Dirac Angestun Gesept

I never actually posted this one here, so here ’tis; apologies to those who’ve seen it before.

The game show went well and was fun; I also won, which will help my chances of going to LISA ‘05, since the prizes included a free technical sessions registration.

The flight back was uneventful.

Last day; sigh. This has been the first LISA I’ve been able to attend since 2000; it’s been loads of fun, not long enough, et cetera.

First session: papers, even though there were two interesting talks scheduled. (Yes, my rule is to go to talks instead of papers; one of the two was cancelled, and the other is apparently also being given at BBLISA in Boston in a couple months.) This was a set of security papers, and all three were interesting.

The first one was on how they set up a security game (challenging teams to secure their machines and crack into other machines) in a controlled environment, complete with a scoring system modeled on “capture the flag”. The second discussed how PlanetLab manages security given that they don’t physically control their machines, let users have root, and so on. Not my set of challenges, but they have a well-thought-out set of techniques that seem pretty solid to me. The last was on better ways to do automated tasks on multiple machines while maintaining least privilege, rather than having root-enabled ssh keys that can do anything. I can think of lots of uses for that.!

Second session: Simson Garfinkel’s talk on “Used Disk Drives”. Lots of fun examples of stuff that people didn’t actually delete, even in the cases where they thought they had erased the disk (hint: fdisk and format aren’t it).

Lunch, then the “Lessons Learned from Howard Dean’s Digital Campaign” talk. Tom Limoncelli’s talks are always fun, and the topic was interesting; what more could I have asked for? Well, not being scheduled against the Works In Progress session would have been nice, but that’s hardly Tom’s (or Keri’s) fault.

The last session of the day (and conference) is the LISA Game Show. I’ll report on that later; I’m in it, and by the time it’s over the wireless will no longer be available.

I have a general rule for USENIX conferences: if debating between an invited talk and a paper session, go to the talk; the papers are in the proceedings. (Apologies to paper authors, but it’s true.)

So, today…”all talk, less rock”. Or something like that anyway.

The first talk in the SPAM track was an overview of the problem, the solutions, the problems with the solutions, and some solutions to problems with the solutions. (The last being “use Bayesian techniques and other heuristics to kick out the obvious junk and pass the obviously clean stuff, then use Turing tests/hashcash/whatever to sort out the stuff in between”.) Not bad, but nothing groundbreaking.

Trey Harris’s talk on “A New Approach to Scripting” wasn’t actually new, as he explained, but it was still a great presentation of a great technique for handling error checking and correcting in scripts. (Basically, it’s sort of a scripting version of cfengine; you assert something, then if the assertion fails you run the command to set up whatever you were going to set up; after that, you test again, and if the test fails that time, you abort.) He’s got a perl module to do the annoying parts, complete with idempotency (since the test happens first), rollback options, and so forth. We’ve done some very basic versions of this in some install scripts at work, but only the test/execute part; no re-test and no rollback. I hope to see this stuff ported to Python, as someone suggested on the conference IRC channel.

Dan Klein’s talk on “Flying Linux” was far too good to try to summarize without doing it injustice (though there were some typos on his slides; the rocket is “Ariane” with one “n”!).

Bill Van Etten then closed out the day with his plenary session on bioinformatics for sysadmins. Nothing really new to me (since I’ve been doing this stuff for five and a half years now, and Bill worked at WICGR when I started) but still fun and interesting to see how he presented it.

Dinner and entertainment were provided by the conference reception; food and $10,000 in fake money to gamble for raffle tickets (which cost, er, $10,000 each). I managed to lose at blackjack, win it all back and more at craps, then lose the extra; one raffle ticket, which didn’t win. Oh well.

Stopped in to the Google BOF/recruiting session…hmm…sysadmin jobs in Dublin you say?

The flight down from Boston Tuesday night was uneventful, and by the time I made it to baggage claim my flight’s luggage was already rolling off. Mine came out fairly quickly, so I decided that I had enough energy to deal with MARTA instead of wimping out and taking a cab. Through the mall, to the hotel, checked in, and got a nice high room in a hotel designed around a huge atrium with glass elevators. Sigh. I think the architect hates acrophobes.

