Cruising the Kernel with Andrew, Ted and the Gang, Part I

There have been 29 Geek Cruises so far, and I've been on five
of them, including four Linux Lunacy cruises. The latest was the the one
completed just a few days ago, Linux Lunacy V. I missed Linux Lunacy IV
last year in the Mediterranean. So it had been two years since I'd been
on a Geek Cruise. I hadn't realized how much I missed them.

You can think of Geek Cruises as conferences at a hotel with a hull.
You'd be right, mostly. In fact, they're more like intensive lectures in
a subject, given by Masters at a small Caribbean or Alaskan or
Mediterranean or Hawaiian university that features bars, night clubs,
pools, music, a casino and unlimited quantities of food.

What I missed, I realized, was the coursework, even though much of it
is intended for real hackers, which I am not. In case you don't know,
my beat is Linux in Business, including the Large Issues surrounding
that topic. The only code I know is Morse.

A sampling of the talks, which were more like seminars:

Ted Ts'o -- Introduction to the Linux Kernel (two parts, taking up a
whole day at sea), The Linux Boot Process, New Developments in ext3
Filesystem and Recovering from Hard Disk Disasters.

Andrew Morton -- Linux Kernel Development and Linux Kernel Disk I/O.

Ken Pugh -- Socket Programming for Linux, Setting up iptables and
Firewall basics.

Scott Collins -- Hands-on GUI Programming with Qt 4.

The other guest lecturer was Yours Truly. I gave the closing keynote,
summarizing what I've learned as a journalist covering Linux for nearly
a decade, plus the new insights I gained aboard the ship. If you're
eager to hear a summary of the latter, jump ahead to the end of this
piece. If you want to hear what I'm still learning, read my next few
reports. (Not sure how many I'll have. Earlier cruises have yielded two
or three). Meanwhile, I'll talk about the Cruise Experience, which was,
well, amazing.

All of my other Geek Cruises have been on Holland America ships. I like
Holland America. They provide food on par with any fine hotel and
service that's a good four stars, if not five. It never occurred to me
that Holland America's decor was in any way distinctive, because it's
not. Okay, the front desk on Holland-America ships all flank a roundish
lobby with a two-story art object in the middle that we jokingly called
"the reactor core". But that was about it.

This time the cruise was on the Carnival Miracle ship, one of the latest
in the "Spirit" class of hulls, which are immense. Imagine a
12-story hotel the length of two football fields, and you begin to
get the idea. This thing is freaking huge. Here are the details:

• 88,500 tons
• Passengers: 2,124
• 960 feet in length
• 105.7 feet wide
• Decks: 12
• Crew: 930
• cruising speed: 22 knots
• Registry: Panama
• Entered service: February 27, 2004

But that's not what makes the Carnival Miracle distinctive, especially
for a veteran of Holland-America cruises. It's the décor. It's as if
they took every rejected idea for a Las Vegas hotel and put them all in
one big boat. I can imagine a dialog that goes like this:

"Let's do a bar called 'Frankie & Johnny's', based on the song--"

"--or the movie."

"There was a movie?"

"Maybe. Whatever. Go on."

"Okay. We have a shiny ceiling and floor, with reflecting balls and
triangular stalactites hanging down over each table."

"Good."

"With sharp corners at about the hight of a kid's head."

"Good."

"And a bullet hole in the mirror behind the bar."

"Why?"

"Because Frankie shot Johnny."

"Let's leave that one out."

"Okay."

"But yeah, we'll do the rest of that stuff."

Above the lobby/front desk bar, an atrium rises 12 stories to a
transparent reddish ceiling over a glass curved stairway that leads to
Nick & Nora's supper club. A vast classic-style painting covers one
whole wall, opposite glass elevators trimmed with blue lights. Lighting
everywhere is thick with blue, orange and mauve. A mauve allergy would
put one in shock.

In spite of the almost countless public spaces in the ship's interior--many
of them quite large--they all have a closed-in feel to them.
Perhaps this is because architect/designer Joe Farcus wanted to take the
"Fun Ship" motto of the cruise line to its full extreme. Perspective:
the large casino is open almost around the clock, except when the ship
is at a port, when shore excursions are encouraged, while the Raven
Library/Internet Cafe is a cramped little space with a tiny stock of
books in locked cabinets. Unlike the library-like library in
Holland-America ships, the Raven Library contains almost no books about
places to which the ship sails. In fact, at all of the desks there are
little carrels occupied by Windows workstations. There is no place to
sit with a laptop, other than two little facing couches, neither of
which is close to a wall outlet.

