The technicians day was overall much more interesting than the business day. I attended several talks:

• Wietse Venema – Postfix as a Secure Programming Example. Wietse described what considerations lay behind the structure and design of postfix. Very interesting.
• Ronald Jaramillo – Webapplications with Turbogears. I have some python experience, so I found this talk very impressive. Although I’m wondering how well the utilities in the associated toolbox scale?
• Alan Cox (no link provided — you know who that is ) talked about the changing face of PC storage and problems posed to the Kernel developers. He also described the solutions implemented along with pros and cons.
• Poul-Henning Kamp talked about leap-seconds and how they are not standardized and how the people in-the-know cannot agree on a standard. Very entertaining
• Finally, I heard Dan Klein talking about perfect data in an Imperfect World. Very funny talk. The gist was to raise awareness to issues associated with the growing amount of data collected about people in their everyday lives.

As a technicians day, the entry-fee was much lower than the business day, but there was no free coffee, water nor food . So I had to pay exorbitant prices for breakfast, lunch, coffee and supper. I will gripe about this another day.

However, that evening consisted of beer and smalltalk. Very cozy