So I'm halfway through my 2nd full day here at DebConf 6. The trip over was fairly uneventful. Dorval Airport charges a fairly ridiculous amount for WiFi. Cost me $10 to surf for an hour. Such a ripoff. Meet Jimmy in Newark. A bit of a mad rush from the Mexico City airport to the bus station to catch the last bus to Oaxtepec. Mexico city is big (says Captain Obvious). Arrived at the resort after midnight, and was greeted by a nice gift bag and many developers, including one of my roomies for the week, sfllaw. There are wild cats everywhere on the resort! They're adorable, but a little heartbreaking. There's waterpark here too, need to try to find time for that. The swimming pool closes at 6pm, just around the time I'm most keen for a swim. Yesterday, the conference officially began. sfllaw, I and few others (including important spanish speakers), went into town for breakfast. I had a chorizo echilada, very nice and not sick yet. The talk level was fairly light, and sfllaw went to town again to get some beer, limes and water from town. The deposits on the beer bottles were almost the same as the price of the beer! sfllaw theorized that it was to discourage destroying the bottles. The day caught up with me in the evening and I fell asleep and almost missed dinner. Luckily we made it just in time. The conference food has been fairly good, and I can't argue with the price. The net connection seemed to have problems in the evening, I was feeling a mite anti-social and the previous 24 hours had caught up with me, so I totally crashed around 11. Today was some interesting talks, the most interesting being the Ubuntu Annual Report by Mark Shuttleworth. During the QA, a lot of the same objections seemed to be raised (LaunchPad non-freeness, passing back to Debian. The same soft answers were forthcoming. I mostly have no problem with Ubuntu, and think sometimes we're a bit whiny about them. This is free software, we can't compel anyone to do exactly what we want, nor do they owe us. I'm happy to get what help I do from them.

The impromptu dinner party was quite successful. Not only is my refrigerator mostly empty now, I also had happy people walking out the door. I am going to buy pesos later this afternoon. And quite possibly some appropriate clothing. I understand it's the rainy season down in Mexico. I wish it were warm and rainy here. Then I could put my plants outside and not worry about them dying. Say, does anyone want to water my plants when I'm away? Some of you may be wondering why I'm going to Mexico. Well, I had booked this trip months in advance, because it was the first time in four years that Debconf has returned to North America. Although last time, I only had to road-trip to Toronto, instead of flying for several hours. I hope to see people that I haven't seen in a long while, and maybe geek out just a little bit more than I normally do. Oh yes, and to take photographs. In a surprising turn on events, I now work on a Debian-derived distribution. So perhaps some of this trip could be considered business as well? Who knows? I'd certainly like to talk to AJ and the other BTS folks about passing bugs between Debian and Ubuntu. Because we can certainly pool our resources for things like this. Then I want to buy people drinks and food. And get far too little sleep. Don't look at me like that. I get plenty of sleep. Oh wait, it's half-past three, isn't it?

People who know me know that Perl is my favourite programming language ever. Today, a co-op was complaining about how some variables in Perl consist only of punctuation. But that is not a reason to hate Perl, it is a reason to love it! Here's a one-liner, to prove my point: perl -le'* $#_ =sub world ,s;"*;$,=$";e,* $_ =sub Hello ,print$_--->(),&$_'

Apparently it's been a month since I've said anything. No wonder people say I don't update this blog enough. A few weeks ago, Simon came to visit/make supper for some of us down here. It was good to see him again. Unfortunatly, after he left my fridge had stuff in it, so I had to leave it plugged in. That stuff I mentioned was mostly flavoured vodka and ice cream.

The weekend after Simon visited, I visited Victoria to see Gordo, who was on his last weekend on the west coast. I partied it up pretty hard with him and had quite a walk around Victoria saturday night while trying to find Esquimalt.

Before my mother arrive last saturday I figured it was a good idea to get rid of the ice cream and vodka in my freezer. So, I got to watch spaceballs with some friends while mixing some vodka smoothies.

My mom and auth Faye were down last week. I was partial tour guide, partial tourist this last week as we explored big basin, Stanford and San Francisco. It was fun to have visitors for once. I even got a lamp, some bowls and some wine glasses out of the deal.

Tonight, I went out to the Dana St. Roasting Company to see what was going on in Mountain View. To my surprised, tonights show was belly dancers. There was some very impressive dancers. It was a good night to go out.

