Why are so many conferences filled with so much marketing dribble? I
planned on going to a lot more talks while at SCALE but only attended
one in its entirety. Some presenters started off their presentation
stating they would "market" their product for the first five minutes,
but then continued throughout the rest of their presentation going into
all the features it delivers. Are conference organizers really this
desperate during the CFP they allow companies to market their products?
I thought vendor expos were for this (they did have one), and the
conferences talks were more vendor-neutral. The presentations I sat in
for about 15 minutes were basically product demos. I'm dissapointed in
the quality of talks at SCALE. Fortunately we were in L.A. and took the
afternoons to go out to Hollywood and Santa Monica to have some fun. I
definitely want to go back soon and have a trip. It's a nice change from
Arizona and the East coast, cool atmosphere and culture, especially for
me who's in their 20's... :)
Posted by Marcin on Monday, February 12, 2007 in
Other and
Tech.
While in L.A. at SCALE, I attended "Admin++, What root Never Told You,"
by Ron Gorodetzky, sysadmin for Digg.com and Revision3. His presentation
gave some insight and tidbits on the things you forget when you have
your own startup, and the other problems you enounter. Things like
scaling, availability, power, managed server, co-location, datacenter
etc.. He made a point to monitor your monitoring station -- because you
don't get pages, doesn't mean everything is just dandy. Ron also pointed
everyone to the document on upgrading LiveJournal's
backend, to get a
picture of what it's like to design a scalable architecture. I read this
document a while back when I was first learning computer networking and
security, and it blew my mind away. I never fathomed the amount of work
that goes into these sites. I wonder how Building Scalable Web
Sites is when it comes to
desiging large web sites.
Posted by Marcin on Monday, February 12, 2007 in
Linux and
Tech.
I'm heading out to Los Angelos for the 5th Annual Southern California
Linux Expo. I'll try and post
inbetween sessions (that is... whenever I can). I'll be attending these
talks:
- Leveraging the IT Community (This talk is focused on a building a
new broad resource for sysadmins by sysadmins. Starting with the
concepts that made the site Wikipedia a great success and tools like
grep so universal, this talk will discuss the challenges of building
a large IT community / knowledge base and how to bring IT
troubleshooting to the next level.)
- Admin++, what root never told you (In this talk will go over some
of the lessons he learned from helping to simultaneously build two
startups facing different technological challenges: "Digg" and
"Revision3")
- How to monitor your infrastructure with Open Source software
(Systems Management is one of the most expensive and time consuming
parts of an IT guy's job. Open source software is making it easier to
deploy and integrate systems management as well as making it cheaper
to manage your infrastructure. Erik Dahl, the leader of the open
source Zenoss project will share his experience developing monitoring
solutions...)
- Web Applications: What is your backup/recovery plan? (One of the
overlooked mission critical task is the backup and recovery of the
critical data maintained by these applications. This session will
examine backup and recovery requirements for Web applications,
various open source tools that can be used to achieve them and best
practices.)
- New & Improved: How a More Modern IT Security Model Can Better
Protect Enterprise Data on Linux Systems (...discuss the inherent
limitations of existing enterprise security approaches and will
outline the key elements of an end-to-end IT infrastructure,
highlighting the tremendous security benefits this approach offers
enterprises of all types using Linux systems.)
I'll post pictures as well from the weekend...
Posted by Marcin on Friday, February 9, 2007 in
Linux,
Security and
Tech.
McAfee now has thier own wicked custom Mini
Cooper! Wow! Special,
huh? Black with an ugly white/red sticker on the hood and doors. It
looks wild and fast just sitting still like that!
Come on McAfee, you can do better than that. Where's the paint job? or
at least a custom license plate? Hahaha.
Posted by Marcin on Wednesday, February 7, 2007 in
Other.
Pretty funny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4FF_aT_mE8
Posted by Marcin on Tuesday, February 6, 2007 in
Security and
Tech.
