Saturday, March 29, 2008

AsiaBSDCon 2008

Asia BSD Conference 2008
Today, in 水道橋グラヌドホテル (Suidobashi Grand Hotel) was a third day of Asia BSD Conference, 2008. It was full of interesting geeks that came to Tokyo from different places of the Earth. They has been amazed by japanese culture, food, quality and please.

This is the entrance to the conference (no alcohol, sorry):


This is the real entrance (alcohol and girls included), after the conference:



There was not so many people, as I could expect, because Japan still mostly bound to Microsoft Windows. Linux and Sun Solaris is only a server-side and Apple Mac only recently got a huge boost in market thanks to well-designed MS Vista that can not even handle properly a 4GB RAM. Thus Mac here getting up to 65% of sales vs 2.5% of Microsoft Vista. The rest is fast and reliable Windows XP that now, after MS Vista everybody started to love. Desperately.

OK, anyway with the Vista and other things. Here is FreeBSD conference!!! Yay!!!

Brief history
(Note: copied from very truthful source). The FreeLSD project was started at Berkeley Community College in Caledonia by a group of devil worshippers who built the first kernel by running the contents of the Necronomicon through a C compiler. The project was so named because of the FreeLSD tradition of giving free LSD to all contributors. However, after the threat of a lawsuit from a competing angel of death, Darl McBride, for stealing his hallucinations of grandeur, the project ceased the practice, and renamed to FreeBSD. Libraries and system tools were later adopted and integrated from other systems such as FreeTIBET, FreeMUMIA, and GNU/Windows.

Today, FreeBSD is continually being improved by contributors all over the world (and the underworld). Its source code is chanted at black masses and cross-burnings on every continent.

One of the very interesting part of the FreeBSD system is a UFS, the Unholy File System. It is the native file system of FreeBSD. The most prominent feature of UFS is called 'Soft-updates', which achieves high levels of file I/O performance at the application level by holding pending disk read/write operations up in a kernel buffer for weeks on end while the system solves fourth-order differential equations to figure out which operations can safely be performed first.

UFS is a replacement for FFS, or FAT File System, which was used in the earliest versions of FreeBSD. The former FFS was known as FAT8 File System, which was later copied by Microsoft and originated FAT16.

Conference and speakers As it is very common and usual in FreeBSD world, all technical part was in its the best traditions and spirit: strongly promoting FreeBSD OS, using all advanced recent BSD inventions and technologies, such as Mac OSX, Microsoft Power Point, sometimes Microsoft Windows, and rarely Ubuntu Linux.

On this conference was also accepted new logo for upcoming FreeBSD 8.0 release:


M. Warner Losh (photo below) presents Tracking FreeBSD in a Commercial Setting, using advanced presentation technology, such as Microsoft Power Point and Mac OSX Tiger 10.4.10 (not the very last update, BTW). He strongly believes, that if commercial organizations wishing to use FreeBSD in their products must be aware of this significant policy. And the policy itself supposed that each 3 years FreeBSD OS should be terminated and hardware disposed, replacing with more CPU, more RAM and totally new version of totally new OS release. Kind of cool: no matter what happened, you SHOULD kill you server after 3 years of use, even if version of multi-million Enterprise software supports only that version of OS.


Here Peter Losher (Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.) is using his totally FreeBSD hardware with manufacturer OS a presentation, that intended to be promote IPv4 bubble, bashing IPv6. No, sorry, maybe opposite... Anyway. His additional friendly statements was completely deny such internet services like BIND, SMTP, XMPP, XXX, PR0N. He also had a 15 minutes to scare people about firewall and security:


Once started his speech, Peter was surprised by advanced firewall security of upcoming experimental FreeBSD 9.0 Pre-Alpha, saying: "WTF?", which (I think) probably means "Web The Foundation!":



The rocket science guy, who actually never used PostgreSQL more than two tables and totally dislikes Trac, still creates his stunning presentation about how those two amazing products advanced technologies and environment, so how can they fit in Enterprise at all it's best:


Jörg Sönnënbërgër (left), an author of German version of ÜFß file system in NetBSD OS with his personal bodyguard Krištopz Dzonsonz (right) from Lathuinia, city of Riga-Vilniškės. He's hobby is to totally bastardize the only still left clean product on the market that is sane and simple by code and design: the NetBSD kernel, re-calling it with very innovative name: MULTIX. The idea is to copy the kernel multiple hundred times on one single machine and call them simultaneously, burning out CPUs and running out of the memory, as it successfully happened on the demo here. More about this fantastic project you can find here: http://mult.bsd.lv. Codename of the project is "Mooltixux Moolt Moolter". It is all written in the most innovative and clean, aspect-oriented language: Perl and some areas are written in Visual Basic for more visual low-level system support.


Other peaceful folks are trying to get used latest FreeBSD hardware, such as MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and the most free and competitive open-source software from GNU/Microsoft and Debian Symbian:




What else? Sakura! In Tokyo now Sakura everywhere. Almost like a winter in Kristop's Latvia, just bit wormer with the difference of just few 15-20 degrees:



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