I've been carting the "big wall of kernel developers" poster around the world with me for the past 6 months, getting it signed by as many kernel developers as I could find.

First off was the Ottawa Linux Symposium, where the poster was unleashed apon an unsuspecting crowd of people. They mostly just laughed at it, and I had to update a few names by hand for some late patches that slipped in:

At that conference, which had around 600 attendees, I collected 101 different signatures. That ment that 1 out of every 6 people attending that conference, had gotten a patch into the last kernel version that had just come out (2.6.22 at the time.) That's quite a high concentration all in one spot.

I then displayed it at 2007 OSCON. While a fun conference, it is not very kernel oriented at all, and so, I picked up a few more signatures, mostly from Ubuntu people who happened to be attending due to a recent conference.

After that, it was a jump over the pond to the 2007 Linux kernel summit in Cambridge. I collected a few more signatures there, after having to clear off one whole wall of the conference room, much to the hotel's dismay.

Then, it was a few more plane rides, having it get lost by the airline between London and Hamburg, a train ride to Nuremburg, and then a bus ride to the Czech countryside for a SuSE Labs conference. Once again, the hotel staff looked at me strange, but they eventually found a way to set it up, and a few more signatures were aquired.

In the end, I collected 165 signatures, and the poster traveled with me to five different countries.

But today, I finally said goodbye to it. I sent it off in the mail to linux.conf.au, where it is to be raffled off for charity, after collecting a few more signatures that it is missing.

If you see it, say hello, for after lugging it on more airlines that I want to recall, and having to explain it to more airport security people than should have been necessary, it feels strange to not have to tote it after me anymore.

Maybe I'll go create a new poster for all of the work that happened in 2007 in the kernel, that one should only run about 50 meters long and give me something new to lug around the world again...

posted Sat, 19 Jan 2008 in [/diary]