(less than 900 emails to catch up on)

Each morning, CodeCon started later and later. This is not just because us volunteers couldn't get there in time, but also because the attendees would show up more hungover and sleep-deprived as well. Thankfully, it's a hacker conference so we started at about noon. Or 12:30. Which is "morning" for some. We kicked off the day with a talk on Dido which is meant to help you write voice-menu systems. Quinn did a neat demonstration involving a real telephone, which was quite novel. However, since I despise voice-menu systems, I have to hate his project on principle. In the Q&A; period, I nipped over to Bill Pollock's booth. He runs No Starch Press which is absolutely fabulous. He gave me a free mug, some tea, a book, and a T-shirt. In exchange, I had to buy a few books as well. I'm afraid that my book buying habit is starting to get uncontrollable. Every time I return from a trip, I bring five or ten books back. Now I have a copy of madduck's book which I will get him to sign at DebConf 6. I completely zoned out on the Deme presentation. I think I was talking to someone who wanted to convert me to Evil, after hearing that I was a hacker. I'm afraid that I'm too noble for that. But what I did glean from the presentation is that deme is an actual English word. My presentation on UniConf came up next, so I put on my red "Speaker" badge and hopped on to stage. You see, I was at CodeCon as a backup speaker, in case one of the others missed a flight or fell down some stairs. I had to resist doing any of them bodily harm. For my altruism, I gave a talk about how UniConf glues configuration systems together, and why people should use it instead of writing their own. I got a lot of questions afterwards, which was pretty cool. At lunch, wealhtheow and Bill came by to ask me what I'd like on my pizza. Wow! I said that it didn't matter, and thought little of it. Then they showed up with boxes and boxes from the local Costco. Bill had just bought everyone lunch! We organised a queue that would have made the British proud and everyone got a slice to eat. I remember first hearing about Monotone from Graydon, back at GCC Summit. So I was a little surprised to see Graydon sitting on stage looking pretty while Nathaniel was presenting. Monotone has inspired a couple of version control systems but it's never really gotten popular. But one thing it hasn't passed on is its use of Merkle trees to express differences. All throughout the conference, I had been selling drinks from behind the bar. Standing for all that time really hurts the feet, so I was sadden to discover that my shoes were not good for this. Still, I had a good time there. I've definitely found a calling in the service industry, if the computer bubble bursts again, I'd make a great bartender. I never knew! You make eye contact, smile and say something friendly. Then you chat as you pour a drink, take an interest in someone, and just be nice. If you give a little extra, smile and wink, like it's secret just between you. I was busy chatting to my customers for the Rhizome presentation. Reading its description, I'm not really sure that I could tell you what it is. And I work with computers! As I was selling drinks, I was also selling CodeCon T-shirts. Very snazzy T-shirts. Every time I sold a drink, I tried to sell a T-shirt along with it. Show off the front, show off the back, offer an appropriately sized shirt. Flattery seems to work very well, as does smiling when the person looks at it. You know they're sold when they're holding a shirt, so you offer to fold it for them and name the price. It was so easy! Daniel came up again to do his Cqual++ presentation. Not only was this piece of software more difficult to write than delta, it's also less popular. Alas! He does some very impressive static dataflow analysis on C++ to find nasty, horrible bugs. But parsing out C++ is scarily difficult! After the presentations were over, we had a very nice set of closing remarks which made all of us blush. And then we tore down all the stuff we put up and packed everything away. This is where I packed my own T-shirt in a box by accident. Jonathan's going to send it to me by post, which is very nice of him. Then I bid sad farewells to gorgeous Wealh eow and charming akashayi who went off to dinner without me. Six of us climbed into a taxi and we went to a sushi restaurant called Osaka, where we met up with breezip. Bree was the friend that the lovely and indefatigable spider88 kept trying to meet, but failed to. We were all quite exhausted from socialising with people since, after all, we are a group of introverts. So we enjoyed an excellent dinner with subdued, but fascinating, conversation. I was treated to the best uni I have tasted in my entire life. I think Bree was quite amused at my sea-urchin ecstacy. After dinner, Len paid with a thick wad of cash, which in conjunction with his suit, made him look like a mob boss. I had a very good night.

Now that pphaneuf has returned from his journey to France, we have a lot more trouser dropping in the office. To convince people that we actually do work around here, I'd like to point out that I released WvDial 1.56. It has only one change, which is quite embarassing to have had to make.

