Belgian chronicles

Hi over there !

The vast majority of all of you know that the FOSDEM 2020 had just ended this day. Not only it was full of interesting talks, but also an anniversary, the 20th !

There were indeed IoT related talks, databases, Linux ... talks for everyone and every profile ... sysadmins, devops and pure developers ... I spent time personally the saturday with Ada, the first language I ever learnt ... pretty much enjoyed the robotics topic, also the Ada keystore to protect sensitive data ... Was hard not to say more but I had to change building to give a chance to other interesting talks :-) The following day, most of the time was in the BSD room, looking at the various NetBSD and FreeBSD talks (apologies to Giovanni Becchis I missed his talk...). I have to admit, the NetBSD ones were entertaining notably this one, pretty accessible and giving new highlight to this BSD flavor and putting down some cliches in the process ... I gave mine just after the FreeBSD foundation presentation ; I admit I did less well than in AsiaBSDCon last year but hopefully will be usable enough for curious people.


Apart of this, lot of moons passed since the last post, as usual did little contributions here and there, most notably memcached, some general changes, some other specific to FreeBSD ... They re all available since the 1.5.21 (now the 1.5.22 just released today). radare2 and AFL++ received some fixes and improvements over the course of the time too. For the latter the 2.60 version is existing since a certain time now but the next 2.61 will have real significant changes (and fixes notably for unicorn, qemu modes and so on ...). Still, I do PR reviews for NodeJS, it is moving fast as always but the v8 changes alone and the related nodejs api ones are, alone, interesting enough to keep track for the courageous willing to build from source.

How are you ?

... Fine I hope since the last time :-)

As I write, there is the template for the last 2019 FreeBSD Quarterly status report. At the moment, the most noticeable part is this presentation, which would introduce all FreeBSD's benefits to people who want to give a thorough try, to get a good feel of the system ... Pretty good initiative !

In my side, I ve been involved in some of the usual projects I look into. memcached, redis, v8 and afl++ most of the time ; for V8 I have happily upstreamed the most important part of the nodejs FreeBSD port patches as promised in a previous post ... About AFL++, there will be, you can count on this, a lot of changes since the last release (radamsa mutator is a major one for instance and a much better Android support ... I invite you to have a look at the changelog to get a feel of...), most of them are general (build and bug fixes) and some other are operating systems ... again, with hexcoder, I ve been focusing on *BSD systems making sure everybody in a equal feet ... should be a matter of days before it happens as I write ... Apart of this, still involved in NodeJS code reviews, I also pushed my own change for DragonflyBSD ready for the next major release then ...
Next major open source event, will be the FOSDEM 2020 edition and it will be a first time personally as both attendee and speaker :-)
In the meantime, I wish you good winter holidays in advance if you have any :-)