BSDCan 2004

reviewed by Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com>

This is a description of my trip to BSDCan 2004 in Ottawa, Canada. If you're interested in BSD or computers in general and did not go to BSDCan, then you made a huge mistake. The conference was tremendously educational, and the trip was a great opportunity to meet a number of great people, and visit a beatiful city. The conference was also very affordable, and there were more than a few who attended on a shoestring budget (I tried to do this, but ended up drinking far too much beer). A number of people also visited from tremendious distances ... attendees arrived from all over the world, so anyone who didn't make it really has no excuse.

I met Tom Rhodes of the FreeBSD project recently, and he and I decided to car-pool to Ottawa from Pittsburgh, PA (about a 9 hour drive). If you don't know Tom, he is a FreeBSD documentation and source comitter, part of the FreeBSD security team, heavily involved with the donations team at the FreeBSD Foundation, was supposed to be re-writing the FAT filesystem code, and I think he'll be mowing lawns for many of the other comitters fairly soon. We left Pittsburgh close to 10:00 PM on May 12, with Tom's girlfriend, Carla, in tow, and drove all night. We learned a few things along the way. For example, if you stop to whiz in the bushes along a deserted stretch of highway at 2:00 AM, Murphy's Law dictates that that stretch of highway will suddenly cease to be deserted, and you'll have to hurry up before you're providing a show for a bunch of truckers. Also, when the border police ask, "Will you be bringing any firearms, tobacco, alchohol, or pepper spray into the country?" they're really looking for a more specific answer than "Not really." (As a side note, the wording of the question made me wonder if I should have brought pepper spray. Having never been to Ottawa before, I suddenly didn't know what to expect! As it turns out, you can leave the pepper spray at home, Ottawa is as safe a place as I've ever been.)

Petrol is $0.25 more expensive in New York than in Pennsylvania. It's a little harder to calculate the Canadian difference because there's an exchange rate for the money, as well as Canada measuring petrol in liters instead of gallons. I think I've figured out the conversion ...

1 liter = .26 gallons and
$1.00 US = $1.36 CA

Which means, the conversion from US$/gallon to CA$/liter is 1.3E-54 ... which would actually be useful if I remembered how many $CA I paid per liter ...

We arrived in Ottawa far too early (around 7:00 AM) and decided to call Dan Langille (Dan's last name was my first experience with Canadian culture. Like many things in Canada, it's French and pronounced lan-gil-ee.) This was a good idea, as we found out later that Dan had set his alarm early so he could be up just in case Tom Rhodes called early in the moring to announce the he, Carla, and I had, indeed, arrived in Ottawa.

We then stopped at Nates on Rideau St. for breakfast. (another French word, to pronounce it, you have to be able to simultaneously breathe in through your left nostral and out through the right and not pronounce the "u") At Nates, I learned that Canadian bacon is not the same as the bacon they eat in Canada, and that Canadian's do not have "American bacon" and that "bacon" in Canada is almost the same as "bacon" in the U.S., except better somehow.

Tom Rhodes, Carla and I were the first to arrive at The Royal Oak the first day. We're already eating when Dan Langille (pronounced lin-jeel) arrived

At noon we met at The Royal Oak restaurant near campus. Dan Langille (remember, it's French, pronounced lun-gwil) wisely chose this as the location for early registration. Here is where I first met some of the most intelligent, hardest working people I've ever known: the waitresses. From slightly after noon, until the wee hours of the morning, a constant stream of computer nerds from all over the world filed in and out of this restaurant, ordering all manner of food and becoming more and more drunken and disorderly as time went on. The waitresses never failed to provide quick, accurate service despite the fact that the typical BSDCan patron adhered to the following pattern:

1. Arrive and order a beer.
2. Move to the registration desk and register for the conference.
3. Sit down in a different seat than when you ordered the beer.
4. Somehow the waitress would locate you, deliver your beer and take your order for food.
5. This was the best time to realize that the conversation at another table was more interesting and move.
6. Again, the waitress would find you and deliver your food and another beer.
7. When you'd finished your food and ordered another beer, you'd have it explained that if you sat at a certain table, you could get just enough of an 802.11 signal to check your email.
8. While at the "wireless table", your waitress would somehow find you and deliver your beer.
9. About halfway through the beer, you'd realize that the person you were about to email had just arrived, so you'd move to yet another table to talk.
10. As different people arrived, this general pattern of table-hopping would continue.

Here you can see The Royal Oak starting to fill up with geeks.

While this doesn't seem terribly complicated, keep in mind that the waitresses were tracking a whole restaurant full of people who were all doing this. I have to say that I was very impressed.

While socializing here, we learned that Theo de Raadt had been followed to the airport by Microsoft agents who wanted to find out the secret location of BSDCan so they could crash it. Theo cleverly threw them off by pretending to have forgotten which airline his ticket was for and running all over the airport like a madman ... arriving at the proper gate in the nick of time, but too late for the Microsoft goons to get standby tickets!

The next morning, I walked from the hotel, up Avenue King Edward (pronounced "King Edward Avenue" ... those crazy French) to the first presentation of the Con (Can?). I decided to listen to Bosko Milikic speak about buffer allocation in FreeBSD. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who thought this would be interesting, since the only place to sit was on the floor! Unfortunately, this trend repeated itself several times over the course of the Con, as many presentations were far more popular than anyone had planned.

