The talk that most amused me at the UKUUG Spring 2010 conference was about libferris – a virtual file system (FS) which runs in the user address space. The talk was presented by libferris’ creator, Dr. Ben Martin who travelled all the way from Australia to speak at the conference. I had a short look at libferris shortly a number of years ago, and was slightly awed at the crazy stuff you can do with it. Since then, the software has grown to provide even more crazy interfaces to data. Ben Martin showed how you can mount your Flickr account and simply copy images in and out, and also how to mount a Google Documents spreadsheet, echo two numbers into a cell each, echo a formula into a third cell and cat the result. Mind boggling and totally crazy. ;-) (The slides of his talk are online.) During drinks after the show on the last day, Paul, Josette, Tony and I spent a couple of very amusing hours with Ben, who also confessed as to the origin of libferris’ name, and it turns out he loves Lindt chocolates, particularly the Excellence 99% Cocoa variety, which, he says, is impossible to get in OZ. (I had a bit of trouble obtaining the bars myself actually: supermarkets don’t readily stock this, but I found a source easily enough. :-) ) I enjoyed the chat so much, that I asked Ben for his address, promising to get him some of the chocolate. This afternoon, a package of Lindt Excellence with 99% cocoa leaves for Australia, and I really hope there will be no problems at customs. Thanks, Ben, for a most enjoyable afternoon.