanut sauce * * * * * And of course I took the chance to do some cross-browser compatibility testing using the difficult "can it correctly draw colored table cells with percentage widths?" test. Interestingly enough, Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows passed, but Internet Explorer for WinCE failed. On the way out, Rick Moen and I talked with Dan Frumin, who has used Linux back when he was a programming instructor. We agreed about the need to keep Microsoft's stuff compatible with the rest of the network, and he seemed glad that we were polite instead of doing gratuitous Microsoft mockery. (But Rick told me this morning that "Windows crashes computers, Linux crashes parties." so it's not like the gratuitous Microsoft mockery is going to stop any time soon though.) We should follow up on the issue of interoperability though. And Dan bought us beer and Coke at the pizza place afterward (he asked us to call and put him on the phone with the people at the pizza place -- then he called the pizza place himself and talked with Ian.) I think I mentioned to Ian that this was "a tie." We got some Linux CDs out (thank you Caldera, danke SuSE) met some people inside Microsoft and among their partner companies, and got fed. Microsoft kept the fuss to a minimum and looked very reasonable. -- Don Marti Electric Lichen L.L.C. whois DM683 -rwxr--r-- Harrison Street dmarti@electriclichen.com San Francisco, California USA
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