Day started much too early, according to my internal body clock. Scotties alarm went off at around 8am and even managed to find a way to penetrate my earplugs. The shower had one of those typical push to get some water mechanisms. Fun part was that the setting for the water temperature did not persist and changed randomly from really cold to freaking hot. So, showering was quite an adventure and a physical exercise: I periodically had to jump out of the shower to avoid burning of any body parts.
We headed down to the cafeteria to grab the last remainings of breakfast and left around 9:30am to find the university campus. Driving was again quite a challenge and to my astonishment we managed to find the university campus. Unfortunately the campus was really large and due to a complete lack of signs (again) we got lost two times. Fortunately Scotty was able to phone someone to get the right location.

Fosdem takes place in the buildings of the university Libre de Bruxelles. When we arrived, the entry was already packed with people. We grabbed a bag with the conference program and some goodies, some copies of old french linux magazines, ubuntu install and live cd and a current knoppix version.

Due to technical problems we were still in time for Jimmy Wales WikiPedia talk. He delivered a really nice talk, giving an overview of the wikipedia project and presenting some of the upcoming challenges for the project. While they have enough people contributing content they are looking for people with more technical skills to maintain and upgrade their infrastructure. They are planing to install more regional datacenters to cope with the increasing numbers of requests.

Richard Stallmans talk was next. Before the talk began lots of “fanboys” took a picture of him. The talk was not outstanding, he speaks rather monotonously and he did not really present anything new. What really disappointed me though was the arrogant and rude way he treated questioners. He could not understand some of the questioners which is nothing unusual at an international event where most visitors mother tongue is not English. However, he either lectured them about their pronouncation or turned his back and ask the audience if they could understand the question.

The talk ended at 1pm and we went off campus to grab some lunch. We stopped at a fast-food place that served chicken stuff.
Ordering took a while so I missed most of the Nagios talk.

Next one I attended was the Snort Talk by Martin Roesch. He gave an overview of the development history of Snort and how they changed integral parts of snorts internal design in the last years.

I skipped the ethereal talk and went to the cluster developer room to listen to a presentation about deploying a network of clusters with rocks. Rocks is a distribution specifically designed for clusters.

Unfortunately I had missed most of the Drupal talks and only caught the last bits of the 100% availability, scalability and security with Drupal talk. The drupal people gave out free shirts afterwards, so I am a proud owner of a drupal shirt now.

Wim van de Putte had recognized Waldemar during the day and invited the three of us to the BSD conference diner. We were supposed to meet him at the BSD booth after 6pm. Apparently there was also an offer to eat with some CCC people. Waldemar’s stomach problems had appeared again and he thought about skipping all events and heading back home. He finally changed his mind and we left half an hour later with a bunch of BSD people. Since we did not have any idea where the restaurant was supposed to be, a co-passenger drove with us. Well, it turned out that he did not have the slightest idea either, but was in posession of Wim’s mobile number. At first we were in line with other cars but soon we got separated. Did I mention that driving in Bruxelles is a pure nightmare? After much phoning, more separating and cruising for a parking lot, we found the restaurant. When we arrived there the room was already packed and Wim told us that too many people came and he basically kicked us out with the words “Go with Paolo”.

So, we went with Paolo and he suggested going to a restaurant to grab some food. He told us about his favorite chinese restaurant, that served delicious and cheap food.
(For future reference, it is called The New Mambou Fleur and is located on Rue Jules von Praet 13). The food was indeed great and not too expensive. Paolo was really forthcoming and outgoing and made up for Wim’s empty promise.

We were all tired, so we went back to the hostel, checked into our new room and went for good-bye drinks in the bar. They had given us a 4 people bedroom and when we returned there was a guy from Poland. He had to get up early (5am to be specific) to catch hist flight to the airport. I continued reading till 1am and went to sleep quite fast.