So, I am in the airplane flying back from Vancouver.
It has been a long journey, but let me start from the beginning.
I have been flying to Montreal on May 7th, basically just after my
return from RIPE-50 at Stockholm. Matt (msf) picked me up downtown, and
Ryan arrived a few hours later, bringing Fernando Gont with him.
We stayed at Matt's for a few days, doing some random hacking, and Ryan
and me, siting in front of one screen, finally got started on the
pf interface abstraction code cleanup, which was a prerequisite for
making use of the interface groups stuff I hacked a year ago. I can't
point out enough how important it was that we could sit down together,
staring at one screen, to get started on that. I continued to work on
that for the following days. We didn't miss out the city of Montreal
either of course - we did have a lot of fun, no doubt.
Reyk flew in on the 12th, we rented a car, picked him up at the airport
and drove over to Ottawa for BSDCan.
There was a (not so surprising) surprise waiting for me - a shiny new
laptop, an IBM X40. Many thanks again to those who made that possible
(and yes, I will finally handle donations.html for the donors when I am
back, promised).
Ryan spoke first, in fact he had the first possible slot at the
conference (3 parallel tracks). He spoke on randomness in our network
stack, that went very well. Bob spoke on spamd the next day, Reyk on
wireless network support in OpenBSD (where, as you could already read
from others, phk tried to spread FUD, which did not work out), Fernando
gave his icmp attacks against tcp talk, and I spoke on OpenBGPD. All
talks went well, unfortunately Fernando spoke in parallel to me so I
could not see his. Bob and me had humppa as introduction to our talks
tho, which the audience appreciated :) We did sell T-Shirts and CDs too,
with quite some success.
Overall, it was a nice and well organized conference, worth visiting.
Of course we went out for food beer in the evenings, be assured we
had fun.
On the 15th we slacked hacked a bit in the student's residence where
we were staying (the coference was at the U of Ottawa campus); in the
evening Matt, Ryan, Reyk, Fernando and me flew to Vancouver, and Bob
home to Edmonton.
From Vancouver we went on a fantastic trip to Tofino (on Vancouver
Island), staying there for two nights, and then driving back to
Vancouver, and over to Calgary in the following two days.
There we were just two days early for our 2005 hackathon. We celebrated
Theo's birthday, and on the 20th we set the hackrooms up.
The hackathon itself got quite some coverage already - after I finished
the interface abstraction cleanup stuff in pf I worked on integrating
the interface groups to pf; I'll write a seperate mail on what that is
and how it works and what is so cool about it :)
Besides that I of course spent some time with claudio in bgpd and with
various other developers on various other things in the networking area
- last not least with camiel on vlan, so that bridging over vlans now
finally works, and bridging vlan-encapsulated frames still does as well.
We did go for a dayhike during the hackathon of course, forming two
groups of 5 people each for a hard hike and one big group for an easier
one. Theo, Ryan, Reyk, Uwe and me went up Mount St. Piran, starting at
Lake Louise, after going over some other Mountain (forgot the name),
elevation delta about 900m. It was fun.
pval me escaped for a (fantastic) mountain bike ride on the last day
before we started tearing things down.
Ryan, Uwe, Martin, jsg and claudio stayed to go on a hike with Theo,
Peter, Ryan and me. We went to Turbine Canyon in Kananaskis (well, close
to it), quite a bit of the way on snow shoes. Camping there a night, Ryan
and me put our tent on top of a hill, with a fantastic view over the area,
which we enjoyed very much and very long :)
Next day we went back down to the forks (about halfway) where bob was
camping; Ryan, Pval and me decided to extend the hike one more day, the
others left. We slacked a bit there and then went up to the three isle
lake. It was pretty hard, but more than worth it - a very cool trip. We
returned the day after.
Of course a day for recovery and catching up on email etc was in
order, we stayed at peter's place in calgary. There was a Plaid
Tongued Devils concert in the evening which we (and pascoe and dlg, who
stayed in calgary longer too) enjoyed very much.
Ryan and me left early the next morning, renting a car and driving back
to Vancouver. We went very very relaxed and still made it in about 12
hours.
There, at Ryan's place in Vancouver, I stayed until today. We enjoyed
Vancouver, went for another 2.5-day hike to Emma Lake (and on), near
Powell River, went up Grouse Grind near Vanouver (930m elevation delta on
3km :)) and used the time to talk about future openbsd work, designing
cool stuff and of course hacking.
Many Thanks to the people who made this trip
