Recently in The Click blog Category

I always pull the trigger too soon when declaring success with a new WiFi adapter/software/hardware combination, and I'm hoping that's not the case with the Airlink 101 AWLL3028, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and my aging Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.

But today I first had trouble connecting with my WEP encryption key (I know I shouldn't be using WEP ... and I will change to WPA2 once I resolve a few issues and get the rest of the house's computers on board ...).

Then when I finally did connect (had to reboot) I had the typical screen-freezes-and-ctrl-alt-backspace-AND-ctrl-alt-delete-have-no-effect-so-I-have-to-do-a-hard-reset.

That's the beauty of blogging where absolutely no one is making any damn money from the entire enterprise: I can just spin out a fake word with 30 or so hyphens and just move on.

OK ... I was reprimanded once for using the kind of language that flows continuously through my favorite podcast, and I considered just chucking the whole blogging-for-the-man thing and doing this on my own time, on my own site and enjoying the tens of dollars yearly I could earn from Google AdSense.

OK, I pretty much do this entirely on my own time as is ...

Anyhow, I'm ready to return to the raw meat of this blog post, which is my trouble with wireless networking.

So I did the hard reset, booted back into Ubuntu and while things seem a bit slow, networking-wise (that could be anything), it's working OK for the moment.

Here's what I'm thinking:

The problem might not be the specific wireless networking adapter; it could be an issue with USB (1.1 in the case of this old hunk of saved-from-the-garbage hardware). Whether Linux-related or not, perhaps the Toshiba just can't handle using the USB inteface that intensely.

I don't recall having any problems with the PCMCIA adapter I use with every damn PCMCIA-equipped computer known to woman and man, namely the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver (all I'm saying is if you don't have one of these, go to eBay and get one; for me's it's the geek-networking equivalent of the Swiss Army knife or Leatherman.

So a "newer" Cardbus adapter (maybe another $10 Airlink?) might work better for this particular laptop.

Another thing: If whatever problem I'm having is related to software, it's possible that performance will improve and crashes will diminish (or end entirely) with newer versions of everything from the Linux kernel (remember, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04, which is pretty much a year and a half old; ancient in Linux terms) to the dreaded NetworkManager in GNOME or anything else in the stack.

But given my recent experience, I'm extremely gunshy and more worried about regressions than either a lack or abundance of "improvements." That's what screwing up Xorg for probably half the PCs out there will do to you, O Xorg developers who decided that working Intel video is for other people, meaning people who don't have Intel video chips embedded in their PCs.

Can you tell I'm bitter? I thought you could.

Of course with the super-fast USB 3 on the horizon for Linux — yep, first for Linux and then for the other 99 percent of the world, I expect we'll be getting more USB-connected hardware and not less, and that includes add-on network adapters, which I suspect will be with us in various forms for quite awhile as PCs' built-in networking (wired and wireless) are superseded by newer devices and protocols.

I'll continue testing the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB adapter and even consider entering the modern era and slapping Ubuntu 9.10 on this laptop. I'll try an in-place upgrade from 8.04-8.10-9.04-9.10, and if that doesn't work I can do a reintall with a fresh 9.10. That'll keep me (and my office's ample bandwidth) busy for awhile, I suspect.

I'm always hopeful; "It's only one crash," I say to myself. But one crash usually begets many more. I say usually hoping for the unusual and simultaneously wondering to myself why things have to be this hard (and remembering that these kind of problems reared themselves very well during my time running Windows 98/2000/XP and Mac OS 7.6/9.x/10.x).

Right now with the built-in wired networking, this hardware/software setup is pretty much problem-free (OK ... suspend/resume is a disaster, but I wasn't expecting anything more with hardware of this now-7-year-old vintage).

It's a good time to put my optimism hat atop my head, leave the friendly confines of the Ubuntu LTS behind and leap into the world of the six-month upgrade cycle and hope that improvements drown out regressions.

After all, I can always initiate my own regression and return to 8.04 (or chuck it all for something safe like Slackware 12.2 ...). I called Slackware "safe." Time for more coffee.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

Come to the Jan. 27 meeting of TUGNET — The User's Group Network — and hear me speak to whoever shows up.

