Josef “Jeff” Sipek

OLS 2006 - Day 5

The day began with an awesome presentation I gave about Unionfs. :) Shawn was recoding it, but after the presentation, he found out that the video turned out to be crap. He has audio only. I’m sure he’ll share it soon. :) I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people that use Unionfs or were interested in Unionfs.

The keynote was excelent as always. However I must say that Greg K-H made it sound like any piece of code will get into the kernel. Yeah, right :) But he did say few nice things about the status of Linux.

After the keynote, there was the GPG key signing - which I did not attend, although I wanted to. Instead we went to get some food. Food was good, we (I, Dave, Mike Halcrow, and Prof. Zadok) talked about a bunch of things ranging from MythTV and terabyte storage servers, to things like the number of ants in Texas. (Apparently, it is a lot of fun to watch termites and fire ants battle to the death. O_o )

We finished food around 19:45 which was about right to head over to the Black Thorn for the after event party. Just as last year it was quite interesting. Pretty much as soon as I got there, I noticed Peter Baudis aka. pasky - the cogito maintainer. We chatted about how git and Mercurial differ (Matt’s talk the day before came in handy :) ). I mentioned I was slowly working on a generic benchmark script that would test a number of popular SCMs including Mercurial, Subversion, and CVS. He was thrilled about the prospect of knowing exactly where git sucked compared to other SCMs - my guess is that he wants to fix it and make it better, a noble goal, but unnecessary as Mercurial already exists and why reinvent the wheel? ;) Seriously, though, I think a lot of people would benefit from knowing exactly where each SCM excels, and where each sucks. The nice thing about collaborating with the git people would be that it would make it more apparent that this wouldn’t just be yet-another-fake-test. After some time, a bunch of other Czech people poped up right next to us (people like, Pavel Machek, etc.). It was quite interesting. :)

After than I joined a converation with some Intel people. As it turns out, one of the Intel people is working on the e1000 driver — awesome piece of hardware, by the way, don’t ever buy anything other than it. :) Some time later, Jens Axboe joined the group briefly. When he said my name seemed familiar, I mentioned how I tried to implement IO priorities - and failed :) Later on, a guy from University of Toronto joined the group. He approached me earlier in the day about unionfs on clusters. We chatted about things ranging from school (undergraduate program, and grad school) to submitting kernel code to lkml. The e1000 guy said a similar thing that we should split unionfs up into a few patches, and send it off. During the event a few people still asked me about Unionfs, which felt good :)

Then, I decided that it would be fun to talk to some IRC people. I found John Levon and Seth Arnold. We sat down, and had an interesting conversation about a number of things. Since at least some of these were quite interesting, here’s a list:

  1. How can I deal with VFS and not drink vodka or other hard liquer
  2. Everybody hates CDE, even people at Sun
  3. Solaris is dead (well, they didn’t say it, but that’s the feeling I got)
  4. Brittons have some interesting sports or at least some of the expected behavior during the sport is interesting, namely:

  1. darts - you are expected to drink as you play
  2. I can’t recall the name - gigantic pool table
  3. cricket - everyone smokes "reefer" (to quote Movement, I just find this name of the substance mildly amusing) because their games sometimes take several days

After that, they kicked everyone out as it was 2:45 already. We (Seth, John, and I) went back to the hotel. There, Prof. Zadok and Chip (who arrived on Friday) were about to get up and head to the airport. :) I just went to bed.

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