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.