LinuxWorld: The Penguin Brief: The Golden Penguin Bowl

“Linus shows he’s a nerd; and, how Nick created and tested the
software program.”

“The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo (LWCE) in New York City
held January 30 to February 2 was an absolute blast. I had the
privilege of hosting the Golden Penguin Bowl. We split a dozen
geeks into two teams — the Geeks and the Nerds — to answer trivia
questions that most self-respecting geeks should know. Each member
of the winning team received a gorgeous, handblown glass penguin.
We also had two members of the Linux community judging: Don Marti
of Linux Journal and Rob Malda from Slashdot.”

“We deliberately left three empty seats on each side to fill
with audience volunteers. I gathered the volunteers “Monty Hall
style” (for those of you old enough to remember the Let’s Make a
Deal quiz show) by selecting them according to whether they had
particular items of geek paraphernalia on hand: digital cameras,
PDAs, etc. I also asked if anyone had directly contributed to the
Linux kernel source code. I prearranged to have a hero of mine,
Linus Torvalds, pretend to be an unsolicited volunteer for one of
the teams and raise his hand for the source code question. When I
chose him as a contestant, I asked the audience if anyone could
vouch for him as a valid contributor to Linux, but I don’t recall
whether or not any hands went up….”

“And while I’m expressing gratitude, let me toss some thanks
once again to Trolltech for its excellent Qt toolkit, which I used
as the basis for the Golden Penguin Bowl software. I also want to
draw attention to KDevelop, the superb integrated development
environment I used to create and test the program.”

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