The conference is over, and it's time to return to the mundane. It was a good time - formal talks, social activity and lots of idea exchanges. Actually a very good time. If I was independently wealthy, I'd probably spend most of my time attending conferences. I hear BSDCan 2010 will be on for next year, so at the very least I have that to look forward to.
I did not attend any of the highly technical presentations, as I'm effectively a BSD newbie (well, I used it for years in the 80's), but I don't really have much experience with the modern versions. That is a task for this year. I have the iso images, vmware, enough physical machines to brown out the neighborhood and time to learn.
I've been lurking for ages and not really gotten involved except at the periphery, so it's time to jump in and help out. I guess I should play up my strengths first and get involved on the sysadmin side and see where that leads me. Could be fun, might be more work, but I will not know until I get started. Cat and Leslie's talk on open source involvement was enough to get the desire woken up, so it's time to see if I can contribute something other than the occasional blog post.
Not too much to say beyond that. I spent a lot more time talking with the attendees than I normally do, so I never managed to take my plethora of photos. I think I only have 13 that were even worth posting and some of them are a little out of focus. Next year I'll do better.
It appears that I only blog here around BSDCan. I'll have to do something about that someday.
As of Monday, it's back to freelance consulting. I've left the corporate world behind again and I am going back into the trenches. It was a good year and a bit, but the security work never managed to be the real focus of the job.
Enough of that noise. BSDCan 2009 - a little smaller this year, might be something to do with the economic downturn or whatever buzzword meets your requirement for defining the rather "interesting" situation we all find ourselves in these days.
Today was the second day of tutorials, and official registration day for the conference. Dan managed to do an excellent job again of getting this set up and running, I don't know where he finds the time.
I managed to attend Michael Lucas' netflow session and it was very informative. I could have used the info about 3 months ago - better late than never.
Tomorrow should be a full day and there are lots of sessions. Even if you don't attend, the list of events is pretty impressive. Check it out at http://www.bsdcan.org
BSDCan, a BSD conference held in Ottawa, Canada, has quickly established itself as the technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. The organizers have found a fantastic formula that appeals to a wide range of people from extreme novices to advanced developers.
BSDCan 2008 will be held on 16-17 May 2008 at University of Ottawa, and will be preceded by two days of Tutorials on 14-15 May 2008.
I've given up the life of the free-lance consultant for the time being to take on a security officer role. It should be very interesting once I get the current crop of impending doom cleared from my plate and actually get involved in drilling into the corporate offerings and policies.
If I'm real lucky, I even get to start playing with all the good toys. Pen tests, vulnerability scans, patch management, etc. Should be a lot of fun (from a technical point of view) and hopefully I'll find it a pleasant change from Systems Administration, Network Design and Data Center Design.
The meetings, verifications and other administrivia will counterbalance the techie portions, but that's the price you pay to play in the field. Still, should make for a new and exciting career change.
This OS is designed pretty effectively to provide a business infrastructure. The $500 version is similar to MS Windows Small Business Server, but it's limited to 10 users - the $999 version is unlimited. You get some pretty impressive integration and a few extras, so it's pretty much a comparable offering to Small Business Server Premium.
There is nothing in here that you can't do with Open Source, but it is nice to see it all wrapped up together in a unified package that actually seems like it was designed that way. If you think about it, you'd spend at least that much on getting someone to implement the unification if you wanted to go Open Source, so it's not such a bad deal.
I'm not going to get into price comparison or feature comparison. I just happened to like what I saw.
If there was a truly killer app that comes with the server package, it's the app called podcast producer. I can't do it justice, but a very short and simplified description is that it is an automated work flow system for producing podcasts. I've been spending quite a few hours just producing the audio portion of the BSDCan 2007 conference and once you are in the zone, it takes a good 30 minutes to set up and produce one single episode. Lets see... 2 days of 3 rooms with 6 sessions is about 16 hours once everything is in place.Just doing a cost of my time, I could easily justify the limited version on my desktop just for this alone and save time if I do the audio again in 2008.
In other news, I was lurking on the OCLUG IRC and saw reference to the ship that ran aground in Antarctica...
The MS Explorer, an adventure travel ship operated by a Toronto company, was on a 19-day cruise off Antarctica when it hit an iceberg on Nov. 23.
The full article is available online.
I find it amusing that the MS Explorer is listed as threatening penguins (think for a few seconds).
I'm a little slow posting, as I have been too busy to post (read catching up on sleep from 5 days of too little sleep). I attended the inaugural linuxfest last weekend, well, the conference/fest was on Saturday with a early-bird party Friday night. I couldn't make it, as I was visiting with family and had been driving half the day.
I wasn't trying to get to too many things, as my expectation level was not very high, this being a first conference and everybody being new to it. The slow to update website probably had a lot to do with my expectation level. In fact, it went off much better than I expected and I'll be going back next year.
