Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Day 2…well…day 1 of the conference. The first talk (a keynote, actually) started at 10am. Unfortunatelly, I couldn’t use my phone as an alarm clock as the LCD broke earlier this weekend…

…and yesterday before going to bed, I forgot to set the time on the alarm clock in the hotel room. So, I got up when it felt like a good time to get out of bed. Well, oddly enough, that turned out to be something like 7:30. A bit scary actually.

Anyway, a croissant and some orange juice later, I was at the conference center, with about 45 mins to spare. I ran into Bruce Fields (one of the NFS guys; working at University of Michigan).

The keynote was ok. First, there were some technical problems (the mic and the projector didn’t work), once those got out of the way and the actual talk began. The speaker was a bit too quiet - not sure if that was his fault or if the amplifier wasn’t set to the right level.

After the keynote, as people started pouring out of the room, I saw Dave Quigley (a former lab mate from FSL) hanging around some SELinux guys (makes sense, since that’s what he’s working on). We talked for a little, and then headed down to one of the talks in the next time slot: Confining the User with SELinux. It wasn’t bad…but being no fan of SELinux, I probably didn’t get all the fun out of it. I am somewhat tempted to give SELinux a try…again.

Seeing that there were no interesting looking talks, Dave, I, and 5 people doing SELinux work went out to get lunch. I had some pretty good burger with blue cheese…I think I’m on a blue cheese binge.

After lunch, it was time for another talk to attend. I decided to check out the “Real Time” vs. “Real Fast”: How to Choose? It wasn’t bad at all. Not being into real-time systems, I learned a few things here and there.

For the next talk, I just stayed in the same room. It wasn’t much fun. The presentation wasn’t the best, and about 15 minutes into it, I realized (talking with some people on IRC) that there was another talk in the other room that I wanted to see. So I left.

The other talk (Tux meets Radar O’reilly - Linux in military telecom was good. Well presented, and while obvious, it made a couple of thoughts explicitly stated.

The last talk (A Runtime Code Modification Method for Application Programs) for the day was quite interesting. I am going to check out the project website and read the paper in the proceedings.

After talks, there were BOFs… I went to the ones about Kernel.org and iSCSI HBA with Linux OpeniSCSI.

The kernel.org BOF was much like last year - and it was a good update to see what’s going these days with the services they provide. The summary: things work. :) And more will work.

The iSCSI BOF was interesting. I got to hear about some iSCSI offload stuff that Broadcom is working on.

After the BOFs, I waited around for a little bit with Christoph Lameter, Pekka Enberg, and Bruce Fields. Then a bunch of people from the conference (I guess something between 25-35 in total) headed to a rather fancy place for some food. The soup was good. The salmon was good. The ice cream was good.

Anyway, it’s getting late, and I should get some sleep tonight.