Allan Fields preparing for his presentation.

While all of the presentations were well done and extremely interesting, the most fun (for me) was finally meeting in person so many people that I've known through email for years.

Dan Langille (pronounced lahn-gee) had wisely planned a location for conference members to meet for food and drinks. Unfortunately, Dan's best efforts to estimate how many attendees would be at the venue on Friday was far too low. As it turned out, The Black Thorn didn't have enough tables for everyone, and had great difficulty accomodating everyone. They were friendly and helpful, but we were just too large of a group.

phk@, rwatson@, nectar@, trhodes@, and bmilikic@FreeBSD.org

OpenBSD developers at The Black Thorn.

The FreeBSD geeks who ditched me when we left The Black Thorn.

The OpenBSD folks stayed at The Black Thorn longer than anyone else

I stayed at The Black Thorn far too long. When a number of FreeBSD folks decided to run off elsewhere, I tried to follow, but they managed to ditch me in the confusion of Ottawa's market district. Not ready to quit, I returned to The Black Thorn to find many OpenBSD developers still there. I spent the next few hours mostly listening, and learned a lot.

Dan Langille (pronounced Lean-guel) demonstrates Bacula.

The next day consisted of another set of excellent presentations. I particularly enjoyed Poul-Henning Kamp's explanation of GEOM. For lunch, I accompanied Dru Lavigne, Maxim Sobolev, and Jacques Vidrine to a local establishment to try out some "Canadian" food. It's called Schwarma, and really hit the spot. After lunch, I was suitably impressed by the demonstration of OpenBSD's pf capability, and Theo de Raadt's explanation of the bold moves that OpenBSD is making to become even more secure.

Theo de Raadt explains OpenBSD security to a packed room.

Dan Langille then spoke briefly to everyone who had attended (which left the largest room with standing room only). It was an emotional farwell, as Dan described how much the convention's success had exceeded his expectations, and reminded everyone to return in 2005!

Dan Langille (pronounced Lin-gool) gets emotional as he closes the conference.

I want to make a comment about Dan here. Despite my inability to pronounce his name correctly, Dan did an outstanding job of organizing and running BSDCan. Having "hung out" at The Royal Oak while registration was going on, I can't count how many times Dan went out of his way to introduce people to others with similar interests. I have no idea how he kept track of so many people, but I think it made the trip more enjoyable for a everyone.

A large number of people who had attended the conference then went to Patty Bolands for food and drinks. I had an additional opportunity to speak with the OpenBSD developers while I as there, as well as many of the FreeBSD developers.

This is the first BSD convention I've been able to attend. I have to say that, overall, the most exciting part for me was meeting people face-to-face that I've known, or known about for many years. It was an interesting experience to put a face on many of the email addresses I've seen go through my mailbox over the years.

OpenBSD developers at Patty Bolands.

FreeBSD developers at Patty Bolands.

Later that evening, I got to see just how good some of the folks who work on the BSD teams are! After most everyone else had left, David Maxwell, Jacques Vidrine, Maxim Sobolev and myself decided to explore the city a bit. We had an elaborate plan on how we would accomplish our exploration while still getting everyone back to their respective hotels in time for their respective flights (respectively). Unfortunately, we forgot to take into account the prowess of a BSD security officer. The instant David was out of sight of the rest of us, he disappeared, like some sort of ninja wearing Predator camouflage. I suspect it was a reflex action, but without jump-jets on the rental car, we were unable to track him down. The moral being: keep a close eye on your security officers, they're sneaky buggers!

The NetBSD and FreeBSD security teams confer under the cone of silence:
David, "We need to keep this secure ..."
Jacques, "What?"

A grumpy Tom Rhodes in stark contrast to his artistically presented bagel.

Sunday morning a breakfast was organized for everyone who had not yet left town. I convinced Tom and Carla to get up early to bid a final farewell to everyone before the 9-hour drive back to Pittsburgh.

My greatest regret is that there was only one of me to attend. There were many time slots where I would have liked to attend more than one of the presentations that were scheduled. The socializing helped: on Thursday night I spent a considerable time listening to Jan Wieck talk about Slony at The Royal Oak, and when the time came for his presentation, I was torn between all three talks scheduled. I decided to go to the presentation on IPv6 instead, in the hopes that my previous discussions with Jan would make up for missing his formal presentation.

I can offer a few points of honest advice to anyone who is considering BSDCan 2005:

1. Arrive. Work it out somehow ... it's really worth it.
2. You don't need to rent a car. Tom and Carla both complained that they weren't used to walking everywhere, yet Tom's car stayed in the garage the entire time. Everything is relatively close by, so you can save some money on the trip if you need to.
3. If you want to sightsee, plan on arriving early or leaving late ... the entire time the conference is going on is pretty much filled up with activities and socializing.
4. Don't miss BSDCan 2005, if it's half as good as this years, it's too good to miss.
5. Did I mention that you should come?

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone next year.

My name is Bill Moran and I've been using FreeBSD and other open-source software for business and pleasure since 1998. Since 2001, my company, Potential Technologies has provided BSD-based solutions to companies around the Pittsburgh area, and around the world! I am also the author of phppdflib, a library for dynamically creating PDF files.