Friday, September 25, 2009

The 2009 Open Source in Mobile Pub Quiz!

I was at the Open Source in Mobile conference in Amsterdam last week, both to present on "Strategies for Enabling Innovation with Open Source" and to act as quizmaster for this year's 2nd Annual Pub Quiz (and having done it two years running, I think it's an official "tradition" now...)

People expressed some interest in seeing the questions and answers, and I promised to post them here. Adam Shaw of Informa, the conference's producers, worked up the first four categories this year; the last four were mine. So, without further ado:

[Well, much further ado, anyway. Sorry for the remarkably idiotic markup problems, fixed now. The quiz started its life as a MS Word document from Adam Shaw to me, and stayed that way. The amount of nonsensical horsecrap that Word throws in with a simple paste is amazing, and the editor that Blogger provides you with doesn't help...]

Round 1- Sport

  1. Q-Due to superstition, what did Bjorn Borg not do during the Wimbledon fortnight?
    1. have sex
    2. wash his hair
    3. shave
    4. wear underpants
    A- Shave

  2. Q- Nigel Mansell won the World Drivers’ Championship for which Formula 1 team?
    A- Williams

  3. Q- Who was the first unseeded man to win the Wimbledon Singles title?
    A- Boris Becker

  4. Q- Which sports playing area is 2.7 metres by 1.5 metres?
    A- Table Tennis

  5. Q- In which country will the 2014 Football World Cup be held?
    A- Brazil

  6. Q- In 1988 who became the first boxer to have won world championships in five different weight categories?
    A- Sugar Ray Leonard

  7. Q- Which piece of sporting equipment is 3 inches in diameter and weighs 6 ounces?
    A- An ice hockey puck

  8. Q- At which sport did Scotland become world champions in 2005?
    A- Elephant Polo

Round 2- Geography

  1. Q- What is the home country of Van Morrison?
    A- Northern Ireland [NB: I want to acknowledge that this answer is disputed by Mr. David Neary, who informs me that Northern Ireland is a "province", not a country, and that Mr. Morrison was, in fact, born in the country of Great Britain the United Kingdom.]
    [NB: I want to further acknowledge that I know something between "jack-shit" and "fuck-all" about the geographical vagaries of the United Kingdom. Sorry for the Inconvenience.]

  2. Q- In which country was OPEC founded?
    A- Iraq

  3. Q- Which country is the world’s largest coffee exporter?
    A- Brazil

  4. Q-If you flew due east from New York City, what would be the first country you would reach?
    A-Portugal

  5. Q- Bollywood is the nickname for the Indian film industry. The film industry of which country is known as Lollywood?
    1. Pakistan
    2. Laos
    3. Portugal
    4. Luxembourg
    A- Pakistan (Lahore)

  6. Q- Paris attracts the most visitors in France each year. Which French town attracts 5 million visitors a year and has more hotels than any other French city except Paris?
    A- Lourdes

  7. Q- At 29,029 ft Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth. The tallest mountain in our solar system is Olympus Mons on Mars. Plus or minus 10,000ft, how tall is Olympus Mons?
    A- 88,600ft, it stands 27kms above the surface level

  8. Q- What Mexican cactus is tequila made from?
    A- Agave

Round 3- Wordplay

  1. Q- What kind of mixed drink takes its name from the Hindi or Sanskrit word for five?
    A- Punch, from the Hindi word Panch as punch initially had 5 ingredients, spirit, sugar, lemon, water, tea

  2. Q- If you were awarded 10 points in the UK for using it but only 1 point in Poland, what would you be doing?
    A-Playing Scrabble with the letter Z

  3. Q- Which animal does a Hippophobe fear?
    A- Horses

  4. Q- Who wrote over and over again: ‘I will not yell she’s dead during roll call’
    A- Bart Simpson

  5. Q- The Toyota MR2 had to change its name in which European country?
    A- France- MR2 sounds like Merde

  6. Q- Which five letter word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it?
    A- Short

  7. Q- What is the Romanian Word for ‘Son of the Devil’ or ‘Son of the Dragon’?
    A- Dracula

  8. Q- There exists only one word in the English language that when it is capitalised has a completely different meaning. What is that word?
    A- Polish, polish

Round 4- Entertainment

  1. Q- Which TV Shows spawned the following spin offs? (1 point per correct answer)
    1. Frasier
    2. Mork and Mindy
    A- Cheers and Happy Days
  2. Q- Which singer appeared on stage at both Wembley and Philadelphia during the Live Aid concert?
    A- Phil Collins

  3. Q- How is singer Paul Hewson better known?
    A- Bono

  4. Q- If you allow for inflation what is the highest grossing movie of all time?
    A- Gone With the Wind

  5. Q- How is Annie Mae Bullock better known?
    A- Tina Turner

  6. Q- What was the name of Anthony Edwards character in Top Gun?
    A- Goose

  7. Q- Who was the boxer portrayed by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull?
    A- Jake LaMotta

  8. Q- Which three presidents does Forrest Gump meet in the film Forrest Gump? (all three needed for a point)
    A- Nixon, Kennedy, LBJ

Round 5- Open Source Trivia

  1. Q- How many children does Linus Torvalds have?
    A- Two.

  2. Q- How is “dead beef” used in a running operating system?
    A- Freed memory is frequently overwritten with this value, which is guaranteed to generate a page fault if dereferenced (in, e.g., Solaris).

  3. Q- How many PhDs does Dr. Richard Stallman hold? How many are honorary?
    A- Six. All of them.

  4. Q- What is the birthday of the Linux kernel?
    A- August 21, 1991.

  5. Q- What was the first software project that Apple, Inc. released under an open source license?
    A- Rendezvous support for “zero-configuration” networking, later renamed “Bonjour”, under a BSD license.

