LISA'11 Boston Dec 4-9

• Carolyn D. Rowland
• Tobi Oetiker
• Mark Burgess
  
• Badvogato

Tobi Oetiker is a bonus that made this trip worth more. I was enrolled in a different session but Tobi arrived early and sat quietly in his classroom Perl5 update next to my classroom. So I decided to switch to his session instead. It was one of the best decision I've ever made. Tobi introduced mojolicious. From his quiet talk and a couple fixing what is NOT working at the moment, I had my first impression on how great minds of language designer/implementor work in real time

Mark, mark was the reason I went out of my way to Boston because I understood his food for thought:

Well that's philosphy I've read
And Law and Medicine , and I fear
Theology too, from A to Z;
Hard studies that have cost me dear.
And now I sit, poor silly man,
No wiser than when I began.
They call me Professor and Doctor, forsooth,
For misleading many an innocent youth
These last ten years now I suppose
Pulling them to and fro by the nose;
And I see all our search for knowledge is in vain
And this burns my heart with a bitter pain.
I've more sense to be sure than the learned fools
The masters and pastors, the scribes from the schools;
No scruples to plague me, no irksome doubt,
No hell-fire or devil to worry about --
Yet I take no pleasure in anything now;
For I know I know nothing, I wonder how
I can still keep up the pretence of teaching
Or bettering mankind with my empty preaching
Can I even boast any worldly success?
What fame or riches do I possess?
What dog would put up with such an existence!
And so I am seeking magic's assistance,
Calling on spirits and their might
To show me many a secret sight,
To relieve me of the wretched task
Of telling things I ought rather to ask,
To grant me a vision of natures forces
That bind the world, all its seeds and sources
And innermost life -- all this I shall see,
And stop peddling in words that mean nothing to me.

SELinux may not be very problematic to use if understood well, the problem is that most of sources on the web are incomplete and the attempt to do anything without understanding its language is equal to the attempt to do the same when coding in C++. Maybe having more people understanding this beast would help to make it easier to control. Nice to have SELinux preconfigured but I faced all beauties after deciding to move the database to dedicated partition. Likely we still need to understand it.

However putting accents on SELinux and similar technologies would surely help for Linux to maintain the image of secure system. Once we had the root user and regular users when Windows 95 offered not protection; these times are gone. To be ahead, we need something new. I really wish Rik Farrow success in promoting Linux security.

two conferences I am interested in:

In London March 24:
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/orgcon-2012

In NYC March 21-22:
http://event.gigaom.com/structuredata/schedule/

wish I could have been there:
February Meeting // FPGAs, Literate Programming, GreenArrays & More!!

"Time blew away like dandelion seed"

Merry Christmas to all here whose love of word and seed is truly inspiring to me.