My topic: Evolutionary computing: Making the leap to free, open-source
applications and operating systems.

What I'll be trying to do is bring the worlds of this blog, which explores the inner reaches of my own geekiness, with that of my print column, Tech Talk, which is aimed at a more general audience.

Both the blog and column draw heavily on my own experience, and I wouldn't have gotten wherever it is I am now if I worried about what I didn't know. I've said on many an occasion that I'm hear to learn and to demystify the process of wading into the technological waters.

Enough of that. What I'll be talking about is my own journey from a garden-variety user of proprietary software to one who aims to use free and open-source solutions wherever possible.

While I burned and ran my first Linux live CD in January 2007, I first got my feet wet in the world of Unix way back in the 1980s through a free on-campus account at UC Santa Cruz, where average (read: non-technically inclined) students were encouraged to use Unix to write and print out (on a bona fide networked laser printer ... and this was right around the time Apple released its original LaserWriter at a cost of $6,995) our essays and anything else we did for our classes.

At TUGNET, I'll talk about the advantages of using free, open-source applications in proprietary environments like Windows and Mac OS and how that makes it all the easier to make the transition to FOSS operating systems that include a few hundred active Linux distributions and four key BSD projects.

I'll be providing tech tips, as well as book and Web-site recommendations on how to learn more about free software, and I'll talk about why I'm using OpenBSD these days more than Linux (and why that could always change because I'm a major proponent of choosing and freely changing both hardware and software to best do the task at hand).

I'd like to thank TUGNET president Marian Radcliffe for inviting me.

And dear reader (as I weakly invoke Jane Austen), I hope to see you there.

In my recent post, in which I related how I missed the fact that Click had reached its 1,000th post, I neglected to mark another blog milestone:

Click is 2 years old. I had forgotten, until I looked at the monthly-archives list on the lower left side of this page, that Click began its life in August 2006, under the auspices of now-former Los Angeles Daily News online guru Josh Kleinbaum. He let me pick the name, which was a nice thing.

I had been doing some technology blogging on my own, but the chance to do it for the Daily News has been, for lack of a more sophisticated cliche, a wonderful experience.

Not the least of that wonderfulness is being able to write exactly what I want with no interference whatsoever. The blog is here, I write, and that's all there is to it.

That said, I'm trying to broaden its appeal somewhat. My weekly print column aims at a more general audience (not that Linux, OpenBSD, old hardware and free, open-source applications don't play a part in it), and I'd like to give that audience more in this blog than the nerdish revelry that comes with succesfully writing to my OpenBSD disklabel and not blowing the whole system to bits while doing it.

Once again, if you work at the Daily News, or any Los Angeles Newspaper Group paper, and you want to write about technology your way, I'd love to have you do it here. I'll set you up right away.

And thanks, readers, for stopping by, writing comments and linking to all of this froth and circumstance.

Seriously, people, I do a lot of work on this Movable Type installation, and I never knew that the archives page for each of the L.A. Daily News blogs features a link to every single post in the blog.

It also features links to every category page, separated by months, as well as author category pages (which most blogs, including this one, really don't need because they're basically one-wo/man shows).

It basically offers a link to every static HTML page generated by Movable Type for this blog. Yep, MT builds a whole lot of pages.

And you thought all Microsoft ever did was roll out endless iterations of Windows and Office in between buying some competitors and threatening to sue the rest -- but there's something going on up in Redmond, Wash., that looks like genuine innovation.

Yep, Microsoft has been working on a new operating system -- one they say is unencumbered by four decades of computing history -- called Singularity. They've been hacking away at the thing since 2003, but this week saw the first public release of the code. I can barely understand what they're talking about, and it looks as if installing the thing gives you a very Unix-like command line.

Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet on Singularity.
Larry Dignan of ZDNet on Singularity.
Singularity on Wikipedia.

And in what looks like a very un-Microsoft move, the company is actually inviting academics and others to download what they've got so far and play around with it.

The whole point here is that Windows, based on the MS-DOS of the '80s and a whole bunch of earlier Windows releases after that, and even all the Unix derivatives (including Linux and the BSDs), which go back to the Multics days of the '60s, have at their core a whole lot of ideas that might not be the best for today and tomorrow's hardware and the uses we make of it.

