April's meeting consisted of a slightly larger than normal crowd. Having a guest speaker must have had something to do with that.

The meeting opened with Todd Carson talking about his experience finding and submitting a bug which turned into an OpenBSD Errata entry.

Following Todd's talk, Theo Schlossnagle, CEO of OmniTI Computer Consulting, gave live demonstrations of both ZFS and DTrace. Theo showed some of the many features of ZFS while demonstrating some of them on live Solaris systems and his Apple laptop, including snapshotting. Then, he showed and described how to use DTrace to see what a process is doing. Without concrete problems to solve, it's difficult to show DTrace in all of its glory, but Theo managed to give a great demonstration. To paraphrase: the hard part is coming up with good questions to ask DTrace.

Then, as an aside, Theo showed us how valgrind (on Linux) can point you to exactly where the bugs in your code are.

Thanks to both Todd and Theo for taking the time to talk to us. See you next month.