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.