Found this site while surfing the net.

It is in Japanese, but it is mostly image based. At the site, you will find pictures of hundreds of different blank audio cassettes from throughout the ages. It is kinda cool to see all of those old tapes that I used to make mixtapes on. Good times.

Click here to see the fullsize image

I’m working on an install for an IBM eSeries blade server right now. Here is about 3/4 of the manuals included for the hardware. I especially like the 162 page “Safety Information” book, in which we are warned against standing on top of the blade enclosure in 27 different languages.

Luckily (for me), IBM seems to have pretty good technical writers, so most of what is contained in this mountain of documentation is fairly readable.

See the photo gallery for this post

Today was the third and final day of LinuxWorld. There were no keynotes or anything, so today was spent on the expo floor. I started the day by realizing that somewhere or another, I had lost my conference badge. Luckily, the registration staff got me squared away.

Speaking of which – the badges all had a magnetic strip which contained your registration information. Pretty much everyone who was giving stuff away would only give you stuff if they could swipe your badge first, presumably to get your email address to add to their list. Well, I beat the system. My 12 character last name, coupled with the fact that I used the long, formal name of my company, coupled with the fact that I included my extension with my phone number, made my mag strip info over 64 characters. However, for some reason, the software that most of the booths were using only grabbed the first 64 characters – so the email address they got from me was david@g - ha! Of course, I gave my full contact info to the vendors that I actually was interested in. But when I just wanted the dang pen, and did not want to get an eNewsletter about fibre channel cards or whatever – I beat the system!

I always enjoy observing the expo floors at tradeshows. It is very interesting to see which companies get how to do it right, and which have no idea. As I mentioned in my previous post, there were a couple companies that had their booths staffed almost entirely by spokesmodels. Now, it is one thing to have spokesmodels be greeters, directing interested parties to the Sales Engineers or Marketers. It is another thing entirely to have your spokesmodels taking the place of your Sales Engineers. When the people in your booth cannot even tell me what operating systems your software can run on, something is terribly wrong.

Another fun trend in tradeshows are the people who really, really do not want to be there. You know what I am talking about – you walk up to the booth to ask a question, to find everyone in the booth engaged in a riveting conversation about what so-and-so back at the office said. You ask a question, and they toss a piece of marketing collateral at you, and go back to their conversation. That really makes me want to spend a bunch of money on your product. Yes, APC, I am talking about you.

Now, on the opposite side of the spectrum, there are some vendors that have the right idea. Of course, most of the big players know what they are doing. But some of the little guys were fantastic as well. I was very impressed with Kerio – one of the Sales Engineers recognized from my badge that we were a customer, and sent me off with an extra pen to take back to our Network Admin. They were friendly, engaging, and genuinely interested in my feedback on their product. Great job, John and Peter!

Another standout booth was the Linux Professional Institute. Now, LPI did not have a big, elaborate booth with video screens and mechanical bulls and video games. They did not even give out any shirts, pens, backpacks, bookmarks, or ear hair trimmers. It was just a small table, with a couple of flyers, and a plain, understated sign. But James Stanger, who was staffing the table, was friendly, informative, and genuinely interested in how LPI could help my organization. Proof that substance often wins out over style.

Of course, there were several booths that went with style, and did that well. UniSys had videogame car races going. Sun had an Unreal Tournament playoff. There was a mechanical bull. IBM, Novell, EMC, and Red Hat had really cool, informative speakers. I especially enjoyed a talk from Sean Cotter, who heads up Directory and Security products over at Red Hat. It was not a sales pitch, it was an informative, interesting talk on what is going on in the security world.

After the expo, I went down to Ponzu, and had some Asian-Fusion cooking. Cool place, definitely recommend it if you ever find yourself in the area.

I am tired, and need to drive almost 400 miles tomorrow, so I will not be adding all of the hyperlinks like usual to this post. Maybe I will update it when I get back.

See the photo gallery for this post

Wow. What an amazing day. For those of you who checked out yesterday’s photo gallery, you remember that I commented on the giveaways and freebies being a little weak this year. Today more than made up for it. Long story short, I made out like a bandit today. If you are just skimming this posting, and are not really interested in all of the technical nonsense, I have highlighted the sections related to me scoring free loot.

