PLANES AND LISTS

May was an interesting month. I wound up visiting a half dozen mostly European countries on some pretty crazy weekends to hook up with various friends from the Linux community. That’s one of the coolest things about working with Linux – you can have friends from all over the world who turn up in random countries on weekends between whatever conferences they’re visiting, and they invite you over for coffee. In fact, over the past month, I’ve been to Amsterdam, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and further afield, pretty much just for the hell of it. And before anyone mails me about it, I know, this isn’t great for my own personal carbon footprint. The month’s random travels began with another trip to Zürich, where I caught up with one of the guys working on the teal time patches being developed for the Linux kernel. We took a train over to Geneva to meet Andrew Hutton, organizer of next month’s 8th annual OLS Linux Symposium http:// www. linuxsymposium. org/. None of the group of international Linux enthusiasts were from Switzerland, so it seemed all the more appropriate that we’d managed to pick such a famously neutral country for our international weekend of mystery. And that’s really all I knew about Switzerland – its neutrality. The Swiss are famous for generally keeping out of world politics, and for their banking system, but I had no idea whether they particularly dig Linux in any of these activities.