24C3 – Day 1

Day 1 started less chaotic. Even the Network worked until about 20:00. I attended several talks.
After the opening the first one about the german Bundestrojaner (not much news for people following fefes Blog). Second one was about the Abuse Handling of the CCC Tor-exitnode.
In the lunchbreak i strolled through the new Alexa-Shoppingmall on the other side of the street.
After lunch the talk about 10GE Sniffing was too crowded, so i recharged my laptop instead and did some maintainance tasks, like fixing some bugs in the squirrelmail configuration (which i only use when i am on a journey, so i did not notice them before) and reconfigured my SSHD to listen on 443, because the internet access in my hotel room only allows port 80 and 443.
I tried to attend the “What is terrorism” talk, but immediately left, because i did not like the way it was presented. I switched to the talk about BT trackersoftware. I don’t and will not use it, but the talk was a good show anyway.
After the evening break i attended the “Crouching Powerpoint, Hidden Trojan” talk. It was about some chinese trojans. What was interesting was how bad the anti-virus products were at detecting quite old only slightly modified trojans and how difficult it is to detect a trojaned machine in the network.
Next was a talk about DNA reverse engineering. I haven’t heard anything about genetics since i left school.
The talk was quite interesting, and i really wonder how many years it will take until there is a genetics programming workshop at a Congress.
Unfortunately the final talk about IPv6 by Jeroen was canceled. So we left for a bar instead.

24C3 – Day Zero

It’s been six years since i last attended a Chaos Communication Congress. Since last time i had to wait very long at the entrance, i decided to buy my ticket on Day 0 this time.
I arrived a few minutes after 18:00 when the ticket counter should open. Quite a lot of people where already lined up. But the counter did not open, because of a “network issue”. We had to wait for an hour in the cold (approx. 0°C). Then the line was relocated to the inside, and we had to wait another half hour until we were finally able to buy a ticket.
So yeah, i was reminded why it is called “chaos” communication congress. I hope tomorrow will be organized better.

YAPC 2007

So YAPC 2007 is over by now. It was quite a dense conference with talks from 9 to 18.00, short breaks and of course an attendendees dinner, so i did not had much time to write a blog entry, because when i came home, i had to fall asleep immediately to be fit for the next day.
So i will try to recapitulate what happend:
Day1: There was some confusion at the beginning, because i was late because of a subway defect and lots of people also wanted to register at the last minute. The registration desk decided to pause registration for the keynote.
First short talk was by Jose Castro about “How to get the most out of a YAPC”. His mantra was “socialize”. Well i failed miserably at the networking game, because it took me until the last day to look onto the backside of my WLAN accound sheet to discover that i need to look for a guy called “Erik Østlyngen”. So no prize for me.
Next was the keynote by Larry Wall. I didn’t really get the point maybe because of the bad acoustic on the right side of the man auditorium. Afterwards i headed to Room 2. Unfortunately Room 1 and Room2 are quite a walk away in the basement, while most of the conference was happening in the first floor. Grrrr’s talk just before lunch about his SQL->Perl abstraction layer was quite interesting. After lunch i went to room 2 again where i stayed the rest of day. My personal highlights were the talk “Gluing a bank together with perl” and the talk about Debians perl packagemaintainers. What i like about the talks program was, that not all talks were of the same length. If you didn’t have much to say you could give a 5min lightning talk, the short talk was 20 minutes, the average was 40 minutes and the longest were about 90min. So the speakers weren’t in need to expand or compress their material.
Second day started with Damian Conways “Anti-social perl” which was very funny madness. Before lunch i went to the testing track, because wanting to learn more about testing was next to curiosity one of the main reasons to attend the conference. Now i have got a Test::Smoke script running on my box, and a half way installation of CPAN::Reporter. Hopefully i have the time to finish this.
After the second coffeebreak… BTW. i found the food supplied in the coffeebreaks strange. In the morning break they offered sweet stuff and in the afternoon a non-sweet second breakfast. I would have done it the other way round. Well after the second coffeebreak i went to Mark Dominus’ High Order Parsing Techniques, which was one the highlights of the conference being a great show while still being a technical talk. But i still don’t understand why the chalkboard wasn’t collapsing when mjd did his freeclimbing intermezzo.
The attendees Dinner took place at a large Heurigen in Transdanubia. Unfortunately they were not prepared to so many people, which resulted in having to wait for a long time to get something to drink or eat. (Did they really had only two waitresses serving drinks for all the people?) Many non-local attendees were quite surprised that they served wine and only wine. I went home with the second shuttlebus, which for unknown reasons went on an odyssee through Vienna (From Strebersdorf to the WU via Schwedenplatz). It would have been nice to communicate this route before, so that i could have taken public transport instead.
On the third day were the lightning talks, which was a great idea, there were some gems included. Afterwards i attended the Regexp talks, which was way over my head. Of course i admire the madness of programming the sudoku solver in regular expressions. After lunch i attended the social talks in the main auditorium.
The conference finished with an auction. They had quite a few interesting items, so i planned to place a bid, but i didn’t expect the perl communities to be that crazy. Even if it was for a good purpose i would never spent more than 100 EUR for a T-Shirt (even if it is a rare “unique” YAPC::South America shirt).
Well lucky for me most people didn’t get, that there were some items sold via silent auction as well. One could write down bids on a paper instead of yelling them through the auditorium. So i managed to win an ActiveState Shirt which looks cool for only 15 EUR and a Perl Poloshirt for 10 Euros (well it has the wrong color and the wrong size, but i could not resist…).
In summary it was worth attending the conference, although i am not a diehard perl programmer. The community was great and the organizers did a great job.
While i was adding YAPC:EU to my events list, i noticed, that i haven’t been on a geek conference for two years. This ought to change.