And who has deeper pockets than Microsoft to fund just such a project?

If the Singularity project does move forward, it could give Microsoft an advantage in the server room, where Windows isn't exactly breaking any records. And Singularity -- or something else totally new and not encumbered by legacy code -- could even become the basis for a new desktop operating system.

I bag on Microsoft a lot -- many of us do -- but it's nice to know that even a few people up there in Redmond are trying to innovate instead of litigate, give something potentially worthwhile to the world of computing, and give people who will never try Linux a reason not to suffer with Windows any longer.

Another desktop-focused OS of note: Haiku is buiit on the now-defunct BeOS operating system and is designed from the ground up to excel on the desktop. I saw a demo at SCALE 6x, and while I was impressed, I'll be more impressed when the project is further along. Besides being tuned to do the things that desktop users want to do quickly and well (with a heavy emphasis on multimedia), Haiku's filesystem-as-database approach is certainly novel.

And when you see how hard it is to get a nascent OS off the ground -- look at how long Microsoft takes -- the progress made since the '90s in Linux, as well as OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, is pretty amazing. It just shows you the value and power of the open-source development model.

Can Microsoft match it?

Totally unrelated: So I'm Googling to find an answer to something, and all I get, pretty much, are my own articles on the topic. But I found out that this Estonian (yes, Estonian) Web site, FreeSoftNews, links to just about everything I write. Thanks!

I've taken a few days off from OpenBSD, and in the interim I ran the NetBSD live CD for the first time on the Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop). Again, it looks great, but I'm so far from figuring out how to manage the CPU fan in any of the BSDs that I'm not optimistic about running any of them on this laptop. I wish it were different, but until the heavens open and the path forward is made much more clear, I'll stick to desktops (and my old 1999-era Compaq Armada pre-ACPI laptop) for BSD.

During that time, I booted into Debian Lenny on the Gateway and installed 141 updates. Debian Lenny is moving along very quickly. I'm ready to put an Etch install alongside it for comparison's sake during the wait for Ubuntu 8.04 ... which is two months at this writing.

The best text editor for the job: The other day, I needed to do some work at home, and I wasn't having a great time with the Gedit text editor in Lenny. I somehow thought that Gedit had a way to change the case of words, but the Lenny version (Gedit 2.20.4) didn't seem to have it. Was I imagining it, or did the Gedit in Ubuntu 7.10 have this feature? (See below for the answer.)

Anyhow, I need a better editor ... so I went into Synaptic and installed three: Geany, Bluefish and Scite. I'm going to try them all out. So far I can't seem to change the case of letters automatically in Bluefish, but there are so many features that can help with Web development that it's probably worth using. But for the level of work I'm doing, I'm relying on Geany the most at the moment. I haven't used Scite much, but I do plan to give it a try soon.

But ... GEdit does have the ability to change the case of words/letters. Under Edit -- Preferences -- Plugins, there's a Change Case plugin. I enabled it, and now I can change case via the menu with Edit -- Change Case. I prefer to use the keyboard to do this ... so I'll probably keep the other editors in contention.

Foresight Linux: The Foresight Linux booth at SCALE 6X was fairly busy. I could barely get near it during the show, and since I didn't really put 2 and 2 together and remember that Foresight is dedicated to presenting the latest in the GNOME desktop environment, I didn't linger. But I do want to give Foresight a try. It has separate install and live images, so I downloaded the live CD image and am m going to see what it's like.

I'll be your server: I've never set up a server, and all this work with OpenBSD makes me want to roll one myself. I'm going to try to do one on the local network with NFS, Samba, FTP and Apache. I'll probably try in OpenBSD and Debian as well as Damn Small Linux.

Two excellent Linux books: Since I'm not made of money, I got both of these from the library. The "Linux Administration Handbook, " by by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein and an army of more recent contributiors, is a hefty tome that's long on advice, Unix/Linux history and what people like to call "best practices."