I woke up to a breakfast of pancakes, cooked by the wonderful riseorbleed. I don't know about you but waking up to a hot breakfast is heavenly. After some morning ablutions, we hailed a cab and along the way we chatted with the cabbie as I looked out the window. Luxor cabbies are really nice, every time I travelled with them, they had some interesting story to tell and big, broad smiles. Smiling is the way to fatter tips! The weather in San Francisco is supposed to be rather variable. You know how that is, rain one minute and then sun the next. Well, the entire time I was there, it was bright and sunny and gorgeous. San Francisco really put on her best to charm me and she really succeeded. I didn't think that postcard-perfect pictures were possible, but I saw them everywhere. I was happy to walk around without needing a winter coat. And everyone else smirked at how happy I was. Daniel seemed to have recovered from the previous night's revelry. His talk on delta was excellent because he's a very good public speaker. Which is good, because he gave two presentations at CodeCon. When I talked to him on Thursday night, he seemed a little embarassed at how successful delta had become since it such a simple piece of software. But people like GCC use it to fare down their bug reports to the lines of code that reproduce its bugs. Rob and Tristan sidled up to my bar and asked me if I could get them some juice. For their laptops. They were working on their presentation all the way until the last minute, which involved a drunken Tristan stumbling around on stage. Except that Tristan doesn't drink, so his imitation was quite poor. They were presenting Djinni, which is their implementation of a fast simulated-annealing algorithm that takes also pressure into account. Sadly, they didn't explain their algorithm but their talk was entertaining nevertheless. At lunch, Spider snuck me out of the building and she showed me around San Francisco. She pointed out the Eagle Tavern with a glimmer in her eye. I think she's trying to corrupt me. Or she's trying to pimp me out. Then we went to Stompers where she tried on some boots. We were stymied, however, by the fact that a very annoying woman and her husband were trying on every single pair of boots in the entire store. iGlance is a real-world video-conferencing and screen-sharing application that has some fairly good usability built into it. It also has a fairly sensible privacy model and does some NAT punching to boot. Although it's only got a Win32 port for now, it's free software so someone will fix it up. Sometime in the afternoon, the beautiful and fair wealhtheow came behind the bar and surprised me with a hug and a sandwich! I was happy with the random hug from a new friend, but the sandwich was wonderful. I had not eaten lunch on Friday so I was very grateful. She put a huge smile on my face. I munched on the sandwich while listening to the OASIS talk. This technology is a locality-aware server-selection resolver, which is pretty good for distributing servers around the world and finding the fastest one. They implement this as a DNS redirector so that lookups are transparent to normal Internet software. This made me feel a little bad for holdenk, whose SelfDirectedProject happens to be on a very similar topic. It does, however, validate his approach. maradydd's presentation about Query by Example was up next. She did a very good introduction to data-mining, which segued into her hack on PostgreSQL where you can specify examples of things you want to search for. That is not how SQL normally works, where you specify constraints. With QBE, you just specify things similiar to what you want, and things similar to what you don't want. I was chatting with Rob Pascual when I noticed Len lining up in the Q&A; queue. Suddenly, my ears perked up as I sensed something important was going to happen. So I pulled out my camera, stepped on some toes, and got into position. When it was his turn at the microphone, he started saying random stuff that wasn't question at all! Something cheesy like how Meredith had changed his life and how he wanted to be with her. Then he got up on stage and asked The Question. It was beautiful. The audience broke out into cheers and applause, except for the heartless bastards beside me. But who cares about them? This was such an awesome occurance that an interview was taped. After teardown, some people were going to head to a franchise Mexican restaurant. Spider insisted that I get real food, so we walked down to the Mission. We made a detour to Good Vibrations which is a San Francisco landmark if ever there was one. I swear that she's trying to corrupt me. Anyway, as we were walking out, I must have mentioned that I was from Canada. Because Cohen, a Torontonian, came out of nowhere and introduced himself to us. Well, what was I to do but to invite my fellow countryman to dinner? So we set off to find a Taqueria that served nopales. This failed since Californians don't seem to like eating cactus. Instead, we went to Pancho Villa where I ate enchiladas and salsa verde and guacamole and churros and I was so very happy! We bid farewell to Cohen after exchanging contact information and tried to find everyone else. Unfortunately, we couldn't reach anyone by cellphone, so we sat around dejected for a while. Then we realised that we could go to Annie's Social Club where an event was happening. This turned out to be a good and a bad idea. It was a good idea because we found everyone at CodeCon. It was a bad idea because Annie's Social Club double-booked us with bad karaoke! And then were quite rude when we complained. And then kicked out John Gilmore. So I just want to say that Annie's Social Club hates geeks and freedom. So Len hailed a black stretch limousine, we all climbed into it, invited some reporters along and moved the entire party to the XYZ bar. The XYZ staff were very awesome, accommodating an extra hundred patrons and getting an extra bartender. And they were very nice about it. Unfortunately, the bar was full, so I had to lead a bunch of introverts in the fine art of taking over an establishment. We walked in, started talking, I encouraged people to sit down in empty spots on the couches. They did a very admirable job of taking over the back. I got the stunningly adorable akashayi a seat and a drink, before I taked to the people sitting with us. They were a couple who had moved from Florida to San Francisco, and a man from New York who was quite the boor. The man in the couple knew the New Yorker and seemed quite embarassed about him. After twenty minutes of conversation, they excused themselves and bid us good night. This gave us plenty of seating space to talk about geeky things until the manager kindly kicked us out. I made sure Akasha got safely to her hostel and then took a taxi back to the guest room. It was quite the challenge to direct the cab driver, since I had lost the directions back, but I managed!

