After 6 hours of excellent sleep, I woke up to the World with the joyful and playful tone of Thierry Deval's children. These little guys are affable. Thierry's daughter reminds me a lot of my own.

After a good breakfast, we drove to ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles) where the FOSDEM is held and we arrived around 12:15PM. Too late to see Xavier Santolaria who left for his hockey game 15 minutes earlier. So no shot of the pimp coder of fuxor.pl this year (no it's not in the OpenBSD tree, If it was, cvs.openbsd.org would have been subject to erratic network disruptions).

For those of you who have been to France but not to Belgium, note that pain au chocolat is called couque there. And for all the time I've been going to Belgium, couques taste slightly better. They might have either good baking schools, some unnamed chemical component added to the food or both. Whatever it is, I really like this kind of food.


Anyways, Sunday was far more productive than Saturday or so it seems. We had many visitors but we could cope with them while keeping working. Maybe it's due to the excellent stability of the Internet connection. Wim showed up some Soekris boxes as well as some prototypes that needed some hardware hacking (with a saw) to assemble correctly. And Reyk Flöter gave a talk on OpenBSD and WLANs. He mentioned the problems our FreeBSD neighbors had with their Atheros-based AP. He didn't understand why they didn't import his fixes into their tree.

Then it was about time to leave. Matthieu Herrb and Marc Balmer left earlier. Uwe Stühler, Reyk, Alexandre Anriot and me followed an hour or so later. We left the booth in the good hands of Wim and Nikolay Sturm.

I've taken close-ups of the developers and the finger^Whardware hacking skills of Wim.

Overall, it was nice to hang on with the gang and talk with the visitors, some of whom are FOSDEM regulars. Once more, I didn't have the motivation to go to the talks I hoped to see. So next year, I won't get a look at the schedule. That'll spare me some useless key pressing to fill my calendar.

Updated to add:
It seems I have a bit wrong on the couque side. According to Xavier Santolaria:

xsa: btw saad, "couques" != "pain au chocolat", "couques" is a generic meaning for such stuffs, coz you can have "couque a la creme", or "couque au raisin", etc... so it'd be "couque au chocolat" ;)

Thanks Xavier!

The OpenBSD booth ran smoothly this afternoon with numerous people coming to see us and all our posters were gone.

We had less technical questions than last year. One guy was having a bad time with his PF configuration. IIRC, he told us that he needed to open a port X on the firewall to be able to forward port X to port Y of a machine behind it. Uwe and Marc helped him with his ruleset and showed him that he was wrong. From that point, they parsed the ruleset in more details and gave him some optimization and security advices.

I also had about the same questions I had every year or so:

• What's the differences among Net, Free and OpenBSD?
  
• How do I install third-party applications under OpenBSD?
  
• Does Net, Free and OpenBSD use the same kernel?
  
• What optimizations are used in the Linux kernel used by OpenBSD? (*new entry*)
  

The Internet connection, while it kept coming and going from time to time, was far better than this morning. Thanks to Reyk and a Soekris, we had a stable wireless AP unlike the (censored) one. As a result, some slackers morphed into hackers and got some work done.

My initial plan was to attend the DTrace and Xen talks but I enjoyed the company of my fellow developers and didn't attend.

Later in the afternoon, we cleaned the booth and took the cars to go take the traditional OpenBSD dinner somewhere in the outskirts of Brussels.

We had a nice time together and the meal was good. Too bad the waitress forgot some of the orders and gave Wim chicken instead of the seafood he ordered. No worries, beer helped the mood.

I've uploaded today's remaining pictures. You might find them with the other FOSDEM 2006 pictures.

Everything went smoothly after our arrival to Brussels Midi. Well almost. At 12:30PM, there is still no stable Internet connection. Let's face it: the FOSDEM staff haven't learned anything from the previous years.

Every year, we hope we'll have an Internet connection upon our arrival. Every year we grow frustrated. Hell! This is an Open Source and free software meeting and all the projects here rely heavily on the Internet to get things done. And yet, it didn't sink in with the FOSDEM staff. Even after all these years. It's simply beyond my understanding.

On the OpenBSD booth front, there a few developers: Reyk Flöter, Uwe Stühler, Nikolay Sturm, Thierry Deval, Matthieu Herrb (who disappeared soon after we arrived), Marc Balmer, Alexandre Anriot, Xavier Santolaria (who went to play hockey for the afternoon), Otto Moerbeek, and -of course- Wim. Dimitar, our official beer supplier, also showed up for a few minutes.


I've taken pictures and I will upload them as soon as I get .... a stable Internet connection.

I've been attending FOSDEM since 2001 and this year is no exception. Fellow OpenBSD developer Alexandre Anriot (who, besides nifty chop-socky porting skills, helps me a lot on the translation effort) arrived yesterday night.


We woke up early this morning to take the Thalys train to Brussels Midi railway station where Xavier Santolaria will pick us up and give us a ride along with Nikolay Sturm, Matthieu Herrb and Marc Balmer to ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles) where FOSDEM is held. We will join the OpenBSD crowd there.

