Dirac Angestun Gesept

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.

Another year, another USENIX, though this time without jet lag or TSA grief or any of that. There’s something to be said for that, though I think it would have been easier to deal with the stack of books I wound up with after the game show if I’d had a hotel room to dump them in and a suitcase to pack them in.

This year’s schedule was odd. Instead of the old 2/3 or 3/3 tutorial/technical split of days, they had 6 days of tutorials and 5 days of technical sessions that overlapped, and you could register for a mix of them.

I’m not sure how I feel about the new scheme yet; they did use the extra time to put together one-day mini-tracks for things like Extreme Linux and the like, and each day had a mini-keynote (all of which I liked, and which were worth slogging over to Copley even in rush-hour T conditions) instead of One Big Keynote. However, it seemed like there was less going on at any given time (fewer conflicts, but fewer options if you weren’t interested in either main track) and as Camilla mentions the vendor displays have been really sparse lately, so my old trick of “hmm, that session looks like a good time to collect vendor giveaways” no longer works.

(When the entire set of book publishers is smaller than the O’Reilly booth used to be, and the rest of the vendor display is less than a dozen tables spread around the perimeter of a portion of the exhibit hall that used to be packed full….)

I decided to bug out early on the last day; I was short on sleep and figured I wouldn’t be likely to have much attention span for the last couple of sessions. I grabbed a quick lunch, did some browsing through the Upper Newbury Music Trifecta (CD Spins, Newbury Comics, Virgin Megastore), and then hopped on the T. I figured I’d swing by CambridgeSide to see if Best Buy had a CD I wanted cheaper than either Newbury or Virgin, then head to the office to clear out the backlogged email so I wouldn’t feel quite as guilty about it over the weekend, and gave me a chance to scope out the shuttle bus between Gov’t Center and Lechmere as well.

As the train pulled in to Park Street, a woman with two young children got up to get off through the rear door (by the unused driving cab). The train stopped, the door started to open, and one of the kids fell down the stairs, managing to catch his head between the leaves of the accordion door as it was opening. The kid was screaming, the mother was freaking out, and another bystander and I were jumping to push the door aside and free the kid’s head. Scary enough to give me a jolt of adrenalin I wasn’t expecting.

After that, helping a gaggle of teenagers find the shuttle buses at Gov’t Center was fairly anticlimactic. The bus ride was reasonable, the stops (particularly “North Station”) are not necessarily really close to the T stations, and they didn’t seem to really care whether you had taken a transfer or not. I’m glad I don’t have to ride that segment daily, though.

A quick buzz through the mall, picked up some CDs at Best Buy, then to work, and on home once the email was at least shoveled out somewhat.

It feels like it’s been a long week that flew by. Very odd feeling.

This was, as always, loads of fun and one of the highlights of the conference for me.

After being royally skunked in the final round every time in the past, I’ve finally managed to win instead of coming in a distant second; I now have a spiffy Google lava lamp to show for my efforts. It’s not blue, though.

Oh, and some books and hats and t-shirts, including one of the no longer being sold printed 4.4BSD Daemon shirts, autographed by Marshall Kirk McKusick himself.

(It is, however, XXL and therefore a bit large to actually wear…framing for display is being considered instead.)

I’m at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference all this week.

The conference has Wi-Fi coverage, so I can still do some blogging; though I didn’t bring a laptop along (I’m commuting to the conference by T and don’t want to have to haul it along, especially with the Constitutionally-dubious behavior of the MBTA these days), the Palm web browser appears to work well enough to post with.