Beanie Award Wrapup

Well, last Thursday evening we announced the Beanie award winners at the Slashdot/Andover/VA shindig at The China Club. For those of you not able to attend, I've written a synopsis below, otherwise you can watch the whole deal at TheSync. You can grab the awards in both streaming and downloadable format. And, if you'd like to see some pictures from the show, check out Brian Hawkins' online-pix as well as Kurt Gray's pix from the Andover booth.

The awards began predictably enough as Hemos narrowly took home the Hemos award. It amazes me how many people actually abstained rather than vote for Hemos, but alas, he still won. *grin* The award for Best Dressed went to Tux. Sadly, no one ever thought to nominate or vote for the fine women of FreeBSD, and Tux didn't even bother to show up for the award, leaving me with no one to hug. *pout* However, an Anonymous Coward was on hand to accept the Favorite Comment Poster award, as was CmdrTaco for the Favorite Author award. The Best Slashdot Story went to Quickies, and the Cluestick award for FUD went to Microsoft. Also, the pair of "Bully" awards for domain bullying and patent bullying went to Etoys and Amazon, repsectively.

The fun awards done with, it was time to get a little more serious (but not much) for the two grand awards. Best Unix Desktop Eyecandy went to Enlightenment, and Best Unix Earcandy went to XMMS. Best Desktop Theme went to BrushedMetal, which everyone uses at least a part of. The Best Perl Module award went to CGI, the best Apache Module award went to mod_perl, and the Best Open Source Text Editor went to vim. It's good to see things that I couldn't do my job without get some recognition, although I could probably have said the same about any of the nominees (except for Emacs, but that's a different matter entirely *grin*) The "Most Deserving of $2000" award went to Debian, while the Best Book award went to Programming Perl. Finally in this award category, the Non-graphical and Graphical Interface awards went to Pine and The GIMP, respectively.

The award for Most Improved Kernel Module went to USB, probably because it went from non-existent to usable in so short of a time. Alan Cox won the Unsung Hero award and immediately donated his winnings to the DVD defense fund, proving that he is indeed worthy of the name hero. Best Newbie Helper went to Tom Christiansen, famous for helping newbies find their way out of #perl (I'm kidding! Okay, only a little. Tom still rocks in my book.) and Most Deserving Open Source Charity went to the FSF. Best Open Source Advocate went to Linus Torvalds, surprisingly enough, but advocating by doing is one of the best ways to do it.

Finally, the Big Award for Most Improved Open Source Project went to the GNOME project. All of the nominees in this category were projects that at some point people shook their heads at, and now use on a daily basis, but GNOME just happened to beat out the rest.

Also, a new award for "Best Merger/Acquisition" was announced and awarded to VA Linux/Andover.Net to follow that day's news. All in all it was a good night, with lots of free beer and getting to know people who I'd only seen before on IRC or through e-mail. I imagine it was that way for a lot of people there.

Does this make sense?

<i>Alan Cox won the Unsung Hero award and immediately donated his winnings to the DVD defense fund</i>

Nothing against Alan, and it is nice that he donated his winnings to the DVD guys, but does it really makes sense to have a popular vote for an Unsung Hero? If so, shouldn't the person who comes in last get the award, since almost by definition, an unsung person is largely unknown and will have little chance of winning?

Slashgrit beanie awards

Coming soon... the Slashgrits [geocities.com] beanie awards.

How many bowls of hot grits should we pour down Rob's pants?

Thank you.

Hemos Award - The Conspiracy

I feel the Hemos Award was rigged, It should have been presented to me as I feel I am a better "Hemos" then the Hemos who accepted the award. This leads me to believe that there is a conspiracy underway to prevent the more worthy Hemos-i from stepping forward to claim their heritage. No - instead we are forced to acknowledge this false prophet Hemos as our true Hemos. This is most Anti-Hemos and his coming has been told in the great book of Hemos for some Hemoniums now. Anonymous Hemos #981376351

Re:Hemos Award - The Conspiracy

I am the Way, The Truth, and The One True Hemos. Only through me shall the hemos be dispensed, and thus only through me shall the Hordes of hemos control the earth.

