Josef “Jeff” Sipek

So, the conference started today, with Jonathan Corbet’s presentation about the changes in the past year. I showed up about a minute before he started, and therefore many of the seats were taken. I, however, did not try to look for a seat. Why? Simple. I noticed someone who seemed familiar. When the presentation ended, I walked to him and said: “You know, you look just like this one Finnish guy that maintains this program that a bunch of my friends use.” Then we had a nice conversation for the next half hour about things ranging from who he wants to be the VFS maintainer, why certain symbols are not being exported, etc. About half way though, Mike Halcrow (of the eCryptfs fame) showed up, and joined our conversation. He said two things that made Linus (yes, it was Linus Torvalds) cringe:

1. He suggested to add a way for some of the vfs calls to be “filtered” - he however used the word “streams” to describe this flow of data; Linus’s reaction was “you said the bad word”
2. Then there was brief segue into security - he mentioned BSD security levels, to which Linus replied with “We still support that crap?!”

Of course there were plenty of other people that I saw, including Andrew Morton, S. Tweedie, Ted Tso, and the list can go on and on.

So, the first day here in Ottawa is about to end. I didn’t do all that much simply because I was tired - I actually fell asleep for few hours, which helped a lot as I had only about 4.5 hours of sleep before heading to the airport. In the afternoon, I found Rik van Riel and Matt Domsch. We chatted a bit. Anyway, I’m going to get some food.

Almost a year after returning from his quest, brave Sir Jeff decided that ’tis was time to return to the land of Canada. And so the quest began once again.

So, with little over 12 hours before my flight takes off, I am starting to pack and all the other related things - Yay! This year, I’m going to OLS not as an attendee, but also as a speaker. As you may have guessed, the topic is Unionfs. See you in Ottawa!

So, yeah. I finally forced myself to write one of these blog entries. Woohoo! I’ve been quite busy for the past two weeks (doing some cluster building, and then slideshow making - I leave for OLS in only 4 days!) I must say it should be interesting - the presentation, the impromptu stackable filesystems BOF.

I just found this very bizarre image (mirror) (too wide to include it here) which explains rather humorously  RAID.

Oh yeah, I should have probably posted this earlier…the OLS paper is done. And it looks good :)

So, I was at ICON the past 3 days. I took a bunch of photos of people and of the place; I went to a bunch of presentations; I did two presentation myself (with some other people); but the most interesting thing was when I went to a Q&A Session with George Takei on Saturday. (Those who don’t know who George Takei is: he’s Sulu from the Original Series of Star Trek.) There was this one guy, who asked him (Takei) if he (the guy) could have his tea cup. I found that an awesome idea. But it was too late.

The next day (Sunday = Today), I went to the second Q&A session, and asked Takei if I could get his tea cup. He said sure. :)

I know I am crazy, but I don’t care. I have an autographed tea cup, and you don’t.

(More photos to follow when I get to it.)

So, Linux Users’ Group @ Stony Brook is going to host an Install Fest at ICON — a science fiction convention right here in Stony Brook. Some of ICON’s guests include George Takei (Hikaru Sulu), Kevin Sorbo (Hercules), and even bizarre individuals such as Voltaire (author of “The U.S.S. Make-Shit-Up,” etc. in addition to most of the other “music.”)

So, show up, and have some fun!

So, about two weeks ago, we (the FSL) decided to write few proposals for Ottawa Linux Symposium. One of them was: UnionFS: User and Community-oriented Development of a Unioning Filesystem by (in alphabetical order) Charles P. Wright, David Quigley, Josef Sipek.

The other day, I got an email saying that it got accepted. Yay! So, we have to write an abstract by March 1st, and then the paper by April 1st.

So, newyears consisted of working on a simple HTTP proxy-like script (in Python) until 23:56 when I got called downstairs to watch the NYC ball drop thing on TV. The ball dropped, just like every year, and there was much rejoicing. 0:01 I said that I’ll be upstairs coding some more. :-)

Except those 5 minutes, a typical midnight.