openSUSE Conference 2009

I'm heading over to Nuremberg on Wednesday (16 Sep) for a few days to participate in openSUSE Conference! This is the first-ever openSUSE Conference, an opportunity for openSUSE contributors to do/attend talks, workshops, Birds of a Feather sessions, and collaborate together face to face. The conference will be held from September 17 - September 20 in Nuermberg, Germany.

The interactive event aims to bring the openSUSE contributor community together to share ideas, experience, learn, hack and help to guide the direction of the project. The different tracks include Desktop Development, System and Toolchain (openSUSE Build Service, YaST, Kernel, Packaging), Community, Quality and Appliances (Moblin, SUSE Studio). There will be a lot of Fun in the form of Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions, roundtable discussions, Unconferences and hackfests apart from scheduled talks.

I will be doing an Unconference session. The topic is "Roads Less Travelled - Making Technology Previews succeed".

Check out the full schedule here.

VIM tip of the day!

Ever wondered how to avoid VIM creating those annoying backup files like foo~ ?

Add the following to your vimrc:

" Don't backup files like foo~
set nobackup
set nowritebackup

LWN.net quotes me

LWN.net a leading online magazine which covers quite a bit of Linux Kernel development had quoted my name in the Security advisory on CIFS multiple vulnerabilities.

To quote LWN:

kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
Package(s): linux-2.6 CVE #(s): CVE-2009-1630 CVE-2009-1633 CVE-2009-1758
Created: June 2, 2009 Updated: August 20, 2009
Description: From the Debian advisory:

Frank Filz discovered that local users may be able to execute files without execute permission when accessed via an nfs4 mount. CVE-2009-1630

Jeff Layton and Suresh Jayaraman fixed several buffer overflows in the CIFS filesystem which allow remote servers to cause memory corruption. CVE-2009-1633

Jan Beulich discovered an issue in Xen where local guest users may cause a denial of service (oops). CVE-2009-1758

Forgot to stick the url: http://lwn.net/Articles/335751/
(Thanks Nikanth)

Wondering how did I miss this.. Pleasantly surprised.