The day started with a keynote from Mark Webbink, General Council for Red Hat. Mark spoke about innovation and patents. Innovation occurs because a problem needs to be solved, or an itch needs to be scratched. Patents do not cause innovation. Mark closed with the following two challenges to Microsoft: First, promise to not sue independent developers. Second, stop approaching end-users about patent issues.

Rant mode on.

It was very, very amusing to hear someone lambasting Microsoft for holding a huge portfolio of patents while speaking at a conference sponsored by the company that started the whole “lets stockpile a ton of patents” craze. Sure, they changed their strategy once it became profitable to jump on the open source bandwagon, but they still started this trend. And I am about as big an IBM fan as they come.

Rant mode off.

Next up, the very informative “State of Samba Address”, by Jerry Carter. Jerry addressed the structure of the Samba project. He also gave an estimated schedule for version 3.0.20 (next couple weeks), and version 4.0 (preview release in about 90 days.)

Jerry also previewed many of the new, cool features that are in 3.0.20, as well as features in 4.0. These are too numerous to detail here, so just check out the Samba site for more info. Suffice to say, Jerry is a very interesting speaker who was able to get through quite a bit of highly technical information in a quick and understandable way. Great job!

Next, a keynote from Mike Shaver, one of the founders of the Mozilla project. Great stuff here. Mike talked about innovation in the world of the web. The three groups involved are users, authors, and developers. As each group becomes comfortable with technology, a portion of them moves on to the next group. The whole cycle becomes circular, as developers are users of the development tools.

On the subject of development tools, Mike spoke at length about why the next generation of web innovation will be portable – not tied to any toolkit or platform. This is caused by the phenomenal growth in “remix development” – that is, taking pieces of existing web services APIs, and mixing and modifying the pieces to fit your needs. Mike cited the merging of the Chicago Crime Database with Maps.google.com into an integrated website as an example of this new type of development.

The one thing that really struck me in this keynote is how similar the new phase of web innovation is to the original innovation that occurred on the web a decade ago. The line between user, author, and developer has been blurred. The most important tools in a developer’s toolkit are becoming “View Source” and Copy & Paste. When I get some time, I think I will write an article on the similarities between these two time frames.

Next, an amazingly informative talk from Bill Hilf. You might remember Bill from the recent Slashdot.org article about him. Bill is a longtime open source guru who was recruited to head up Microsoft’s Linux Lab. Now, I know what you are thinking. Bill covered these exact questions at the onset: his job is not to destroy Linux. His job is twofold – first, to ensure interoperability between Microsoft products and Linux, and second, to provide feedback and insight to the Microsoft development teams as to what is happening in open source, including what open source is doing better than Microsoft.

In addition to Bill’s domain expertise, his team is also filled with expert in the field of open source – for example, Daniel Robbins, creator of Gentoo Linux.

Bill gave an overview of the lab environment that he oversees. It was amazing. Over 300 server and client systems running just about every blend of Linux and BSD that you could name, plus about a dozen more. He showed exactly how they manage such a large, mixed environment, using tools such as Microsoft SMS, Centrix DirectControl, and other custom applications.

Next, Bill gave a preview of Monad. It looks really, really cool. To give you an idea of how cool it looked, in a room filled with die-hard Linux geeks, the question was asked, “So, are you guys planning to port this shell to Linux?”

Bill showed a really cool example of what Monad can do. From the command line, with relative ease, Bill wrote a script that took the output from the “pid” command, passed it to the office graphing object, and exported the result in html. The end result? Almost instantaneously, an HTML pie chart popped up that showed the different processes running, and how much resources they were taking up. From just one line of code. Amazing.

Bill concluded by saying that he didn’t want to sit around and talk about all of this stuff without letting us give it a try. First, he gave everyone a free 180-day trial copy of Windows Server 2003. That was kinda cool, but you can get that from Microsoft’s website anyway.

Next, he gave everyone a free copy of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. A full, working, nonlimited copy. Whoa. Cool.

Finally, he had us reach under our seats. Under 100 seats, there was a paper that was redeemable for a free copy of Halo 2 for the Xbox. There was one under my seat.

(Running free stuff total: MS Server 2003, MS Virtual Server 2005, Halo 2)

During a Q&A session that followed, Bill mocked the incorrect press reports about the Monad virus. Just like I have been telling anyone who will listen, Bill clarified that all this “virus” was is a shell script that screws stuff up if run as root. Just like a similar script would do to Linux, Mac OSX, OS/400, and just about any other operating system in the world if you made a script that said “rm –rf”, and ran it as root.

