Monday, October 02, 2006

Ruxcon and SLUG

This weekend I was in Sydney for Ruxcon. Ruxcon is a computer security conference with a focus on penetration testing and related skills.

The presentation on Unusual Bugs by Ilya van Sprudel was particularly interesting. He spoke about a number of issues that could do with some improvement in Linux, I will file some bug reports shortly.

There was a chilli eating contest. I was one of six people to enter. I survived the first two rounds and got onto the middle-strength chilli before giving up. There were 100 tickets to the Google party for the ~200 person conference and everyone who entered a contest got a ticket. My aim in the contest was to eat more chilli than I enjoy eating but less than the amount required to make me sick, with a secondary goal of tasting at least the second level of chilli. I achieved my goals and left the contest after tasting the second chilli.

One man appeared to be impressed by my chilli eating and was telling everyone that I am famous for eating chilli. It's good to be famous for something in the computer security community. :-#

At the end of the conference there was a panel discussion that I was invited to attend. I had to leave early to catch my flight, at the time I left everyone who was on the panel had each finished a few drinks and a couple of new guys had just joined. I think I missed the most exciting part of the panel discussion.

Thanks to whoever paid for the drinks for panel members. Things were a little hectic when we were given the drinks and I forgot to thank whoever paid for them.

In other news Sydney trains are slow and unreasonably expensive, $13 to get from the airport to the SLUG meeting at St. Leonards seems excessive. With all the problems with Sydney roads they really need to get a better public transport system!

While in Sydney I attended a SLUG meeting and gave a short talk about Postal (my mail server benchmark suite). I will present a paper about Postal at the OSDC conference later this year.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

The airport link in Sydney is privately owned, so they up the prices quite a bit.

I'm guessing of that $13 fare, ~$9 of it would be for the Domestic -> Central hop alone.

Transport in Sydney sucks, that's why I ride my bike everywhere. :-)

Anonymous said...

In my country,transportation system is superb.
Traina are so luxurious ,so you can even see people mouth water while they're sleeping.

etbe said...

Shintaro's comment refers to an event that will be described in my Japan travel pages, I will post a pointer to them in my blog at some future time.