Fosdem 2007 , late toughts
I know.. Fosdem is already over for almost 2 weeks. But I was busy writing other stuff , so I`m catching up now.
Sounds weird, but somehow eventhough fosdem is getting crowdier every year it also seems to be better organised.
The focus is moving away from the main conference track and into the hallway and devroom tracks. That's where the people meet.
Matt and I arrived rather early at Fosdem on saturday , for once that RMS wasn't giving a keynote I took the opportunity to actually go there and catch parts of both the OLPC and the Java talk. Nothing new about the first one, Sun marketing in the second one. I`m not used to the kind of talks Simon Phipps gave, this was more a commercial or a TV show trying to entertain the audience rather than actually teach them stuff. hmm.. probably that's why they call it a KeyNote. The Puppet community kind of arranged to meet at 1400 at the entrance of the Centos/Fedora room , so I tried to catch a glimp of Luke there and succeeded. Karanbir had kindly offered his timeslot for Puppet talk on sunday.
After lots of other hallway encounters, pointing me to a really nice NLUUG Virtualisation Conference Schedule and the new dates for T-Dose, I managed to see the LinuxBios talk, I really should spend some time looking at this .. some day ..
After this talk I headed back to the CentOS room to see Fabian talk about eID, then Federic about OpenVZ , realised that I really should spend time looking at Fedora Directory Server, it should be really familiar, as in august it will only be 7 years since I took the IPlanet Directory Service training in London :) , auch .. time flies when you're having fun at the open side ;) Things I wrote down from FedoraDS were the multimaster replication , the Virtual Views you can use when organisations realise they should have paid you for the formal LDAP analysis , Chaining of directories and much more.
After the last talk from Dab about RPMForge we had a photoop :)
Yes, that's the whole RPMforge team for you.
A bunch of us headed out to De Appel in Leuven for Drinks an Food.
I drove back Luke and Karanbir to their hotels only to get stuck in traffic in Brussels.
I was looking forward to Pete Herzog's talk on OSSTMM on Sunday morning, it feels like ages ago since I was closely involved in the OSSTMM project , I had a 2 minute chat with Pete before he flew back to Barcelona but it was worth getting up early . If I could find that 26hoursaday patch I'd probably jump back into it.
Max Spevack finished his Future of Fedora talk early so I could still catch the end of the Drupal talk While hurrying back to Jeff Johnsons talk on the current state of RPM , I bumped into Roland, JJ talked a lot about xar , also something to look into.
Before Lance could start his CentOS roadmap talk I ran into Lenz and Roland but couldn't find them again after I finished my sandwich :(
One of the talks that I will be remembering was stpeter's 1 slide per second talk. Great stuff.. really kept you focussed and meaningful content also, not just marketing crap. Only too bad he didn't provide a ful solution yet. Time wil..
Fosdem kept the best for last, Luke's Puppet talk, I've mentoinned puppet before in this blog, so you kind of know why I keep mentionning this.
I taped his whole talk with my mobile. The video quality isn't really good, but the sound is reasonable. I should probably check with Luke to put it online somewhere in a usable format ;)
After Luke's talk I went home and started the recovery process , which took till .. well.. now :)