Received 01/22/2009 22:48

LCA09 - Wednesday/Thursday

Well, time flies at LCA as always. Its been a very hectic couple of days and I'll try and pick the highlights.

James Turnbull gave a talk on Puppet on the first day which was very interesting. I'm keen to investigate it further in an application configuration context at the office. I would love to be able to turn application installations into a 5 minute press-a-button job. Mind you, their Windows support is 'in BETA' at the moment so there may be abit of work still required for a feasible implementation.

The Mozilla talk unfortunately wasn't quite what I was expecting. I had to leave early so perhaps in the last 20 minutes there was some more insight into how to start low-level Mozilla hacking. Waiting for the video to be released for this talk.

That night was the penguin dinner. There have been plenty of blog-posts on what occured here, including the auction and all the funds raised for the save-the-Tasmanian-Devil foundation. Fun night. Food was OK.

The next morning after another early jog and a quick breakfast had me at talks on Perl and Webkit. I probably should do more investigation into Webkit ........... but I just can't get as excited as I do about Mozilla.

As in previous years I've spent a fair bit of time in Rusty's tutorial on lguest. I was able to clear the easy and medium tasks (helped alot by my participation in last years tutorial) but came unstuck on the first advanced step. As always, I'll pledge to continue investigation, but most likely not find as much time as I would like.

KSplice probably takes my 'huh, thats interesting' award for the conference so far. Real-time-live kernel patching sounds great, but all the 'yeah, we handled that' and 'oh, that required us to mess with this' leaves me feeling uneasy about using it anywhere in production. Of course, this type of system is built for using in production so perhaps I'll go read the research paper to try and put my mind at ease. Interesting from a security aspect on the ramifications of this research as well (KSplice worms anyone ?).

So, last day today. I fly out at 6:30pm tonight to meet Sarah in Melbourne for the weekend. Looking forward to a weekend of real accommodation and real food :-)