EuroBSDCon 2005, part II

Saturday was a long day - after the opening session, saw Adrian Steinmann's talk on Single User Secure Shell - it was quite interesting; basically it's a secure shell maintenance RAMdisk environment that can be launched very early in the boot process, fx before mounting the filesystem - it's a good idea, and I think of a few remote boxes where this might come in handy.
Afterwards moved on to Marc Schiessers's talk on hard disk encryption - it was an interesting talk but the first 20 minutes were spent getting kpdf working, so we ran out of time - gbde is a cool tool, and I might start out with encrypting the filesystem on my USB key.
After a long lunch, saw the talk about evolution of the X Window System - Lots of changes, and interesting eye-candy new features - will be very cool (for desktop users that is). They also announced the death of imake, and will be shipping Xorg7 with GNU Autotools - Good luck to the X port maintainer.

Moved on to the Remote User Access VPNs by Emmanuel Dreyfus, and afterwards Ryan McBride's talk about PF on OpenBSD - it was quite straight-forward, however more amusing than the average - especially when he pulled out an axe and chopped up some ethernet cables to demonstrate live failover. Finished off with Massimiliano Stucchi's talk about Filtering Bridges.

We also had a pretty uneventful FreeBSD ports BoF - the usual bikesheds were discussed, and we even found a new one (ports-tags).

Saturday night we had this years social event.. I had lots of beers, let's just leave it at that ;)

Saturday Extreme Rugby

Our rugby team (Big Red Noses) played against the ENA at l'INSEP at 9:30am.

Well that would have been fine, had it been for the weather:


Needless to say, Météo France screwed this one up too (where were you on that one dipshit!) Yes, it snowed around 15cm during about 3 hours.. It was extremely cold (-3C with wind), very wet, and one hell of a game! By the way, what you see in the pic is the actual pitch we played on.....

That evening, Kris and I went to the France / South Africa rugby game at the Stade de France. The Stade de France rocks, it is not the biggest staduim (80,000 places), but it looks real good, and no matter where you're sitting, it seems like you're pretty much sitting 1st row.


Needless to say we beat South Africa, it was a rough game though, almost lost it in the second half.

Voila! So most of the day was focused on rugby... loooovely ;)

Ciao for now

Dim

EuroBSDCon 2005, Basel, CH

So - I arrived in Basel, Switzerland late Thursday afternoon. This time I drove, beats flying !!

Went out and had a bite at hotel nearby. Food was ok, beer was better. Later met up with the Anton Berezin in the hotel bar, for more beers ! Went fairly early to bed, as I was tired from the driving.

Up early Friday for the DevSummit, nothing really interesting to report - I enjoyed Mike Silbersack's talk, about FreeBSD vs Linux and userbility.. I tend to agree with him, that mergemaster is a bit overwhelming for new users..

Friday night I ate dinner at an Indien restaurant with Henrik Andersen, Simon Nielsen, Flemming Frokjaer and Poul-Henning Kamp - the service was rather slow, however that did give us the opportunity to sample the indinen beers (I was particularly fond of the Cobra beer) - I had my all time favorite indie-dish; butter-chicken.
Ended up having beers at the hotel bar, and fairly early to bed.

Today the actual conference started.
Robert Watson was supposed to talk at the opening session, however he had injured his foot and was unable to attend - pity I rather enjoy his talks. Poul-Henning Kamp stepped up and spoke a bit about the his history with BSD, and its history in general - it was quite amusing.

Testing my patience !

So, I found myself having to go to Copenhagen real fast last week, and after comparing prices - I chose to fly with Sterling (previously knows as Maersk Air). Well actually the choice was quite easy, as I could get a round-trip ticket with Sterling for roughly 150€, whereas the same trip would cost me 600€ with Air France.

Sterling is flying out of Beauvais-Tille (located ~90km north of Paris) - So I drove up there and got on my flight (parking is fairly cheap as well, compared to CDG and Orly).

Everything went smooth.

The return "trip".

Flight was scheduled for 7pm, arriving in Paris at 8.40pm. Yeah right...
After going to the gate, they announce that the departure will be one hour delayed.. I hate waiting in the airport, but ok, it can happen. We finally depart, and the flight itself is going well.. Until we prepare to land in Beauvais.. Apparently is too foggy for us to land, so they decide to land in CDG (Charles De Gaulle International Airport) situated ~75km away from Beauvais !
Sterling propose to organise a bus, that will take passengers back to Beauvais, and another bus for passengers going to Paris. Most passengers werobviouslyly going into Paris, so they were happy to that much closer..
Not me, I had to go back and get my damn car.. (oh why, did I not take the bus.. )
The arranged bus for Beauvais would arrive after 2 hours - at this point it is something like 10.30pm.. I find to other passengers going to Beauvais, and we end up splitting a cab..

All in all, I end up spending way too much money on parking, ticket, taxi and whatnot, and I'm not home before 1.30am !!!

Grrrr.. it's a rough day today.

Hand-Job-Dating

I came across a beautiful one today. Check out what was on news.google.fr..



Obviously one journalist at l'Express doesn't know what a handjob is in English.

Just so you know, this article is about jobs for handicapped people... geez.

of CNN, France and Hobos

Well well, hasn't it been an eventful couple of weeks!

I saw this on CNN the other day, and just had to post it. I mean, I would love to meet the kid who did this little graphic for CNN... Where were you on that one, dipshit?!


I have some advice for you:
1. go back to elementary school and start from there
2. once you're done with step one, and assuming you can read and write, open a browser, go to www.google.com, and type "map of france" in the blank. Don't forget to press enter on your keyboard (it's the big inverted L button on your right).
3. When using Google Earth, at least take into account the CITY LOCATIONS!!!!!

Fucking idiot...

New beast

Last weekend we got a new addition to our little family..
Meet Merlin:



He's a Maine-Coon, and a cool little beast - now the challenge is to get him accepted by our current cat..

Riots in Paris suburbs

Damn hoodlums.. Burning cars, destroying other people's stuff..

I fail to see why we do not declare a state of emergency in those areas, and send in the military (the foreign legion comes to mind) to clean up this mess.

I'm imagining that those idiots would calm the fuck down at the sight of a ready-for-combat-fuck-with-us-and-we'll-open-a-can-of-whoop-ass foreign legion unit..