I didn’t get enough sleep last night. (Note to self: try to avoid sounding like the person at work who blames all of his mistakes on lack of sleep and excessive devotion to the cause.)
Jules, Geoff and I went out for some Indonesian food at Orient, one of my favourite restaurants (on the Van Baerlestraat), then biked into De Pijp for some drinks at my old stomping ground, Café Krull. By the time we got back to our hotel, it was very late, but I still had a few things to do on the computer, like chat to my lovely wife, back in California.
SANE 2004 is progressing nicely. Gerald Carter’s Tuesday Samba tutorial was very good, but largely irrelevant to me. We don’t use Samba at Google and, besides, the tutorial was really for people who are currently running 2.2 servers and want to know what they can expect from 3.0.
Gerald Carter also hosted my Wednesday tutorial, which was about implementing [Open]LDAP. This was much more relevant to me, but my own knowledge of LDAP is fairly extensive, so I didn’t pick up much new from the session. Nevertheless, it was still useful to listen to Gerald speak, as he recapped a lot of the work I’ve been involved in over the years and basically covered all of the material from his book in just eight hours. It was quite an involved talk, as you might imagine.
The tutorials ended yesterday with the Free Software Bazaar, which basically consisted of a talk by Richard Stallman. I’d seen the same talk before at Google a couple of months ago, but it was still amusing and gratifying to hear him compare one’s moral obligation to copy software for one’s neighbour to one’s moral obligation to save a drowning man, unless that man be Bush, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft or Kerry. I do respect people who dare to speak their mind
The conference proper began today. The keynote by Paul Kilmartin was about eBay’s infrastructure through the years and went into a surprising amount of detail. Not a bad talk for a bigwig.
Wietse Venema discussed lessons learnt from open source security programming later in the morning, which was another very well-attended talk. He discussed the release and publicity surrounding each of TCP Wrappers, SATAN and Postfix and contrasted them.
Now it’s the late afternoon and I’m starting to feel woozy. I’ve got to hang in there, though, because the social event is coming up this evening, which translates into a boat trip along the IJ river. That’ll be a lot of fun if I can stay conscious.
On a sadder note, the occupants of a car returning to Amsterdam from Paris after dropping off Richard Stallman were involved in an accident that cost one of them his life; a compelling reminder of how suddenly one’s fortunes can permanently change.
Tomorrow is the final day of SANE. It’s hard to believe that Geoff and I began our journey to The Netherlands almost a week ago. Time passes very quickly in Amsterdam, unlike in Silicon Valley, where the weeks seem to drag on forever. On the other hand, it’s gratifying to know that I’ll see Sarah again on Monday, as I’m missing her and looking forward to being reunited.