  6. Q- What was the first “live CD” Linux distribution?
    A- Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X (LGX), released in December 1992.

  7. Q- From where does the Jokosher project derive its name?
    A- It’s a play on the name of the project’s creator, Jono Bacon: Jo-no-bacon == jo-kosher.

  8. Q- The “Jargon File” has existed since 1975. What is it, and who maintains it?
    A- The Jargon file is a glossary of “hacker terminology”, originally created at Stanford, but great expanded at MIT. It is maintained by Eric S. Raymond.

Round 6- Geek Movies

  1. Q- What does an “oscillation overthruster” enable you to do?
    A- Drive through mountains/enter the 8th Dimension (Buckaroo Banzai)

  2. Q- How much power is required to energize a flux capacitor?
    A- 1.21 gigawatts (Back to the Future!)

  3. Q- What do the characters Elrond (from Lord of the Rings), V (from V for Vendetta) and Agent Smith (from The Matrix) have in common?
    A- All are played by Hugo Weaving

  4. Q- In what movie does a character save the day, exclaiming, “This is a UNIX system! I know this!”
    A- Jurassic Park

  5. Q- What 2001 movie featured Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric S. Raymond and a host of other open source and free software luminaries?
    A- Revolution OS, directed by J.T.S. Moore

  6. Q- What was the first appearance of a laser in a motion picture?
    A- Goldfinger, 1964

  7. Q- What is the relevance of banging a radio antenna guy-wire with a hammer to the film Star Wars?
    A- Ben Burt used this sound for the blasts of the ray guns.

  8. Q- Where would you not go to buy a “phased plasma rifle in a 60-watt range”?
    A- 1984 Los Angeles (The Terminator)

Round 7- Technology Free-for-all

  1. Q- If you were to look at “NMEA data”, what would you be looking at?
    A- GPS information.

  2. Q- The third time definitely wasn’t the charm for this well-known computer company. What is this a reference to?
    A- The Apple ///, released in 1980, proved to be extremely unpopular. It’s the only computer Apple ever produced which was replaced by one with a lower model number (the Apple IIe).

  3. Q- What does “DLNA” refer to?
    A- The “Digital Living Network Alliance”, a standard used by manufacturers of consumer electronics to allow entertainment devices within the home to share their content with each other across a home network.

  4. Q- Which of the following has not been used to access the internet: carrier pigeon, semaphore, morse code, catapult?
    A- Catapult

  5. Q- ENIAC, the US Army computer which ran continuously from 1947 to 1955, was based on vacuum tubes. How many did it contain (to the nearest thousand)?
    A- 17,468

  6. Q- Smalltalk was originally designed to be run on a specific device aimed at giving children access to digital media. What was the name of that device?
    A- The “Dynabook”, designed by Alan Kay.

  7. Q- When was the notion of “hypertext” first proposed?
    A- In a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article by Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think”, which described a proposed device called a “Memex”.

  8. Q- Tim Berners-Lee is credited with the development of the world-wide web. When did Berners-Lee first propose the “WorldWide Web”?
    A- In November, 1990.

Round 8- Name that Distro!

(Visual round: teams had to correctly identify the distro from its logo)


  1. Q-
    A- Xandros

  2. Q-
    A- Mepis

  3. Q-
    A- Gentoo

  4. Q-
    A- Mandriva

  5. Q-
    A- Arch

  6. Q-
    A- Knoppix

  7. Q-
    A- Kubuntu

  8. Q-
    A- Puppy Linux

10 comments:

tspiteri said...

Great Britain is not a country either; the UK (the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island) is.

Ed Ropple said...

Q- Which of the following has not been used to access the internet: carrier pigeon, semaphore, morse code, catapult?
A- Catapult


I have a new summer project, now, don't I?

Dave Neary said...

Hi Lefty,

About the Van Morrison question, let me go over that again:
- Great Britain is an island, not a sovereign nation. The nation is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
- The island of Ireland is partitioned into two parts, Northern Ireland (a subset of the province of Ulster) and the Republic of Ireland (which, until recently, didn't recognise partition).

Cheers,
Dave.

schmichael said...

How ironic that an open source quiz was written in Microsoft Word. ;)

Your RSS feed had a bunch of Word specific markup scattered about:

<meta content="" name="Title"> <meta content="" name="Keywords"> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" equiv="Content-Type"> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Generator"> <meta content="Microsoft Word 2008" name="Originator"> <link href="file://localhost/Users/davidschlesinger/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_filelist.xml" rel="file-list"> <style> </style>

In all seriousness it looked quite good though!

Unknown said...

I'm guessing this was (ironically perhaps given the subject?) copy & pasted from Microsoft Word 2008 as on P.G.O. it shows all of the invalid markup, not sure where else the blog is syndicated though but might be worth a fix :D

Lefty said...

I have a new summer project, now, don't I?

I'm game to write the RFC. "The packet SHALL be in the form of a printed hexadecimal dump of its contents, wrapped around a large rock."

Lefty said...

@Dave, thanks for the clarification (again). If it's any consolation, my US geography isn't all that much better... =/

Walther said...

To be completely pedantic: although Mount Everest is definitely the highest mountain, you could say that Mauna Kea is the tallest. It's on the Big Island of Hawaii and measures 33,476 ft from the sea floor.
Might be a nice question for the next quiz :)

Pradeep Nayak said...

Good one!!!;-)

Pradeep Nayak said...

good one!