I woke up on Friday morning and wondered what breakfast would be. Then I remembered that I was staying at the W and decided to forage for food elsewhere. I took a taxicab with spider88, enochsmiles, maradydd. It was a strange hybrid SUV cab that was painted all yellow, I would later learn that Yellow Cab drivers were scary and that I should avoid them. We got to StudioZ and discovered that we didn't know how to get inside. We figured that out eventually and took stock of the situation. I started moving tables about and setting up chairs, because I abhor standing about with my hands in my pockets. Then I helped hang banners from the rafters. After I did that, I tried to see if I could do anything else. Since CodeCon is run on the cheap so that anybody can attend, drinks like coffee are not included in the conference fee. And since the conference was being held in a night club, there was a convenient bar that would be a good place to setup a concessions stand. So I put things in order and stood behind the counter. I got to see people walk in the door and after registering with wealhtheow or Spider, they'd stand in bewilderment in front of my bar. It was a lot of fun to watch all sorts of people come through. And then I'd smile at them and offer to get them something to drink. We started Lance's talk a little late in order to let everyone settle in their seats. I met him the night before where he talked about his Apache module that has heuristics for detecting when a phisher is trying to clone your website. Or when your website has been cloned and the phisher is passing login requests through to you. This kind of thing is totally what financial institutions have to start doing. We got coffee from this place called Cafe Organica, which seems to have some mixed online reviews. Or rather, Jonathan did, in a big messenger bag filled with carafes. Since Jonathan doesn't actually drink coffee, it was left to me to decide whether it was any good. It seemed to be drip coffee that was thick, dark and strong. Very decent for something that was brewed hours ago. The customers didn't seem to mind, as we ran out of coffee every day. The next presentation was SiteAdvisor which takes an interesting tack on safely surfing the web. Instead of building security features into your browser, there's a central server that stores information about sites that you're visiting. But what was really interesting was how they got this information. They had an automated tool that went in pretending to be a real person, signed up for some e-mails, downloaded some programs, and examined what happened afterward. I missed the majority of the VidTorrent presentation, because I was busy chatting with people and offering them refreshments. Also, their demo didn't work because the wireless setup at the conference kept on going down. People were abusing the free Wireless network that Cliff was trying to keep up and running. Which is sad, because Cliff had basically volunteered to set that up on his own time. Tom came up after that to present Localhost, which is a unimaginatively named piece of software, but is interesting because it lets you browse a world-wide filesystem of torrents. What's interesting about his filesystem is that it uses a distributed hash table, so that even if there are files with the same name, you'll be able to distinguish the distinct copies. Which is useful if you want to tell whether you're downloading a legitimate and popular file, or some malicious file that someone's injected. The last talk of the day was Truman, which not only demonstrated an interesting piece of technology, but also quite educational. The tool itself is a specialised Linux distribution that can capture what happens inside itself and simulate a public connexion to the Internet. This is advantages, Joe tells us, because modern pieces of malware are smart enough to disable themselves when they detect sandboxed environments. After people filed out, we packed away everything into storage as StudioZ is a nightclub, so it was setting up for its nightclub crowd. Everyone else went next door to Loft11 where a party was being held, sponsored by bramcohen's awesome company I went inside and bumped into Graydon and we tried to go about finding fellow Canadians. This was not so successful on the crowded downstairs floor, so we went upstairs to chat and catch up. I met some people who were at the speaker's reception and successfully remembered their names. Then I met a guy who was at the night club just waiting for his buddy, and I explained CodeCon to him. He thought it was a great idea. Len Sassaman and Bram got up to give a little speech, which I tried to take photographs of. But failed. Instead, I noticed that they were on this awesome glass ceiling which made me want to dance. I didn't do that though, because my feet hurt from standing all day. I poked my head into a room upstairs that was all white, which was very cool. Some people were playing a game of Werewolf which finished with the villagers winning. I hung out with some people like Eric, Pete, and Kelsey who told the story of her pink Barbie backpack. I also met Chloe and her husband, whose name I have forgotten. But Chloe is awesome because she is now independently wealthy so that she can pursue her dream of studying the nitrogen cycle in soil using post-doc maths. Impressive! I also met akashayi who is not a professional computer programmer at all. She teaches martial arts by day, and slings code by night. She drove all the way from Los Angeles to attend CodeCon and was having the time of her life. I wistfully remember when I was that excited about computing, so just hanging out with her was awesome. She promised me a Kempo lesson if I ever made my way to L.A., which is an offer I intend to collect. I found Spider downstairs, sitting on a couch with Daniel. The night was getting long and we were totally exhausted, so we took a taxicab to the W. There, we went up to Enoch's room party where he treated us to $17 cheeseburgers. Now, I didn't think that cheeseburgers that expensive were worth it, but boy oh boy were those good. Spider and I took a cab to kineticphoenix and riseorbleed's place sometime past midnight and we dragged our luggage into their guest room. Which was really more of an awesome guest apartment. Hurray for knowing people in foreign cities! I don't remember much after that. I think I turned on a space heater before passing out.

