Into.the.Void.

Yesterday I had the first spam attack on my blog. Some bots posted about 30 spam messages as comments to various posts of mine. It was something I never expected cause my blog neither famous nor has any “famous keywords”. Anyway, from now on I have explicitly set an option to moderate all posted comments, that doesn’t mean however that I won’t allow any posts that don’t agree with my ideas but I will not tolerate spam on any comments.

So you are free to flame me…with my permission 🙂

cheers

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During the past weekend I went down to Athens, Greece to attend the vnoc (virtual noc) teams of GrNET meeting and a meeting about ipv6. GrNET is the ISP/company that interconnects all greek universities and big research centres in Greece. It is the place where true broadband links (up to 2.5Gbps) in Greece take place and one of the very few “places” in Greece where you have the chance to work with real hi-tech equipment as well as to meet people with advanced knowledge of networking.

The convention-meeting-conference-(give-your-own-name-here) was fun and tiring at the same time. The speeches started at 9:00 in the morning and finished at 19:00 in the afternoon. In order for me to get where the speeches took place I needed about 1 hour from the place where I lived during these days. So it was kinda tiring to have to travel for so long and then listen to various speeches for about 10 hours (including some breaks of course).

The most interesting day was day1. All the speeches were about the backbone of the network and about new services (like QOS, VoIP, MPLS, VoD, and many many others) that were already implemented or being designed. It was a great experience to find out about new technologies that will help this network grow bigger and more efficient.
The second day about ipv6 was kinda troubled. It had originally be designed for concurrent sessions-speeches, introductory and more advanced ones, but the place where the speeches would originally take place were taken over by some students protesting about how people are kept inside jails in Greece, so the speeches had to move to another building that had only 1 auditorium. So some speeches were skipped and introductory and advanced ones were mixed to one session. The most interesting speeches were about ipv6 mobile ip and about an ipv6 ip security draft (Network Address Protection) presented by a cisco engineer.

I will post the link to the place where the presentations will be uploaded when I get informed about it(possibly in the next couple of days). Some of those should be read by anyone wanting to implement some serious services to his network whether in Greece or not…

Filed by kargig at 21:40 under General
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Most of you probably won’t know what infosystem is. Quotting their site:

The 18th I.T., Telecommunication and Digital Technology Exhibition, INFOSYSTEM 2004, is about to take place once again, at the International Exhibition & Congress Center of HELEXPO, in Thessaloniki, Greece.

I visit this exhibition every year for more than 10 years now and I can assure you that it’s getting worse every year. A major reason for that is that there’s now a Comdex exhibition in Athens, Greece while 5 years ago there was no other IT exhibition (in Greece). So, most companies prefer to “show” their products on comdex than infosystem due to the more visitors going there…

So what was this years’ Infosystem about ? Hmmm…to be sincere…nothing…nothing new was presented. The “new” word on this year’s exhibition was “ERP”…while last year it was “SOHO”. Every year new words are presented to the IT market…but very few customers can understand and use them. But the greek companies still persist on these stupid marketing techniques. Well presenting the same software with different “name” every time doesn’t help the market nor the companies.

What was I doing there ? Meeting friends mostly from Hellug and TWMN mostly. Not as many friends as I expected came…but it was fun meeting the ones who came. I helped a bit at the hellug pavilion by explaining to ppl what Linux is, how to install it, how to overcome problems, etc. I was surprised by the number of ppl that had already some experience with linux, through live cds, installations, presentations, etc. It was the first time I ever saw that many people getting interested on Linux. Hellug and TWMN was co-hosted under the same pavilion and I can say that we surely had the most visits than any other pavilion, even from companies like Microsoft. The highlight was when a couple at around 30-35 years old came to the pavillion. The male asked me some questions about linux..I gave him some cds (Knoppel and Suse 9.1 Personal Edition) and then his wife said:

“Let’s go…these are freaks” and he answered
“They are not freaks honey…they are users”

That trully made me think…what are we ? Why do we want to promote Linux ? And why some people see us as freaks ? what’s so strange about us ? Why is it “bad” to have the will to get the max out of your pc ?

Anyway…another bad exhibition is over but a new “force” is rising again. The greeks are again forming communities and that had many many years to happen (maybe since Fido-net).

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