Concepts in the Paradox

(meta: hmm, I sure am posting a lot)

I’ve decided to do the Xen BoF again this year, after talking to William Pollock of No Starch Press about his plans for a book on Xen. I guess his author for the Xen book he had in production fell through, and now he is thinking of starting up a Wiki. Of course, a couple people recognized me from last year’s BoF, and wondered if there would be another. I really didn’t feel like doing the BoF thing again, it’s sorta stressful, but the gears started to turn, and I filled out a slot on the BoF schedule anyway. (9pm tonight, Washington 3).

Topics from brain storming:

1. Distro support: XenSource (RHEL3), Debian, RHEL, Fedora, Suse

2. Management tools
3. Features, what have people used? 64/32-bit, migration, LVM vs. loop back, imaging, fail over
4. Resources: mailing lists, blogs, wikis, forums
5. Hints & Tips in general
6. OS’s you’ve virtualized: Windows, Linux distros, OSX, BSD, etc.

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing, had some interesting points during this morning’s keynote at LISA this morning. His message was that we are once again starting to lose the battle that we were winning in the ’80s with our right to own what we purchase. Companies such as Sony, with their “root kit on a audio CD” and the FCC with the broadcast flag, or even Apple and their DRM-crippled iPod, are treating their customers, and ultimately owners of this equipment as criminals. Real criminals, at least by a small stretch of the imagination, that download material from sharing sites such as Kazaa, Bittorrent, or eMule, have far more control over their illegal downloads than legitimate customers.

Cory went on to make the point that even “click to agree” clauses, often known as End User Agreements, have become deceptive and almost impossible to get out of. Simply by having a laptop delivered to you, in the case of Lovato, is enough for you to “agree” to terms that are not only stated in a lengthy agreement, but any future terms they might want to define.

The keynote did carry a positive message, even on top of all of this denial of our freedom to simply own what we pay money for, saying that big companies are starting to wise up against this, and are joining customer advocates such as the EFF. AT&T, for example, is being sued by the EFF because of wire tapping ($150 per customer per day that was tapped), has joined in with other companies like Sony against anti-consumer companies such as the MPAA.

On a different note, overheard on the way out of the keynote:

“…oh, I was in the back of the room for power. I fell asleep while coding drunk, and ran down my battery last night.”

I met up with some LISA attendees I was talking with on IRC during what became a very boring and non-applicable talk on VMware ESX. It was almost a sales pitch in a way, which irritated me.

After the class, we went to a sushi place near Duponte Circle and ordered about $187 in sushi between the 4 of us. I must say, all of the sushi was very good, even though I had no idea what any of it was. My stomach was a little unhappy, but my tongue was overjoyed.

Being the pro-transit person I was, I asked how people got to the conference. The gal from San Jose of course flew, but one guy from Pittsburg took the train and another guy from North Carolina also took Amtrak, both first time train riders.  It would seem that they weren’t alone, at least two other people I talked to took Amtrak rides that were under 10 hours, $84 round trip.

Maybe Union Station was a big temptation, maybe parking and traffic were intimidating, or maybe people are just tired of dealing with the whole car and gas ordeal.   I will say that there is a change in the air.

Tomorrow are the technical sessions, where I get to learn random techie things in hour and a half spurts. Yay information!

Today’s LISA class involves VMware ESX server. It’s starting out slow like Sunday’s day-long class, but I’m hoping to walk away with more knowledge on good practices on deploying virtual machines. Some key things I’ve gained so far:

• SAN and LVM are the best way to seup partitions

• Configuring too many virtual CPUS causes contention if you don’t need that many VCPUs
• You can’t mix and match CPU types (Intel Vs. AMD)

Also, no power outlets in this room. I’m playing power vulture during the breaks. :\

I’m here in DC for LISA.

Yesterday’s class got better toward the end of the day, covering topics I was only weakly familiar with. LVS, OpenLDAP, PAM, and even OpenMP were covered. I even took notes!

Today’s morning session is THE LATEST HACKING TOOLS AND DEFENSES by David Rhoades, which has started out with a bang. I know none of his material, showing how far behind I am in computer security. For every question you ask, he throws a little monkey at you. As of the break, I am still monkey-less.

Also, VMware seems to be the hot testbed tool here.

This weekend is CodeCon, which features various programming projects and ideas from the employed and unemployed programmers in the Bay Area. Take a look at the program to see if there is anything interesting you’d like to see. I’ve found that CodeCon projects often bear fruit, or give a good indication of where software in the industry is heading.

For example, long before Flickr was hot for photo uploading, there were projects at Codecon showing how to hack Flickr long before Yahoo! stepped in as owner. SCM projects, P2P, and audio hackery are also projects one would expect to find there.

So grab $85, plus some money for food and booze, and everyone for a 3 day coding geekout — and of course all the enjoyment that San Francisco has to offer.

Also, there will be llama-tipping.