An audience of two

Monday October 02, 2006

Stinking Badges
I keep hearing complaints about the badges, and I have to agree with them. You can't read the damn things. I keep walking up to people whose face I recognise (or worse still, people I really ought to recognise), but the 10 point font is impossible to read. And that's assuming it's facing the right way; most people might as well be called LUNCH EVENT.

In past years the badges were paper and they had your NAME and COUNTRY in nice, big, clear letters. You could read them from half way across the room. The problem is that the company handling registration also handles registration at JavaOne. Now at JavaOne they use smart cards as badges. They're the same badges that Sun engineers carry every day, with a smart chip and an RFID tag. The badges are there to ensure that the people attending the sessions paid the admission fee, and to allow the people in the trade show booths to quickly download all your details. The name is immaterial; at the last JavaOne I was RAJEEV GUPTA and nobody noticed.

CEC isn't about that. Almost everyone here is a Sun employee. CEC is about networking, meeting people that you work with every day. Putting faces to names or more accurately email addresses. And clear, easy to read badges are a key part of that.

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BrandZ
Finally made it to a breakout session without getting interrupted. I got to see Nils Nieuwejaar presenting on BrandZ. It's a nice tool; I've been using it to test the Sun Update Connection Enterprise edition; the agent and SDS run fine, but there's a problem with the console which seems to be down to a bug in the implementation of the Linux clone system call.

It was a good presentation; a nice overview for the people who hadn't used it before balanced with a bit of detailed technical stuff which explains why some of the things work the way they do.

I wish there was a similar presentation on Xen; I plan to try installing that on my laptop one of these days.

I plan to continue playing with BrandZ for the time being since Nils gave us an incredibly useful tip; you can use it to run the Linux version of Acrobat Reader 7. Which as any fule kno, still is not available for Solaris.

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Troubleshooting
I was going to entitle this "Firefighting" but it seemed inappropriate, given that there's a building on fire a block away.

So far I haven't made it to any of the sessions or breakouts; I've been chasing around fixing problems.

• One team had brought a SunRay 150 with them and wanted to know how to configure it to connect it to their SunRay server. In Colorado.
• The SunLibrary team had brought a laptop and a 24 inch flatscreen. Unfortunately when they connected the two together the laptop freaked out and refused to boot any more. He took it to the Installfest to see if they could recover it; last I heard they were defragmenting the disk. 3 hours later it was at 34%.
• Some bright spark had set up their own DHCP server on the presenter's subnet which was serving bogus addresses to the Ultra 20s. It didn't help that the main server had run out of IP addresses.
• Trying to install the Java plug-in in Mozilla is harder than it needs to be.
• Half the speakers have brought their presentations in on USB dongles, so there was a constant procession of people waiting to transfer them onto the subnet. Tip for the day: Don't just pull out your USB drive from an Ultra 20 without unmounting it first.

Quote of the day: They call him "Passion Fingers" because he f~cks everything he touches

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Insomnia
It's 3AM and I can't get back to sleep. The 15TOG duvet isnt helping, but it's not the problem; something's bugging me. Then finally it hits me.

I missed the walkthrough. Was there one?

The walkthrough is something that we always did on the final day of setup. The core team would go round and check each room to make sure that the mikes worked, the computer was setup and can route OK, the graphics resolution matched the native resolution of the LCD projector (nothing says "lack of attention to detail" quite like small text on a high resolution slide being scaled down by a projector and displayed on a huge screen.)

Some years I'd be too busy to join the walkthrough myself so I'd ask Derek or Gabe to do it and just be called in to fix whatever problems arose. There were always problems, especially when we were in Denver; the static could be relied on to break something. One year we ran out of backup systems and had to send someone back to Broomfield to fetch more.

This year the systems are all brand new and near identical, and have been reistalled from a master disk image that I configured, so we should be good to go. Plus I know the team were checking each system as they went along.

But still it's bugging me.

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