I am the Susan Lucci of the Beanie Awards

humor_mode(on);

When I found out E won, I looked up from my plate of pancakes and said, "Well, that sucks. I shoulda won that one." (I really like pancakes) ..It put a damper on my whole day. "Bastards," I thought to myself, "..dont these people realize that its a windowmanager?" I mean, cthulga, xlockmore, thats eye-candy. Saying a windowmanager is eye-candy is like saying "Mmmm! Wow! Look at the morals on that gal!" ..A windowmanager is incidental to what goes _in_ it. Propaganda is a $5,000 paintjob with 10 layers of polyurethane high-gloss finish. Enlightenment is merely a chassis.

As I ate my pancakes, I imagined Geoff and Carsten gladly accepting the award, and the $2000 prize that went with it.. I imagined them going to the bank to cash it, and stopping by Piggly Wiggly to pick up a roll of scotch tape, only to march home, tape all the bills together in one big long line, roll it up, and insert it into the toilet paper holder right next to the john. "Damnit!" I said to myself, "Geoff and Carsten make too much money! Salary! Stock options! What good would two grand do those two?" , and I began to dream...What would I do with two grand?

I'd put it to good use, thats what I would do with it.

I'd hire a skywriter up in Redmond to put the words "WE SUCK" with a big arrow pointing down to Microsoft's HQ, every day for a year.

I'd go to one of those ultra-sized supermarks and buy like 200 kegs of Log Cabin syrup..keep one for my pancakes, and pour the rest into Lake Washington where Gates lives, so his whole house smells like maple syrup for weeks. Call in the news media, and blame it on Bill, saying he finally went nutty like Howard Hughes did. "He just likes dumping maple syrup into the lake behind his house, then denying it." , i'd tell the press.

Or, if on that particular day, I felt particularly artistic, I would ...eh, well...if only I had won. Maybe the world could have been different.

I'll just eat my pancakes and wait till next year. ;)

"Well, at least your not like Susan Lucci....not yet." - My dad

humor_mode(off);

Congrats Carsten & Geoff :)


Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://propaganda.themes.org [themes.org])

GNOME / KDE: Who cares?

So what if KDE won no awards? If I wanted to use Windows, I would run Windows; it has a better interface anyway. (Spare me the flames, I care not.)

Seriously though, I am not out to bash KDE, to each their own. I am not a big fan of GNOME either, just another excuse to eat resources. That is what Enlightenment is for.

Enlightenment won best unix desktop *eyecandy* -- KDE and GNOME have very little *eyecandy*.

I am not too fond of the default Enlightenment theme. Nevertheless, you must agree that it is hard for a Blackbox theme to win the 'best theme' award. Enlightenment, overall, has the most eyecandy when it comes to themes. Blackbox is an excellent windowmanager. In fact, I am running it now. Nevertheless, it is simplistic. To reiterate, Enlightenment, overall, has really neat stuff when it comes to themes.

Quit complaining about it being 'one-sided.' Did you vote for what you liked? Good, you got your side in. If not, too bad, you should have. This was not intended to be a big deal anyway, it was just for fun.

I was slightly shocked when I read this report and saw 90% of negative comments. Why must everybody be so negative? Do you always have to go out of your way to attack Slashdot or something they have done? Opinions differ, get used to it, and deal. You are not 12 any more, try acting like it.

You people might enjoy life more if you quit whining.

Kind regards,

WHiTe VaMPiRe\Rem

And..

The scene shortly following the announcement of the Hemos Award [min.net].

Old News!

I mean, this happened like, last Thursday.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected

Bluesteel: not just for Enlightenment anymore...

I must admit, Bluesteel looks pretty nifty. It's got nice sharp corners and a neat shape to it. I actually went to the trouble of installing Enlightenment for it.

Then I discovered that Enlightenment sucks.

It ran slowly, used icons for things (ick), and made a general mess of my X session. I won't even get started on the customization menu ("transparent" window dragging? WTF?). Maybe somebody really loves Enlightenment, but that somebody is not me.

So then I found Sawmill. Sawmill has the Bluesteel theme, and yet doesn't suck. It has no icons, has genuinely useful customization, and lets me attach a theme to as many or as few windows as I'd like. (I usually pick one xterm for Bluesteel, just cuz). So, I voted for Bluesteel anyway simply because Shinyblue wasn't available.

Enlightenment may suck, but its prettiness can be ported...

vim award goes to charity

vim has always been 'Charityware' - if you use it, you are encouraged to make a donation towards a charity working with orphans in Uganda. On Friday, Bram Moolenaar announced on the vim mailing list that vim had won the award, and that the money would go to that charity.
Which I think is pretty cool.