Steve Mills, a Senior VP at IBM, put on the next keynote. This session was about Linux on the desktop. Since this is not any issue that is of much concern to me, I ditched the keynote, and spent the time on the expo floor without the crowds.

I stopped by the Rackspace booth to say hi. Our company has been hosted there for a while, and we love the service.

A note to the reader: this website (Davemitz.com) is hosted on DreamHost. I also like them a lot. Rackspace provides my big enterprise grade dedicated hosting solution, and Dreamhost does my personal website. And each excels at what they do.

Anyway, when I stopped by the Rackspace booth, they were all thrilled to hear from a customer. I received an invitation to a roundtable reception being put on by Rackspace and Wired, for Rackspace customers, at the trendy W Hotel located nearby.

I went back to the hotel to check email and jump in the shower. Then, I left for the reception.

The roundtable discussion was hosted by Geoffrey James, who writes for Wired (amongst others). I have always enjoyed his work, so I was pretty excited about that. The panel consisted of Seth Brady from EMI Music, Ken Burbary from Campbell Ewald, Marcus Chung from Sygate, Ryan Gavin from Microsoft, John Judge from Novell, Anthony Risicato from 360i, and the CTO of Rackspace, John Engates.

The discussion was centered around Linux, Windows, and leveraging the right platform for your business. It was a very interesting discussion, with good insight from the vendors, the customers on the panel, and the customers in the audience.

It was especially interesting to hear that there was a general consensus that, while religious wars about OS’s are fun, there was no one answer to what you should use. Factors like what your staff already knows, what you are planning on doing, and how you plan on doing all influence which platform to use. There was also consensus that neither operating system is inherently better or worse than the other, it just depends on what you need and what you know. Even the reps from Microsoft and Novell (who owns SUSE) were in agreement on this point.

All attendants at this reception received a cool Rackspace messenger bag, and a mini-maglite, along with a copy of Wired.

(Running free stuff total: MS Server 2003, MS Virtual Server 2005, Halo 2, Rackspace Messenger bag, Maglite)

Finally, they had a raffle. And I was one of the winners, receiving a fully boxed version of Windows XP. Amazing.

(Final Score: MS Server 2003, MS Virtual Server 2005, Halo 2, Rackspace Messenger bag, Maglite, Windows XP Professional)

So I went to a Linux conference, and ended up with like two grand worth of Microsoft products. Weird.

I also have a chance to meet Tom Weeks, system administration genius from Rackspace. We chatted for a while about OS Commerce, Myth TV, 802.11g, and some other geeky stuff. It is pretty cool to finally put a face to a name that I see in the Rackspace support forums all of the time.

Now I am back at the hotel, putting out a couple of fires that happened back at the office. No rest for the wicked.

I’ll blog at y’all tomorrow.

See the photo gallery for this post

First, and foremost, a bit of advice to any travelers in San Francisco. If you plan on walking from your hotel to the convention center, it is probably a good idea to follow the route that the concierge mapped out for you. I attempted to find an “optimized” route, and, well, got a nice walking tour of one of the more interesting sections of the city.

But enough about that.

The day started with a keynote address from Charles Phillips, President of Oracle. Oracle has made Linux a key component of their future strategy. They are seeing the end of Moore’s Law, and are betting on grid computing to spur future growth. Oracle has seen 32% growth in the number of Linux servers shipped, and controls 82% of the Linux database server market (IBM has 17%). Charles repeatedly emphasized that there is immense value in predictable systems – specifically, Linux on x86. Oracle sees itself as a provider of all pieces along the integrated architecture.

From there, I went to a seminar on integrating Linux into the enterprise environment. The seminar was led by Leif Davidsen, who is a marketing manager at IBM. Leif presented the following quote from the Gartner Group:

“About 35% of an enterprises software budget is spent on maintaining the multitude of point-to-point application links already in place.”

This seminar focused on how IBM WebSphere products, running on Linux, could solve this problem by creating an enterprise service bus. An interesting point that came up is that the Web Services-only world does not exist yet, which makes web services just another data format that needs to be integrated. Very true, yet almost never mentioned in all of the fanfare surrounding the web services buzz.

