Now, that may surprise some. Its pretty easy to think that I work for a super advanced company that has started a revolution and sits on the bleeding edge of innovation. I mean, at Canonical, we’re doing all kinds of amazing stuff with “the cloud” and building software that makes peoples’ jaw drop when they see it in action sometimes.

But really, I think we’re more like CODA. CODA has built what looks to be a sustainable, practical electric car. The car itself is not visually stunning, but the idea behind it is. Make an electric car that anyone can buy *and* use. Make it fun, and make sure the business is sustainable. But, in no way is CODA challenging the ideas and revisions that have worked for the 100+ years that the car industry has existed.

CODA is still putting a steering wheel, gas pedals, and gear shift in the cockpit for the driver. There are doors, wipers, lights, and probably floor mats. In much the same way, in Ubuntu, we’re still putting our software out there with the intention that, while its created differently, and affords the user more capabilities, it is basically driven in much the same way as Windows 7 or OS X, mostly as a web, errrr, cloud terminal.

The exciting part is that for $3 of possibly more efficiently produced electricity, you can drive 100 miles. Even more exciting is that the CODA might actually compete with sensibly priced  (but larger) Honda and Toyota sedans, rather than like the Tesla cars that compete with Lexus and BMW’s.

Given this way of thinking, the auto show was extremely interesting. The electric car (open source?) has “arrived”, and the established players are buying the interesting enabling technology like batteries (android’s linux kernel, darwin for mac, etc) from companies like Tesla, and putting them in their established products.

Whether consumers care about either open source or electric cars is another story.. maybe the 2011 LA Auto Show will have an answer for me on at least one of them.

I actually really love the feeling one gets when pushed to their limits of sleep deprivation. For me, my ego tends to shrink and go away after this long without sleep. I did catch a few winks on the plane, but they were mostly drunken winks, so they weren’t quite as restful as, say stretching out on a pile of broken glass. With the sun hanging in the air while my body wanted it to be under foot safely blocked out by a ball of mud, magma and water, I arrived feeling pretty much like I was in outer space.

That feeling was rather fitting, given that the first Canonical employee I met at lunch was none other than Mark Shuttleworth, who actually *has* been in outer space. It was quite random, I grabbed a place in the salad line, and there he was. We had a pretty good discussion ranging from why people still choose CentOS to Darwin’s Theory of Sexual Selection, its really awesome knowing that the guy at the helm gets what we’re doing.

The afternoon was spent in sessions, and I have some quick take aways from them:

• Puppet integration in Ubuntu Server is about to get really damn good. Some things that have been discussed are making client registration automatic and decoupled from hostname, allowing re-provisioning without reconfiguring anything.
• PPA’s for volatile software that releases nightly builds are continuing to flesh out. This makes upstream bug reports much easier, as when they say “try the latest nightly build” you can, in fact, try it without suddenly shifting from the package installed version to a custom compiled, or trying to build your own package. I think one challenge for that is going to be making sure that users know that the PPA exists.

Well, I got some sleep, so now I’m up at 0-dark-thirty and ready to attend some sessions. My favorites for the day are:

https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/server-maverick-monitoring-framework

Monitoring is near and dear to me. Mathiaz has some awesome ideas about how to make it fault tolerant.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Specs/ARMServer

A full rack of servers using only 7.5kw  … can’t wait to see this presentation.

https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/server-maverick-hadoop-pig

I want to learn more about this and play with it.