Obligatory post-FOSDEM article. It was a great event as usual, unfortunately I could only attend the Sunday part. Fortunately I didn't get lost in Brussels this time so I arrived just in time for the first talk.
I appreciated a lot the Metasploit talk by HD Moore. Metasploit is a hacking framework, entirely written in Ruby. The speaker could manage to penetrate on a Windows 2000 machine using 2 Ruby expressions in the terminal. There is even the possibility to open a VNC session by injecting some dll on the remote machine, if I properly understood. They have a Rails interface, and more interestingly, a special shell (called meterpreter) that allows you to do very basic operations on the file system of the compromised machine. Sounds very interesting.
My second favorite talk was Federico Mena Quintero's profiling desktop applications talk. There is no need to introduce Frederico. This was the first time that I saw him and I found him very funny. He introduced some very basic ideas about making code more efficient, things that everybody should already know but still forget sometimes.
I also attended to Jim Blandy's GDB tracepoints talk, which was quite interesting. But it's difficult to fall in love with this once you have used DTrace :-)
I managed to see the Etoile talk in the GNUStep developer room. These two guys are doing an amazing job. I wish I had the time to could check out the latest version and hack a bit on it.
It was a great opportunity to meet lots of friends and people. GNOME hackers, colleagues from DataRescue, school people... and especially Eloy Duran who made the travel from Amsterdam just to meet me (and of course attend some talks, let's be honest).
Video recording of tracks are available! Big kudos to every person involved in this event. They did an awesome job as usual, and FOSDEM is better every year.
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