Since sfllaw hasn't blogged about it, we're having a little get together on Saturday at Hurley's at 5:00. In the spirit of "the more, the merrier" (hope that's ok with you Simon), if you're a wannabe Debian developer come buy us drinks. I promise to sign the key of anyone who buys me a pint (how's that for a web-of-trust?).

Since sfllaw hasn't blogged about it, we're having a little get together on Saturday at Hurley's at 5:00. In the spirit of "the more, the merrier" (hope that's ok with you Simon), if you're a wannabe Debian developer come buy us drinks. I promise to sign the key of anyone who buys me a pint (how's that for a web-of-trust?).

So what does a Debian beer stein have to do with this gathering? Absolutely everything! We're getting together a bunch of Debian Developers in Montr al to drink and chat. There are rumours that you can even get your GnuPG key signed, if you buy enough rounds. What a great deal! Thusly, the beer goes down and the trust scores rise! The relevant details:

Who:

The Debian community.

Where:

Hurley's Irish Pub

Date:

Saturday, 7 January 2006.

Time:

17:00 or 5 PM.

My day at the office has been pretty grand. I got to talk with a whole bunch of people about their problems and promised to look into some of them. Then I talked to someone about sales and marketting. Then I talked to Chris and we struggled with PHP. And finally, a chat with Tim about release management. It was like a day at the Montr al office, but with people who are less bouncy. I tried to smile at people and make them feel happier, at which I think I was mildly successful. Perhaps my motivational poster will help? I had some tasty ph for lunch at Ph Vi t which is a Vietnamese restaurant run by Cantonese people. It is also within walking distance of the office. Their soup was rather filling for a small portion and they had delicious spring rolls. Alas, they are not UltimateSpringRolls, but one can't expect to find those everywhere. A special bonus was that I got to talk with Deidra, in between happy bites of noodles and soup. It is now late and I guess I should be heading out. I was hoping to hang out with people after work, but they seem to have gone home. Oh well. So to pass the time, I released WvDial 1.55. Hurray!

I suppose it would be a good time to mention that http://open.nit.ca is up and running on a nice new server in Montr al. That's the website that hosts all of NITI's free software offerings. About two months ago, our mailing lists were eaten by a disk failure. We've managed to get the archives back, from our subscription lists are all gone. But I've got them up and running now, on GNU Mailman no less, and have subscribed some people to them. They have doubtlessly noticed this because spammers have been hitting two of our mailing lists like crazy. After going into denial for a while, I have decided that I ought to moderate these posts. Oh hey. The new XPLC got into Debian. Too bad we realised that we need to kick in another change soon. Ah well. I look forward to pushing out a WvDial release over the holidays, as it really needs to get out the door now.