While much of the book is flying right over my head, and I don't think you could really administer a system without a secondary reference that's specific to the Linux distribution you're using, this is a very valuable book that every serious Linux user should have. Especially when it comes to servers, there's a lot of information here.

"Linux Administration Handbook" is heavy on the philosophy of how to set up and maintain a system, and amid a sea of distro-specific how-tos that expire with every six-month release, that's a good thing to have. Still, what books like "Linux Administration Handbook" make evident is that at one level, most Linux systems are more alike than they are different, and the skills you develop using one distribution are very much transferable to the others. However, there are pointers everywhere in the book to specific instructions for Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu and Suse.

And if you want to see how professional sysadmins (or at least the good ones) go about their work, this is the book to get. It can't be the only book on your Linux shelf, but "Linux Administration Handbook" pairs very well with a doorstop-sized distro-specific how-to (like the "Unleashed" series of books, or Mark Sobell's "Practical" guide series) to help you get a handle on making Linux work for you.

The other book I got from the library, "Linux Administrator Street Smarts: A Real-World Guide to Linux Certification Skills," by Roderick W. Smith, is a great book for anyone who wants to figure out how Linux works from the command line. The book doesn't assume a vast knowledge of Linux or Unix. It offers many tips, instructions, and again, "best practices" on how to configure and manage a Linux system. This book is also not distro-specific; instead, it's one of the best command-line-centered books I've seen when it comes to basic system administration.

I don't know how good "Linux Administrator Street Smarts: A Real-World Guide to Linux Certification Skills," in helping you get actual "certification skills," but it will definitely help with the basics of setting up and maintaining a server or desktop.

Smith's style is clear and concise -- a rarity in these kind of books, which often leave me more confused than not. I definitely recommend taking a look at this "Street Smarts" volume.

So I had two winners here. I would probably buy both of these books, but that said, I still turn to Carla Schroder's "Linux Cookbook," which I'd love to see updated, and Michael Stutz's same-name-but-different "Linux Cookbook," which could use an update even more.

If I was in a buying mood, I'd get a more recent O'Reilly book, "Linux System Administration," by Tom Adelstein and Bill Lubanovic, and I really like Chris Negus' new "Toolbox" series of distro-specific books. They're fairly cheap and filled with good, timely tips, emphasis on the "timely" part. If only all of these great books were updated every couple of years instead of five years ... or never.

Click frequency: The "publish every day at 5 a.m." thing hasn't been working out so well of late. I just haven't had all that much time to do entries in advance, but I have had an entry every day ... just not prewritten to publish at 5 a.m.

One man's FreeBSD: I admire this guy, William Denton, for chronicling eight years of personal use of FreeBSD.

Debian ... ah, Debian: In case it's not evident, I still really enjoy using Debian. While I'm a great believer in the slimmed-down application mix in the default install of Ubuntu (which is based on Debian) -- with less indeed being more, on many levels I've had a whole lot more success with Debian.

I've done the default GNOME install of Debian, the Xfce and KDE installs, a "standard" install to which I've added X, and a few "standard" installs that were console-only. The flexibility of Debian is legendary, as is its stability and usability.

Some of my hardware has been supported better by Ubuntu at times, but I keep coming back to Debian. I'd love for Debian Lenny to support the Alps touchpad as well as Ubuntu Gutsy does. I'm hoping it'll happen before Lenny is frozen, and I will be trying Ubuntu Hardy when it comes out, but I'd love for Linux in general to get everything right for my Gateway laptop.

But since fan management has gotten worse, not better, over the past six months in the Linux kernels I've used, I'm only cautiously optimistic.

OpenBSD doesn't use the CUPS printing system by default, and while I've been successful in using Apsfilter in Damn Small Linux (but not in Debian), now that I've figured out all the quirks in CUPS and my office network-printing situation, I prefer to use CUPS to manage the many network printers at my disposal.

OpenBSD tip: Whenever installing software in OpenBSD, it's a good idea to save whatever messages the system prints on the terminal screen for later reference. Nowhere is this more important than in the installation of CUPS, which requires a bit more user intervention than I've experienced before. Who am I kidding? I've never installed CUPS before in my life -- it's always "there."

