Mark J Cox

mark :: blog :: oscon

30 Jul 2001: OSCON

Back from OSCON to a jetlag and a heatwave. Looks like I could have got my sunburn/tan here instead of flying 11 hours with a broken seat-back TV and a pounding headache. Anyway I put up a few photos of interest from the conference.

Read what we thought of the tutorials until the end of this week when we've finished writing up what we thought of the main sessions.

joe and I combined a talk on XSLT and a talk on Extreme Programming and spent a few hours in the hotel converting the Apache Week markup langauge (which was rather like Ventura Publisher markup) to XML, pair programming, XP-style. It was either that or watch ABC and play the internet enhanced-TV version of "Who wants to be a millionaire?"

26 Jul 2001: 0915 PST

I'm sitting at the very back of a packed hall, typing this live as Craig Mundie from Microsoft talks about his thoughts on open source. He started by saying that Microsoft's problems and comments are around the free software movement rather than the open source movement. "Open source isn't the issue".

It must be strange for him up on stage looking out over a sea of people wearing plastic red hats. Yes, it's a bit of a publicity stunt, but we must have got about a third of all the attendees wearing the fedoras. I had great fun handing them out on the way in, getting trampled in the rush, but the attitude of everyone was great. Apart from the guy who worked for SuSe who didn't want one. Not even to burn, apparantly.

25 Jul 2001: CA

It's exactly a year ago that I got to visit Monterery California to report on the 4th O'Reilly Open Source software convention (Apache Week issue #208) When I managed to get invited back to San Diego for this week I thought I'd been given the ideal assignment; getting to fly to California in July, avoiding the British rain, and spending a week right on the West Coast with nearly 2000 other open source advocates. So with only one direct flight a day from England I was unsuprised to find a large number of delegates on the plane; wearing Penguin badges and snapping pictures of the clear views over Greenland with a variety of digital cameras.

San Diego has great weather, and it's easy to forget that coming from England, so I managed to get sunburnt. If you're at the conference this week look out for the pasty english guys with sunburn. Wireless lans are great; I'm currently typing this listening to Brian Behlendorf talking about Apache to a group of people including Larry Wall, sitting just in front of me.

19 Jul 2001: San Diego

Off to San Diego tommorrow for TPC/OSCON. I've not flown with British Airways since 1995 when after two flights with dismal customer service I vowed never to fly with them again. However, London to San Diego was cheapest with BA and I didn't fancy paying the price difference. Also they might be better now, they've got the seat back TV screens. I now know two BA pilots too, but neither is flying the outward or return flights :(

Well I can't leave until I pack, and I can't pack until I've finished work, and that means writing Apache Week. People have been asking about the OpenSSL exploit, so I need to write that up, together with a company that is giving out free server certificates.

My entire trust model for SSL is based on that fact that anyone who can issue a server certificate "does the right thing". That means they check who I am and that I have the right to use the name I've asked them to certify. Otherwise someone else could register my name, or something similar to it, and theres no point having SSL do authentication anymore. How can a company giving out free certificates afford to do any checking? But then I've heard of Verisign and Thawte making serious mistakes issuing certificates, so I probably had a false sense of security anyway.

Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

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