Dirac Angestun Gesept

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?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 18th, 2004 at 21:02 and is filed under Computing/Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom 1.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.