An audience of two

Thursday October 11, 2007

Home from Vegas
Finally home from Vegas after a busy week. US Airways Flight 160 was delayed by almost an hour so i caught up on email and listened to some podcasts. If you didn't check out the CEC Podcasts you should.

Had dinner at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba last night with a bunch of Europeans, including Dave Levy, Mike Ramchand, Eric Bezille, Mathias Pfützner and Chris Gerhard. Chris had some interesting comments on CEC so I thought I'd address a few of them.

Use Sun Ray 2s with the vpn firmware installed so that they can be punched into Sun.
Couldn't agree more. I hadn't heard about this until a few days ago; when I did I contacted the group that were supplying the hardware. This group supplies all of Sun's trade shows and has a huge warehouse full of kit in Milpitas. It turned out that CEC clashed with a storage conference in Denver, and their limited number of SunRay 2s were already committed to that event. Also we had requested 150 SunRays and I don't believe they have 150 SunRay 2s. Hopefully next year there won't be a clash and by then maybe they'll have more SunRay 2s anyway.

I have to say, setting up the SunRays was really easy this year. The SunRay team have done a great job making utadm so much simpler and reliable than before. It did fail on two of the servers - the SunRays got the firmware update but then did not restart properly, but utadm -d followed by utadm -a cleaned it up nicely.

Put the Sun Rays into a FOG so that if a Sun Ray server goes down the individual Sun Rays are still usable.
This sounds like a good idea. I wish I'd had more time to work with the SunRays beforehand; unfortunately I didn't get out of hospital until a couple of days before the servers had to be shipped, so everything was kind of rushed. Hopefully next year I'll have more time and can talk to some SunRay experts to find out the best way to configure them.

Have some Sun Rays in Paris near the main conference room.
It's an interesting idea, and while I agree in principle I'm not sure how it would work. At conventions like JavaOne they line the corridors with them, but that's not really practical in a hotel, and certainly not one like Paris/Bally's. They have to be in a room that can be properly secured; as I mentioned in an earlier post several bits of equipment did go missing despite our best efforts at security. So while I agree with you, I wouldn't hold your breath.

It would be good if the content builder did not give times for the presentations. Simply allows users to choose the top 20 presentations that they wish to attend numbering them 1 to 20. Then get the computer to work out the room allocations such that we get the best allocation of slots.
Interesting idea. You're never going to please everyone (believe it or not I actually worked on a program like this on a Commodore PET over 25 years ago. It was to handle school class timetabling issues and won me the School Prize for Applied Computing - a 5 quid book token that I spent on a copy of The Vic Revealed).

I have to say, I always find the Schedule Builder program a pain in the arse to use. It wasn't quite so bad this year because no sessions were repeated, but still.

More deep technical presentations for those of us who are that way inclined.
You need to take that up with the selection committee. However the big problem is that you're always limited to the set of papers that are proposed.

Have the party somewhere that can easily cope with the numbers rather than somewhere that can't.
Amen.

The other thing that we really need to think about next year is the issue of power in the breakout rooms and general session rooms.

If you have any other thoughts feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to get them to the right people.

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Tags: suncec2007