I sincerly hope hat we will have a better booth space than last year (we had two tables in front of drink machines so people were always going back and forth and it was really annoying).

Looking at the FOSDEM schedule, there a some talks that look interesting which I would like to attend. I hope I won't slack too much on the OpenBSD booth and go learn something useful thay I may share with you.

Betabug pointed out this morning that the links on the archived posts were missing. After investigation, I found out that when I copied them from my previous blog site, the links were not correctly pasted over and it seems that my current blogging software simply removed them without a warning.

As far I can tell, all those links are live and kicking now. Don't forget to force reloading the pages or purge your cache. And if you still notice anything wrong, please let me know.

Sorry for the inconvenience. And thanks to Betabug for reporting the issue.

A few days ago, I picked up the copy of Cryptonomicon which I ordered on March 2001 (*cough*, blame it on my backlog). Aside from being a very interesting and funny book, I laughed my bowels out when I read the following paragraph:

Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally.

Some may wonder what made me laugh. My fellow developers who are members of the OpenBSD project would understand that Cryptonomicon's Randy sounds a lot like our own leader, Theo de Raadt.

Did Neal Stephenson, the author of this book, interact with Theo? Maybe he was an OpenBSD developer in disguise. Or maybe the World.com(tm) is full of Theos and I'm way too blind. Or do we learn this kind of attitude in Manage Hackers 101? Either way, it's an excellent technique for getting work done.

Yesterday night I was performing maintenance on wax, a multi-purpose machine I use for development, file serving, backup and routing for the rest of my home network. wax is a Dell Dimension 4550 machine that runs OpenBSD and has something like 600GB worth of disk. The maintenance consisted of upgrading the OS version and updating most of the applications I use through the OpenBSD ports collection.

The upgrade went very well and I started building the latest versions of my favorite applications from the ports collection. During the build process, I was enjoying some great music on my PowerBook and reading the latest issue of MacWorld in electronic form. You could say I was relaxed and confident that I was going to get to bed (soon) in a happy mood.

Sadly, Mr. Murphy, the most dreaded man on Earth, thought otherwise. He and his Law decided to pay me a visit.

I started to smell a nasty odor. Fried electronics! Oh, no! Using the Nose(tm), I began tracking it down. Is it coming from my PowerBook? From the cable modem? From the KVM switch? ... S***, it's wax's fan! It doesn't work anymore!!!

In a big hurry, fearing the loss of more than a fan I stopped all the builds and halted the machine. Once I untangled and yanked all the cables, I opened the box to assess the damage. I was relieved to see that there was no other problem. The trouble now consists of finding a similar fan since the Dell box's warranty has expired 3 months ago. I wrote Dell an email hoping that they sell spare parts. If you sell (or know someone who sells) a JMC Datech 92x92x32 (12V, 0.85A, 83.1 CFM) fan or a similar one, please send me an email even if it's used or refurbished.

I thought I was done with Mr. Murphy for the night. So I started cleaning up my desk and preparing my backpack for tomorrow's ride to work. But Mr. Murphy is an insidious man who enjoys hospitality. The fan of kaboo, a Dell Dimension 8400 workstation, started to make weird noises. Please Mr. Murphy, don't tell me that a second fan is going to pass away.

I repeated the previous procedure: untangle cables, yank them, shut down and open the box. Phew, the fan seems to be OK. The noise is due to two damaged rubber clips that no longer hold the fan. As a result, when the fan is rotating it hits from time to time the plastic enclosure. kaboo is still covered by warranty so no worries!

Lessons learned:

• Mr. Murphy is as strong as ever (did I tell you that last week my iPod Photo ceased to work so I had to call AppleCare to the rescue?).
  
• If you have important data, back it up now and make sure you do it regularly and you have properly documented the backup procedure. Better be safe than sorry!
  
• The server that hosts the important data must be covered by a strong warrranty. In my 5y+ experience with Dell, their warranty and support are very good.
  
• What do you do when your backup server dies and Mr. Murphy decides to stay, lurking inside your dear workstation or laptop that holds all your electronic life?
  

Who said I.T. is fun?

I just added another photo gallery to the website. This one is populated with shots taken during a trip we made to Corsica in 2004. I was a bit worried at first since some natives showed aggressivity towards immigrants from Maghreb and the French media made big headlines on the subject.

When our ferry arrived, the first thing I noticed was a big writing on the wall in front of the arrival zone in Ajaccio : "Arabes Dehors" which means "Arabs Out".

Save for a few other writings on postal boxes (as if La Poste could carry persons), I felt no animosity and the travel was really enjoyable. Corsica fully deserves its surname. It is really The Island of Beauty.

I have populated the Pictures section of the website. It contains 8 galleries containing shots taken between 2003 and now. Some of these shots appeared on past incarnations of my website.

I will add more as time permits.

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