Anyhow, back to OpenBSD and CUPS. As is always the case, you need to use sudo or su to root to install CUPS:

$ sudo pkg_add -i cups
(enter password when prompted)

or

$ su
(enter password when prompted)
# pkg_add -i cups

The system then kicks out the following:

To enable CUPS, execute '/usr/local/sbin/cups-enable' as root To disable CUPS, execute '/usr/local/sbin/cups-disable' as root

Starting cupsd will overwrite /etc/printcap. A backup copy of this file is saved as /etc/printcal.pre-cups by '/usr/local/sbin/cups-enable' and will be restored when you run '/usr/local/sbin/cups-disable'

As I said above, SAVE THIS IN A FILE. You might need it.

This is not enough to get CUPS going. You must do this as root (or, again, with sudo):

# /usr/local/sbin/cupsd

Now you can open a browser (in X, I used Firefox, but I think you can even use Lynx in a console), go to http://localhost:631 and configure your printer(s) as usual. Since everybody's situation is different, I'll leave instructions for the rest of CUPS up to you, except for one thing:

In OpenBSD, chances are you will need to find the right driver for your printer. I went to the CUPS Web site, more specifically to the Printer Drivers page, found the driver for my printer (an HP Laserjet 2100, if you must know), downloaded it and used it when configuring my printer in CUPS.

That's not all. By default, OpenBSD doesn't tell your system to automatically start the CUPS server at boot. I'm sure there's a more correct way to do this, but I added the following line to /etc/rc.local (again, you must do this as root or with sudo):

/usr/local/sbin/cupsd

Looks familiar, doesn't it? It's the same way we started CUPS in the first place. And now it'll start without any intervention by you on your next boot.

By the way, with CUPS controlling my printing, I can both print in X and from a console. Just use the old lpr command (with the name of the file you'd like to print):

$ lpr filename

Your file will print to your default printer. You can also specify a specific printer, print a certain number of copies, and do all sorts of other clever things at the command line.

NetBSD: While I'm having a lot of fun working with OpenBSD, I'm itching to repeat all of this with NetBSD. I didn't expect the NetBSD Live CD to run on my Compaq Armada laptop, what with the CD using KDE and the laptop only having 64 MB of RAM, but after a lengthy booting process, I did get to a console in NetBSD from the live CD, and wireless networking on my trusty Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card worked out of the box.

But the laptop's doing so well with Debian Etch, I'm wary of making any change. Still, I might keep my data in a Linux partition, wipe off Debian for now and give some other things a try. I can always reinstall Debian if that's the way things go.

As far as my converted thin client test box that's now running OpenBSD, of its three hard drives (any of which can be easily plugged in to run different OSes at any time), I've got one drive that I use mainly for Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, and another one with Xubuntu 7.04, Slackware 12 and Puppy 2.17 that I use rarely. That will probably become the NetBSD test bed at some near-future time.

Again, why? In case you missed the last time I answered this question, I'm playing around with the BSDs so much ... because they're there. Just as I don't think it's a great idea for everybody to just run Windows, it's also not such a great idea for the free, open-source software world to be about Linux and nothing else. Even if there are 300 Linux distributions out there, there's only one Linux kernel (albeit in many, many versions). The BSD operating systems are developed differently, and while FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and, yes, DragonflyBSD (sorry I haven't mentioned that one until now) all have specialized uses, there's plenty of software available -- at least in FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD -- to run them as any kind of server as well as a fully functioning desktop computer.

And while the FreeBSD project has spawned PC-BSD and DesktopBSD on the desktop (the last one's pretty obviously aimed that way, given the word "desktop" in its name ... but I digress), there's no reason these other operating systems shouldn't be tested, used and enjoyed in the same manner.

Yours in operating-system diversity,

s.

... but wait, there's more:

Interesting blog: Larry the Free Software Guy is looking at "Eight Distros a Week." I went quite far back into his blog, and I plan to return often.

Take once a day: You might have noticed that Click is now publishing once a day, usually at 5 a.m. Pacific time. Rather than pushing out five entries on some days, even more -- or none -- on others, I'm trying to get ahead of myself a bit and make this blog more predictable for both me and you. If "breaking news" intervenes and I have something to say about it, I'll post during the day, but for now, look for a new entry at every morning at 5 a.m. Pacific. And no, I'm not awake that early -- the magic of Movable Type enables me to schedule posts to appear at any time in the future.