I went to two sessions on Joomla! (one was a community meeting and
the other was a practical hands on install session with basic
configuration). After that I spent some time at the mini trade show (the
BSD folks were there as well) which was pretty good - open source
projects as well as companies such as RedHat and IBM. You can see the
full list at the website. I also
went to an Open Source Advocacy Town Hall type meeting which seemed to
be mostly about how do we get the word out (my opinion would be more
how do we fight the apathy of end users) and had to leave early - the
LPI people were putting on an exam and I was getting my proctor
training.
After that, I went to the closing Keynote by John "Maddog"
Hall. I believe the distilled essence was something like "We make too
much crap that uses too many resources. We need a better way. Let's all
do something about it" I'm probably missing an item or two, as the presentation was about an hour long and had a lot of slides. It was
pretty interesting and I'd like to get my hands on a copy of the
presentation. There was a post conference reception an hour or so
later that I also skipped.
Well, the audio so far was pretty easy. I'm not an audio engineer, nor do I have the patience for it. The audio for the conference was originally recorded as wav files on a cd recorder for each session, so given what t he microphone the speaker is using hears and the gear being used, a trim and some additions are all it gets.
I suspect that the video I shot will prove to be a little more difficult. It's captured on one of those Sony HDD cameras, so the file is a compressed mpeg4 to begin with. The good news is that iLife '08 on my mac sees the video from the camera with no problem. The downside is that the silly camera must use a DOS file system, as the files are all limited to 2GB each, so I may have to do a number of cuts and joins to get it all put together properly. These will also be posted in video podcast format for space reasons.
With some luck, maybe before the end of November.
The next day, same room. This makes two days worth of audio. I have four more to set up.
At long last, I have gotten started on the road to production.
The following files are Day 1, room B1038
[Crossposted to my other blog]
I just got back from attending a friend's wedding back in my hometown. Well, she's more of my wife's friend, but that's not significant enough to matter.
In the interest of saving a few dollars (just over $300) and a few days dog kennel money, I adjusted my stay down a few days and the price dropped dramatically. If I had stayed an additional week, I could have gotten the same deal, but it would have cost me 7 days consulting rates and the extra 7 days kennel fees (as well as taxing my relationship with the person taking care of my cats). I just don't get it - how can it cost $300 more to go out on the same flight on a different day? It's not like I hadn't stayed over a weekend; oh yeah, they don't do that any more. I booked a return trip; right, that doesn't matter anymore either. Well, then there is no real way to predict prices. Fees and taxes are another good one. Better than half the cost of the trip was the various surcharges, taxes, airport fees, security fees, etc. Don't forget, they still offer complimentary drinks (water, juice, soft drinks, milk, coffee, and tea), but don't ask for a refill if they are busy. food is available - you have to purchase it now. Not even the salty fried carbohydrates are available any more. Stock up on bottled water and a visit to the Tim Horton's or Second Cup inside the security area before you board the aircraft. To add insult to injury, the flight had mechanical difficulties and we sat on the tarmac for an extra half hour (the plane was filled to capacity - and smelled like it). I did make my connecting flight in Halifax, but it was getting close - the hour I had between flights had dropped to 10 minutes.
Where was I going? Thats it, vacation... Well, the trip out was Wednesday afternoon, arriving around 21:00, so nothing to do that evening except get settled in, have a meal, unpack and grab some sleep.
Thursday morning - wake up (later than I would have liked, 1.5 hours later in the day). Figure out the sequence of events for the next few days:
- The wedding (Saturday afternoon, evening and night)
- My anniversary (Friday night)
- The combined family get together (Thursday evening - 7 hours from now and running until relatively late)
- Breakfast with my sister and her husband (saturday morning)
- Get a few gifts for my nieces (right after Saturday breakfast)
- My parent's wedding anniversary dinner with my side of the family (Sunday afternoon/evening - they had it a few days early so my wife and I could attend)
- Some time with my nieces - take them out for breakfast and give them a few gifts (Monday morning and early afternoon)
- Fly back to Ottawa (Monday late afternoon, arriving 9:30pm)
If I check that list correctly, I had some time on Friday to check my email, moderate a mailing list (over 300 spam messages), attempt to figure out why my father-in-law's computer was so slow, download my wife's pictures to my laptop so she had empty memory cards again, and realize that the three or four things I actually wanted to do would not happen. My inlaws also do pretty much nothing but cook and entertain these days - there was always a planned (slightly elaborate) meal so no skipping out on that.
I still had a good time. Next visit will be for NO events and just to relax (yeah, right!)
Almost forgot - back to work Tuesday morning, run out and pick up the dog after work (65km away) and get home to call my wife to let her know that the dog is OK, the cats are fine, the house is still standing and everything is as it should be. This is then followed by a run out to a friends house for the weekly visit. Wednesday night, out for wings with a bunch of friends. It's Thursday morning and I finally feel like I'm starting to recover from the "vacation"
On the plus side, I think I have a social life.
Here's a picture from Signal Hill, overlooking the city harbour:
It occurs to me that I should state that no humans were eaten for lunch during the course of this... read more
on BSDCan2007_keynote