Oh well, Ondrej Certik offered a debugging challenge for a problem in Sage he discovered. The problem was that he hit a timeout when starting up a binary copy of Sage on his shiny, new and fast Intel Quad Code box. After some debugging he discovered that Debian's XFS default mount options cause the slowdown, all the details can be found in this blog entry from Ondej's blog. You should go over to his blog and check out the quite interesting details since he took the time to track the issue down.
The challenge boiled down to the whether the timeout bug was in Sage or XFS. The loser would have to publicly claim that he is lame. Since the challenge was issued and resolved while I was asleep I did contribute little to the end result and let's just say that I am not lame. By the process of elimination you can guess the outcame. But I have been wrong about bugs in Sage and elsewhere in computing in general many times before and while I teased Ondrej a little bit about it in IRC it was all good fun. It just shows that Sage is much, much more than a pure technical project and has a social and community side, too.
Cheers,
Michael
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