Next up, a keynote from Martin Fink – VP of Open Source at HP. Martin began his keynote by detailing the evolution of enterprise IT. In the 1980’s, the goal was stability and reliability. In the 1990’s, the goal was speed and flexibility. But today, the goal is agility and cost. In today’s world, “science fair projects” do not exist anymore. IT must now align with the business goals of the rest of the organization.

In a lighter section, Martin praised Intel for changing some of their licensing to GPL. He challenged IBM to follow suite, and promised to give HP laptops to Sam at IBM if he did so. Very amusing (IBM doesn’t make laptops anymore.) He issued a similar challenge to Sun.

Martin also gave a brief interview of another division that he is in charge of – HP Nonstop. HP Nonstop is just the tandem program renamed, and is based on continuous availability. The thing that is interesting is HP’s commitment to spur open source development around the project. They will be donating a collection of HP Nonstop servers to key universities, as well as sharing intellectual property. All of the resulting work will be GPL’ed. The goal is to provide support for Nonstop servers into the kernel.

Martin closed by raffling off some HP iPods. Again, very amusing, as HP has discontinued selling iPods, and as such, needs to get rid of their inventory.

After that, I went to a class on integrating Open Directory and Active Directory, facilitated by Jeremy Allison from HP (also the co-creator of Samba). I have to say – this seems to be one of the areas where there is some serious opportunity. Open Directory does not integrate seamlessly with AD, and it needs to.

Next, a very interesting panel discussion from OSDL. It was led by Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL. Stuart opened by talking a bit about licensing, and stating that the three biggest issues facing Linux are compatibility, license proliferation, and intellectual property laws.

Up next on the panel was David Patrick from Novell. Novell is betting the company on Linux. David stated that the decision was made last year to move all products to the Linux platform because Microsoft could no longer be considered a trusted competitor. Ouch. He also made a couple of cracks about how Vista already has a virus (which is not exactly accurate, but I won’t get into that right now)

David also mentioned that venture capital funding is being put into Linux projects. In the past 12 months, over thirty open-source based companies received substantial VC funding Just writing that last sentence just took me back to the pre-dotbomb days. I need a minute.

Ok, I’m back. Up next on the panel was Tom Rabon from Red Hat. Tom spoke about Linux adoption in government. I will be honest – I was actually reading through my program guide during his section. Tom is a good speaker, but the subject matter really did not interest me.

Next, Chris DiBona. Chris is from Google, and formerly from Slashdot. I enjoyed Chris’ section quite a bit, because it was very raw. All of the other panelists were heaping on the marketing speak, whereas Chris just said what he felt.

Chris took us through the history of Google’s data center, which was pretty incredible. Google uses Linux because they can make it do what they want, and equally important, make it not do what they don’t want. In a data center as enormous as Google’s, that is a key factor.

Next up, Eben Moglen, professor of law at Columbia, and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center. Eben gave a fantastic speech on the open source legal landscape. His most resonating quote was, “SCO is dead, and the GPL is still standing.” He also spoke about how to prevent another SCO incident from happening.

Finally, Stuart came back up to announce the launch of the OSDL Patent Commons Project. The Patent Commons Project will serve as a central repository for patents that have been pledged to open source. An exciting idea that is long overdue.

From there, I spent some time in the exhibit hall. Good presence from the major players, including IBM, Oracle, Intel, AMD, and the rest of the usual suspects. There is a neat section set up called the rookery, which is where all of the new Linux companies were located. Of course, like all tradeshows, several vendors stocked their booth with spokesmodels, which is a rather irritating trend. At a technical conference, everyone in your booth should at least be able to describe what it is that your product does. Decent freebie giveaways (I got a few shirts and a hat). It appears that the iPod shuffle is this year’s hot raffle giveaway, with several normal iPods on the block as well. There are also a few Sony PSPs being raffled off, and a few digital cameras.

The evening’s final event was the annual Golden Penguin Trivia Contest. This year, it was the team from Google against the team from Microsoft. The Microsofties were excellent sports – they even came in costume (one Darth Vader, two Storm Troopers.) They took a lot of good natured ribbing, and even got in some great jabs of their own. One of the questions was about how many of the top ten supercomputers ran Linux or Unix. The answer was 10 out of 10. The Microsoft response? “You can have those ten, we’re more concerned about the millions of other computers on the desktop.” Ouch.

The Google guys ended up winning, and everyone had a great time.

I had some incredible Sicilian-style pizza from Village Pizzeria, and am now back at the hotel room catching up on what is going on back at the office.

More tomorrow.