Wednesday: got up, got breakfast, got registration stuff. The keynote was reasonably interesting, though I’m a little more jaded about mere 20TB storage systems than I used to be…that’s about the minimum amount we’ll put a PO together for these days. CNN’s throughput needs are a bit more demanding than ours, though.

On to the technical sessions themselves. First, I went to the refereed papers presentations. The Bogofilter paper was interesting for the general issues of Bayesian filtering with a shared word list, something I’m already doing with amavisd-new; this gives me additional confidence in going forward with implementation of something similar at work once I can get a feedback system set up.

After the late morning session, a swing through the vendor display (much busier than at the Advanced Technical Conference), including a chance to say hello to various semi-random folks (hello, Randal!) and then off to Chick-Fil-A for lunch.

For the afternoon, invited talks. First, the talk by Brad and Lisa from LiveJournal on the architecture and scaling of the system. I’d seen the slides previously, but the presentation added a lot to them, and it was also amusing to participate in LJ-posting about people LJ-posting about people LJ-posting about the LJ presentation…during the presentation. (Not counting the non-LJ blog posts by LJ users posted here and here, and, well, this entry too.)

For the last session of the day, the IT on documentation. Very enjoyable, with lots of quotes from the Alice books as analogies for specific topics. Would have been more enjoyable if my phone hadn’t decided that vibrate mode was boring, followed by crashing while ringing (yes, crashing…I had to physically remove the battery to reboot it). I think it needs a Ctrl-Alt-Del option.

Dinner was taken care of by the simple expedient of the vendor display pizza feed, which also gave me a chance to talk to someone who I never see while in Cambridge; after all, he works two blocks away, and I only get over to that part of campus three or four times a week.

After dinner, various BOFs; the LegatoEMC BOF, where they were having a drawing for an iPod (I didn’t win) and discussion of the disk-based backup options (which we’re already using and reasonably happy with). From there to the DDR BOF (not to play, just to watch and be amused) and thence to the GPG key signing BOF.

After that, an aborted visit to the NetApp event (in the bar…the smoking bar…I didn’t even get 2 feet past the door), some hanging about in the lobby area where the free conference wireless was, and off to bed.

Thursday report later.

To my great-grandfather, who served in World War I, and those who served beside him;

To my grandfather, who served in World War II, and those who served beside him;

To my father and his brothers, who served from the Vietnam era to the invasion of Panama, and those who served beside them;

To my brother and my cousins, who are serving now, and the many who serve beside them today, in Afghanistan and Iraq and South Korea and Germany and stateside;

And to all those who have given limb or life in service over the years:

Thank you.

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt……If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

– Thomas Jefferson, from a letter he sent in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act

(via BarlowFriendz)

EDIT: full letter here. Other useful quotes:

This is not new. It is the old practice of despots to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order, and those who have once got an ascendency and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantages. But our present situation is not a natural one.

Does this sound familiar?

Be this as it may, in every free & deliberating society there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties & violent dissensions & discords; and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time. Perhaps this party division is necessary to induce each to watch & delate to the people the proceedings of the other. But if on a temporary superiority of the one party, the other is to resort to a scission of the Union, no federal government can ever exist.

What he said.

(Ironically, he was complaining about “the present rule of Massachusets & Connecticut” [sic].)

In AP’s story on a grenade shell found in the turf at Wrigley Field, even the Chicago police won’t give the Cubs a break.

The device was “found to be empty and harmless”:

“It’s a dud, just like the Cubs were,” Police spokesman Pat Camden said Wednesday.

Patrick Smith, author of the Salon column Ask the Pilot and the book of the same name, is appearing at the Somerville Public Library, West Branch (in Davis Square) Thursday night at 7 pm.

As his web site puts it, “Patrick Smith will answer your questions and sign copies at the Somerville Public Library (West branch in Davis Square) on Thursday, November 4th, 2004 at 7 p.m. He will also accept your canned goods, donations, and adulation.”

I’ll be there; I enjoy his column and like the book, even though some of the answers recapitulate stuff I knew already. My favorite is probably his column on the pedantry of airline names.

Went to the polling place over lunch. No line, though it wasn’t empty either.

The scantron count was up to 465.

No bake sales, only one campaign sign holder, and I didn’t even get a sticker. Very low key.