I'm filing this from the SCALE 6x "E-Mail Room" in the Los Angeles Westin. They've got a little thin-client network going, with little client boxes from Solar Systems PC running Fluxbox. And since the browser is Iceweasel, I figure it's Debian based.

The good part -- I was able to drag the $15 Laptop -- the Compaq Armada 7770dmt -- back to the car.

We all know that Linux is a kernel, an operating system, maybe even a socio-political movement (it depends on whom you ask), but in a sense, Linux is about people -- those who create, use and promote it.

One of those people is Orv Beach, publicity chairman for SCALE 6X -- the Southern California Linux Expo -- being held Feb. 8-10 in Los Angeles. Since I'm covering the convention for Click, I took the opportunity to interview Orv after hearing from him about getting press credentials for the event, which I wouldn't miss, by the way. And if you do plan on attending, Orv told me that using the promo code CAST when registering for SCALE can get you 40 percent off of admission.

Orv, where do you live, how old are you, and what do you do for a living?
I live in Simi Valley, California, with my wife Beth. I'm 58, and I have four grown kids and four wonderful grandkids. Professionally, I'm the IT director at Simi Valley Hospital.

How did you first discover open-source software, and what part does it play in your work and home life today?
I've been interested in technology all my life. I got my amateur radio license when I was 17, and enjoyed building radio equipment as much as operating.

I got my first computer in about 1979, and when amateur packet radio was authorized by the FCC, it was a natural to use a computer with it. A popular packet radio program at the time was TNOS, written by Brian Lantz. It ran under DOS, and was a communications program & BBS. Brian had an active users group and was happy to add features to TNOS. As it grew in size, the C compiler he was using had more and more difficulties compiling it (It was Borland Turbo C, I think). So he moved TNOS over to Linux to use GCC as the compiler, and a large percentage of his users followed him.

I got Linux from a programmer at work. At that time it was 16 floppies, and that minimal version didn't include X Windows. I ran it on a 40 MHz 386 with 8 Megs of RAM. I've been using Linux steadily ever since and moved my desktop computer over to it full time about six years ago, and my wife's about four years ago.

At work, while Adventist Health isn't a full-blown user of open-source software, they're edging that way. The web programmers at our corporate office seem to have fallen in love with Plone. Some of the programming groups are moving to Project.Net for project management, too. Locally, I use Nagios to monitor over a hundred devices on our hospital network, and we use ZoneMinder to monitor some video cameras.

Now that SCALE is in its sixth year, how big was the convention the first time around, and what kind of growth has it seen? How many exhibitors, speakers and attendees do you expect this year?
SCALE is an offshoot of the "LUGFests" that SCLUG (the Simi-Conejo Linux Users Group - http://sclug.org) held every 6 months where they met at the Nortel building in Simi Valley. They were miniconferences, with people demonstrating open source software and even a few commercial vendors. Even as limited as they were, they drew Linux users from all over Southern California. SCLUG held 4 of them before Nortel closed down that building. (There's an article on LUGFest III here).

The last LUGFest, LUGFest IV, drew 400 people over two days. Based on the response to the LUGFests, we knew we were filling a need for information and education on open-source software.

So after a hiatus of a year or so, SCLUG, UCLALUG and USCLUG jointly started SCALE. The first was held in the Davidson Conference Center at USC. It was one day, with two session tracks. We had 11 speakers spots and a panel, and it was a struggle to fill them. That first Linux Expo drew 400 attendees.

Contrast that with SCALE 6X, which will be held in February, five years later: The main Expo is now on Saturday and Sunday, has 32 speaker slots and two keynotes spread over four session tracks per day. You'd think that number of topics and speakers would be impossible to come up with. Yet we received over 105 submissions to our call for papers! Whittling them down was difficult, and it was painful, as we had to turn down lots of good proposals. We expect to have about 1,500 attendees for SCALE 6X. The Westin hotel will be bursting at the seams.