So what does a Debian beer stein have to do with this gathering? Absolutely everything! We're getting together a bunch of Debian Developers in Montr al to drink and chat. There are rumours that you can even get your GnuPG key signed, if you buy enough rounds. What a great deal! Thusly, the beer goes down and the trust scores rise! The relevant details:

Who:

The Debian community.

Where:

Hurley's Irish Pub

Date:

Saturday, 7 January 2006.

Time:

17:00 or 5 PM.

Since sfllaw hasn't blogged about it, we're having a little get together on Saturday at Hurley's at 5:00. In the spirit of "the more, the merrier" (hope that's ok with you Simon), if you're a wannabe Debian developer come buy us drinks. I promise to sign the key of anyone who buys me a pint (how's that for a web-of-trust?).

My day at the office has been pretty grand. I got to talk with a whole bunch of people about their problems and promised to look into some of them. Then I talked to someone about sales and marketting. Then I talked to Chris and we struggled with PHP. And finally, a chat with Tim about release management. It was like a day at the Montr al office, but with people who are less bouncy. I tried to smile at people and make them feel happier, at which I think I was mildly successful. Perhaps my motivational poster will help? I had some tasty ph for lunch at Ph Vi t which is a Vietnamese restaurant run by Cantonese people. It is also within walking distance of the office. Their soup was rather filling for a small portion and they had delicious spring rolls. Alas, they are not UltimateSpringRolls, but one can't expect to find those everywhere. A special bonus was that I got to talk with Deidra, in between happy bites of noodles and soup. It is now late and I guess I should be heading out. I was hoping to hang out with people after work, but they seem to have gone home. Oh well. So to pass the time, I released WvDial 1.55. Hurray!

I would like to annouce that I am a much better bachelor than Simon. For instance, my fridge is unplugged, the breaker on my stove is turned off, I have no phone, no couch, no table, and no tv. I throw my laundry into two piles. The clean pile and a dirty pile. The key to the two pile system is that the piles must be separated. Lastly, I am a much better cook, I only have one pot/wok thus I can make and eat a meal using only one pot and one utensil.

So, given Simon's announcement, imagine how poor a bachelor he would be without my help.

I've been struggling to get WvDial out the door for about two days now. This is why I'm still in the office at five in the morning. I thought I was just about done when I discovered the plethora of Debian bugs filed against it. WvDial is a magical piece of software that figures out how to talk to your modem to get you connected to your ISP. It used to be very popular back when everyone in North America used dial-up access to get on the newfangled Internet. Nowadays, many people have broadband service, so it's popularity has waned. However, people are starting to use bluetooth mobile phone modems now, so we're seeing a resurgence in popularity. Which is why, of course, I'm hoping to get another release out the door. I have the impression that I can't fix all of the bugs this time around, mostly because I don't have the hardware. But the easy ones should be solved so that we can concentrate on the tough problems.

There's this artists collective on St-Laurent, across from La Sala Rossa. They call their place Casa Magica, and it's really quite groovy. They've got this cozy living area with an open plan. The kitchen is separated from the living room with a tiled countertop someone built themselves. It's decorated in that way with splashes of paint, splashes of light, and furnishings that look like they grew there. I showed up at this place to meet some people in the Free Software world. I've been in Montr al for about a year and I still don't know very many hackers in the city. So when I got invited to Les 24h SQIL, I decided to show up and meet some people. I went up St-Laurent to a non-descript red door with a poster about SQIL on it. "This must be the place," I thought as I tried the door. Upstairs, I was greeted by a living room full of random people: some sitting in front of computers, some chatting away, and one guy fiddling with a projector. I wandered around in a state of confusion until I was introduced to Robin. Robin Millette seems to do a lot of work for FACIL, which is an organisation for promoting free content in Quebec. He introduced me to a bunch of people, like Simon Raven whom I helped with finger-ldap. I met Fran ois from Quebec City, who was interested in Nitix. There was Nicolas who is a Java developer that writes web-based applications. And other people like Alex, Yan, Marco and Matthieu who seemed nice but I can no longer remember what they do. I returned later in the week to Robin's birthday party where I happened to meet Fabien, who is a consultant that does work on Firefox and Yannick who's a Ph.D. student at McGill. We had a good time talking about quantum computing and how to design a programming language for quantum computers. Good geeky times were had.