On the other hand, the public spaces on the boat are amply filled with
Wi-Fi. Internet access is bought in chunks. I bought 500 minutes for
$125. That's 25¢ a minute. And I ran out, because an enormous percentage
of that time was spent trying to cope with a slow connection. Only on
the last day of the cruise did the speed widen to truly broadband
dimensions: 900Kbps down and 80Kbps up. For the first half of the
cruise, speeds were down in the dial-up range and worse. Latencies with
satellite communications are high in any case--don't expect anything
under half a second--making IMAP mail difficult. There were times
during the cruise when I measured ping latencies of up to 12
seconds.

That covers the negatives.

The positives were remarkable, starting with the food. I had expected
"Fun Ships" to have bad food, frankly. Instead, the food was
outstanding. Nick & Nora's, an outstanding restaurant, was one of the
best I've ever experienced. The almost intolerably gaudy Bachus dining
room had excellent food, every evening. Horatio's Dining Room on the
Lido deck--the top one that runs fore to aft on the ship, including three
or four pools--featured a baffling variety of cuisines for every meal,
plus a round-the-clock pizza counter.

I'm writing this on the way back from the cruise, waiting to board a
plane from JFK to SFO. I'll pick it up in the next report, once I'm back
home and can organize all my notes, recordings and photographs.

I was able to take advantage of the high speed connection at a hotel to
upload about 400 hundred pictures to
this
photoset
at Flickr. They're not in order, but they show more than a little about
the cruise and especially the ship. I'll organize and annotate them when I get back.

Meanwhile, take a look through the links below, which include reports on
earlier cruises.

Oh yes, the summary of my talk. The slide said this:

1. Linux is the kernel.
2. It's "a 15-year old implementation of a 30-year old
   architecture".
3. It's "more like a city than a
   cathedral".
4. The kernel is pure infrastructural building
   material.
5. Kind of like wood. Or steel.
6. It has a natural source: working human
   minds.
7. It's adaptive. Like a species.
8. Someday the desktop chickens will lay kernel
   eggs.

The first point was made clear by Linus in the two "State of the Kernel"
talks he gave on Linux Lunacies II and III. Then, it was detailed, at
least for me, by Andrew and Ted, for whom "kernel space" was as central
to Linux as, say, a church to its grounds.

After Andrew said he expected Linux to be in use a hundred years from
now and that he expected to be working on Linux, "stamping out bugs",
for the rest of his life, the image of skilled masons working on a
cathedral came to my mind. Later, in the middle of a long conversation
with him, I brought up the cathedral analogy. That was when he said
Linux is more like a city.

Andrew's thinking was fascinating to me. His responses to questions were
quick, yet gentle, thoughtful and sometimes remarkably deep--even
when he seemed to be insisting that things were not all that deep or
complicated.

When I vetted the ideas in numbers 4, 5 and 6 with him, he listened politely
and seemed to agree. But he also was supportive when I told him I wanted
to go deeper. It was the conversation that followed that led me to the
key point, #7: Linux is adaptive, like a species.

Both Andrew and Ted had pointed out that kernel development was largely
reactive and incremental, improving gradually over the long haul. With my
(too) many years in marketing, launching dozens (hundreds?) of products
into the world, I saw how sharply this contrasted with what Andrew, Ted,
Linus and other kernel developers concerned themselves with. Linux isn't
a product, like Windows or OS X. It grows and evolves as conditions
change, like a species. A bird doesn't say "Hey, the polar caps are
growing and it's going to get colder; better develop thicker feathers".
It adapts to changing conditions. When I vetted this idea with Andrew,
he agreed.

I'll visit all these subjects in more depth in my next reports.
Resources
Geek Cruises

Linux Lunacy
V

"Frankie
& Johnnie"

Frankie and
Johnny

Linux
Lunacy/Perl Whirl Photos

Carnival Cruises

2001 Linux
Lunacy

2002 Linux
Lunacy

2003 Linux
Lunacy

"Geeks on the Half Shell 2.0: Cruising the New Dominion with Linus and Friends,
Part 1"

"Geeks on the Half
Shell 2.0: Cruising the New Dominion with Linus and Friends, Part
2"

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal,
for which he writes the Linux for Suits column. He also presides over
Doc Searls' IT Garage,
which is published by SSC, the publisher of Linux
Journal.