Mac OS 10.4.10 and Macbook problems

Since i upgraded to 10.4.10, my MacBook has frequently problems with its net connectivity via WLAN. It looks like the atheros driver gets stuck. Sometimes it helps putting the macbok to sleep and reawake it, but at least two times, it refused to wake up and popped up a kernel crash dialog on reboot.
So stay away for a while if you have not upgraded yet…

Linuxwochen 07

I am just online via the Wireless Network at Linuxwochen Wien, the local Linux promotion event.
Unfortunately it looks like a lot less people are attending than the years before, maybe 50 are attending the talks.
I am attending the last two talks, the nagios one was very basic and short, and now a talk about linux embedded systems. The talk suffered from a crashing Mac OS X but the speaker managed to get it back working without stopping to talk.

Relocation (non-)progress

Unfortunately inode delayed the activation of my telephone number for a week without explanation, from their shop’s progress tracker it looks like they didn’t receive a report from the TA technician and/or forgot to send a notification to Etel.
So i had a couple of spare time today reserved for configuring the telephone system.
I spent the time moving my shell- and secondary DNS/Mailserver to the new flat, which is next to moving the firewall the most difficult part of the transition.

New ISP

Yesterday my ADSL modem was delivered, and it worked out of the box. Now i have to wait for the painters who decided to delay their work to Decemter 27 instead of tomorrow. Then i can finally start migrating my services to the new IP range.
Since yesterday it was announced that Telekom Austria is buying Etel it was a good idea to switch my ISP to inode.at. Unfortunately the new telefon line, which should start working on January 2 will be operated by Etel, so it looks like I will become a Telekom Austria customer for the first time in my life.

surprise gift

Today the /usr partion on my server reached 100% again. While trying to find some stuff to delete i suddently noticed that all partions counted up to only 10G although the harddisk had 30G, so there were 20G of unused space on the harddisk *yay*.

Cleaning up my Computer junkyard

If anyone is interested, i need to get rid of several old computers:
System 1 Miditower with (excerpts from dmesg):
total memory = 127 MB
cpu0: Intel Pentium (P54C) (586-class), 199.92 MHz, id 0x52c
cpu0: features 1bf
ex0 at pci0 dev 11 function 0: 3Com 3c905-TX 10/100 Ethernet (rev. 0x0)
wd0 at atabus0 drive 0:
wd0: 14664 MB, 29795 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 30033360 sectors
System 2:
CPU: AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor (400.91-MHz 586-class CPU)
Origin = “AuthenticAMD” Id = 0x58c Stepping = 12
Features=0x8021bf
AMD Features=0x80000800
real memory = 134201344 (127 MB)
rl0: port 0xb000-0xb0ff mem 0xd9800000-0xd98000ff ir
q 12 at device 13.0 on pci0
ad0: 8063MB [16383/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33