AsiaBSDCon 2007
I have just returned from AsiaBSDCon 2007 where I presented (PDF slides) a paper on the security measures we have implemented in OpenSSH.
The conference was held in Tokyo, at Tokyo University. The venue was great and the conference was well organised, except that the single track made for very long days (9am to 7:30pm). There were some good papers and presentations at the conference; apart from the OpenBSD ones, I particularly liked Antti Kantee’s “pass to userspace framework filesystem” work, prof. Murai’s wide ranging talk on BSD, the Internet and pervasive networking and the three IPv6 mobility papers from the researchers at IIJ and Keio university.
Tokyo was great fun, as was catching up some some fellow OpenBSD hackers and appreciators (I’ll post some photos once I have sorted them). After the conference I spent a day and a half pounding the streets of Ginza, Shibuya, Harajuku, Shinjuku, Asakusabashi and Akihabara looking for gifts for my wife and son (ok, ok, Akihabara was for me) - this turned out more difficult than I expected, so I ended up covering a lot of ground and getting very sore feet. I didn’t buy much for myself, though Mark from OpenBSD support Japan kindly gave me an IO Data USL-5P to hack on (only slightly larger than a deck of cards!)
I also got to fulfill my childhood dream of visiting a Japanese amusement arcade, but I think I was at least 10 years too late: most of them seem to have been subsumed by Pachinko. Pachinko parlours are mind-altering - if you have ever experienced sensory overload on visiting a casino slot-machine room, start by squaring that level of din and flashing lights then add thick cigarette smoke, the tinkling rattle of hundreds of thousands little balls and epileptic flashing graphics on each machine. msf@ theorised that Pachinko parlours are the reason behind Japan’s fecund production of avant-garde noise artists. (I can’t imagine how Hunter S. Thompson’s masterwork would have turned out had he been given access to Pachinko.) It was too much for me - I didn’t play, sticking instead to the new versions of Virtua Cop, Time Crisis and watching Japanese schoolgirls mow down zombies with submachine guns (a new version of House of the Dead).
I’m already looking forward to going back to Japan again, even though my 日本語 has atropied substantially. One thing I’ll have to do is pick up a W-CDMA phone before I leave as I don’t think I could cope without having my telephony cortex lobotomised out again.