Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

15:25 EDT

So the wireless at the devsummit is working today. Peter put sshd on port 443 on freefall and everyone was very happy. :-)

It looks like the syscons work is going to be a Dutch-speaking effort. The bof consisted of myself, Ed, Marcel and Remko. We are agreed that before we can ever hope to make things "generic", we need to clean up the existing mess. Ed's work on TTYs will definitely help there, and it turns out that Marcel has some code in Perforce too.

I've been working a bit on divorcing the framebuffer from the console. This is more complicated than it sounds, particularly because of the way the VESA bits tie in with this. With a bit of luck, we should have some work committed before 8.0.

Marcel rightly pointed out that unless we "Just Do It", we risk (continued) analysis paralysis. Muddling with consoles and input devices is naturally going to piss people off, but we'll just have to deal with the flak as it hits us.

David from Coverity wondered what it would take to get people to listen to his talk. Ice cream was suggested and now there's a whole bucket of the stuff waiting for us here. Yay! :-)

08:05 EDT

It's funny how the "hallway track" at a conference is often at least as interesting as the conference itself. I always find it interesting to catch up with what people are working on and what interesting places people are working. Few "normal people" seem to be aware of how much of their daily internet addictions (like DNS :-)) are handled by FreeBSD setups.

We got kicked out of the hacking lounge rather early last night because we're creepy old men. There is some sort of science fair being held in the same building and clearly, children with scientific tendencies should not be exposed to the dregs of society who sit around in hallways with laptops drinking (gasp) alcoholic beverages (if you look hard enough, you'll find some alcohol in them). What a strange continent.

Beer of a rather better nature just afterwards in George's room with some very funny people. The amusingly named beer linimon found in Montréal ("Belle Gueule") is something to remember. We exchanged a number of completely unpublishable stories on an unbelievably varied range of subjects. Even the subjects are unpublishable. Move along, nothing to see here. :-)

Breakfast in a bit and then off to the devsummit again for more hackery and geek things. Perhaps the internetwebs will be working today. Just in case, I've set up an evil proxy contraption which might come in handy. Why would a university - of all places - restrict "the internet" to "HTTP over a proxy"?

I have a feeling the local Second Cup will have their hands full with an enormous influx of geeks this morning.

21:14 EDT

Registration at the Royal Oak last night was fun again. It seems most people managed to fight their way through the Canadian border scrutiny again. As usual, a number of people got stuck in Chicago. ORD almost makes LHR looks good... Almost.

We left the Royal Oak rather earlyish for the hacking lounge. I think I got a number of people somewhat interested in my effort to "architect" syscons. It is going to hurt but it really needs doing. The best description I've come up with for the current state of affairs is "four-dimensional noodles on bad acid". The term layering violation does not even begin to describe it.

Got a bit of code-reading done and then headed upstairs at a fairly civilized hour. My roommates (plural, Tiff seems to have moved in -- cool) were in a somewhat confused state when I got there. It transpires that George was double booked in our room, and a number of other rooms before that and was a bit 'hostile' after the manyeth elevator ride. Confused accomodation receptionists are a required feature at geek conferences.

Started a bit grumpy this morning. I found that carrot at home had crashed. Funny how this sort of thing always happens when there's an ocean separating me from any reasonable debugging interface. A smiling face suggesting coffee and breakfast improved my mood considerably. Thanks, miss!

I appear to have come to terms with the local currency. The locals have not come to terms with my breakfast requirements, however. They are surprisingly resistant to giving me something "random and tasty". I asked for a muffin and the girl asked me which one, when I asked her to give me the one which would give her the most pleasure to part with, she looked a bit confused and suggested about four different kinds, when I then said "yes", she got even more confused. sigh.

The devsummit was off to a good start. Except for the fact that there is no wireless. This is also a conference constant, however, so it didn't bother me much. In fact, the lack of wireless probably boosted the productivity.

Met Ed Schouten who is working on rewriting the TTY layer. This ties in rather nicely with my ideas about syscons. I look forward to working with him some more on this. Tomorrow I am organizing a syscons bof. I hope to get this project off the ground at last.

Highlight of the devsummit was the "greenbsd bof". Poul-Henning and Diane disagreed a bit about how to measure power going through switch-mode power supplies. Everyone agrees that we should come up with ways to save power intelligently and that implementations in other operating systems are suboptimal. This will probably become more interesting over the next few months. I look forward to doing some more power-management work again. It's been a while.

Thai food at the hacking lounge. Yum yum. I need to try to find Peter to figure out where my ISC tshirt went and catch up with email. I'm also cooking up an if_bridge patch for Andrew to look over while we're on the same continent. Feeling productive.