I'm writing these lines in the train, back from Bruxelles where I was this week-end, attending the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM). I 've had a really great time there, it was hard to choose between the available conferences, but I managed to view quite a few interesting ones, including but not limited to the ones by Keith Packard, H D Moore, Michael Meeks, Miguel de Icaza (well, missed the beginning), Jim Blandy and Frederico Quintero (that guy's talk was really good, watch the video once it's on the FOSDEM website).

Misc notes:
  • When Keith Packard was searching for a generic name for N800-like devices, someone proposed "Personal Bedside Porn Viewer". A nice discussion on how many free hands you need to operate it followed :)
  • Metasploit 3.0 (not out yet, still in beta) looks really great, the demo was impressive, these guys just seem to have implemented *everything* in it
  • Idiot: "C'est pas Linux ça, c'est Coca Cola" Miguel de Icaza: "Qu'est-ce que c'est Coca-Cola ?"
  • I really should try gdb tracepoints
  • I really should find some time to hunt memory leaks or do stuff like that to help the OLPC Project. I think it's the most important libre software project since GNU
  • Belgian beers really have nothing to do with what you generally can find in England
  • I should do some more kernel hacking, Jim Blandy made me want to. I hated when I made that kernel school project and lost *nights* debugging quick'n dirty code with printk()s. Things look much easier with gdb kernel tracepoints (and, well, that project is just sexy)
  • I don't like certifications, but the OSSTMM methodology looks really clever; security done the scientific way :)
  • Brussels is a really cool town.
  • Yet, even in Brussels, you should beware of pickpockets in touristic areas; Toto knows what I'm speaking about...

I'll try to upload some pics one day, but since I was a long time without internet, I am something like 3 or 4 months late with photos uploading...


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Published

26 February 2007

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