various stuff Marty's Weblog

My boss has asked those of us who attended this past CEC how they think it compares to Immersion Week.  Immersion Week(IW), for that non-Sun reader out there, is a week of training where all of the pre-sales SE's from the US get together and attend session on various topics, usually presented by their “rock star” peers.  CEC on the other hand is attended by all types of techies from across all of Sun, globally. This includes Pre-sales, Professional Services, Engineering, etc...

Session-wise, I'd have to say that the two events are very similar.  The one exception being that CEC is attended by folks from product engineering.  Many of the sessions have these folks as presenters.  This allows the session to become a deeper dive if the attendees take it in that direction.  One of the presenters from the most recent CEC mentioned that they were asked to keep the content at a high level.  My guess is that the organizers requested this because many people use these events to get some cross training.  I have nothing against that, and I applaud the individuals efforts to expand their “toolkit”, but I think what we've ended up with is a scenario similar to returning to school only to find that only freshman level courses are offered.

So session-wise, I'd have to say that CEC beats out IW, just because of the engineering presence.

Networking is a HUGE benefit of these types of events.  With the broader audience attending CEC, I usually ended up eating breakfast with folks from other countries(like Jersey!).  The IW attendees are a more targeted group.  It is much easier to find software folks to “swap war stories” with at IW, and being on the Sun Federal side of the house, those contacts can potentially be used in my day to day job.  It was interesting to meet some Sun folks from far away lands but due to the nature of the federal space, those contacts aren't terribly beneficial.

So, networking-wise, I would personally have to say IW win's out.  I realize for the non-SunFed parts of Sun, it would probably be CEC though.

As for location,  CEC tends to be held in fancier places.  I've been twice, once to San Francisco, and this last time to Las Vegas.  For the past few years, IW has been held at the Qcenter, which is out in the boonies West of Chicago.  Its a nice facility for this type of event.  There are no distractions, so there is nothing to do but learn.  An added benefit here is the individual rooms and the fact that you don't have a roommate.  When attending CEC, you have to have a room mate(or you can pay for half the room), and the locations tend to offer many distractions.

So location-wise, I think the facility where IW has been held is a nicer place for events like these.  That said, this past CEC had 4000 attendees, which I don't think the Qcenter could facilitate.  So the location battle, I would have to call a draw.

In the general session on Wednesday morning the first speaker asked "Did you all have fun at the party last night?" and I guess he didn't hear the low rumble of "NO" that I heard from the audience, because he followed that up with, "Good!".  Sorta funny...

Anyway, on to the panel discussion. There were four partners/customers on stage with a Sun executive for a discussion about “the end of the world as we know it”. They were talking about the end of programmers, the end of computers, etc.  They were attributing the demise of all things "IT" to all of the Web 2.0 types of things available on the Internet today. I think I know where they were trying to go, but I don't think they ever got there.

I find the idea that we won't have anymore programmers "as we know them" because people can now make mashups, a bit absurd. Without the traditional programmers out there innovating and building new development tools, there is only so far the mashers and myspacers would be able to go.  Additionally, I found it a bit odd that they would assemble 4000 people whose livelihood is Software and Hardware and talk about how it's all going away. Like I said, I THINK I know where they were trying to go...  That is: What we think of as a developer is changing. It's not just the computer science grad anymore, it's the 12 year old kid participating in social networking, and making mashups (Apologies for the repeated buzzwords: mashup, web 2.0)  So their talk in a nutshell could probably be summed up by saying "if a trash man can be called a sanitation engineer, a web 2.0 user can be called a web developer"  (which I personally don't agree with.)

The General Session of day two included a keynote from Jonathan Schwartz. It's always good to hear him speak. The bottom line of his talk was that it takes courage to be a leader.

Prometric testing was offered during CEC free of charge. Since I had never taken any of the Solaris tests, I figured I'd give it a shot. I've been playing with Solaris for 27 years now so I figured it'd be cake. The trouble is, there are all of these obscure commands that I've never seen anyone use that made up a good chunk of the test questions. I guess all of my scripting hurt me here.

So on to the sessions... I missed a developer tools demo so I could take the test. The first session I went to was titled something like JES with Integrated Biometrics. I'm sure the presenter was very knowledgeable, but due to a heavy accent, I only got about every fifth word. Since I wasn't getting anything there, I went to the session I had originally signed up for, "Sun Connection 2.0", which was full so they wouldn't let me in. Not starting the day off very well Marty...

So I wandered around the booths and ended up talking to the folks at the CE2.0 booth. CE2.0 is slated to replace onestop (internal Sun documentation site) adding more web 2.0 bells and whistles(social networking, wikis, etc..). In the days of AES, we had started a small group to look at trying to consolidate some of our documentation sites, so I found this to be interesting.  On a tangent topic, I asked if they had considered adding Web Applications like the google spreadsheets. They are looking for open source versions to experiment with, but no fixed plans.

After Lunch I sat in on a talk on the new Communications Suite Web 2.0 Client. They have done a very nice job with this interface. I can't wait for it to roll out to the Sun Network. The UI looks pretty much like the Thunderbird interface.

Then came the OpenPortal/PS7.2 session. Great work Portal team! The graphics page designer looks fantastic!

That night was the CEC party at the Palms hotel. I appreciate the effort from the organizers, but bringing 4000 people together to such a tight area ended up being a disaster. Many people went hungry because the food was so hard to get. I actually saw a food runner come out with a tray full of small Chinese food containers get jumped by about 30 people reaching for the 20 boxes of food.

The high rollers corner of the room...

 

L to R: Jim H., Dave P., Marty K.

In other news we saw the launch this morning for the new T2 chip.  Hot product with great stats behind it.  check it out..

The highlight of the Monday sessions (for me) would have to be either the "Directory Server 6 - Tips, Tricks and Secrets" or the OpenPTK session.  The DS6 session talked about some add-on utilities to help you get stats from your LDAP server so you know what to tune.  The db_stat utility from the original sleepycat bits was one of the tools they used.  It's not shipped with the DSEE and not supported by Sun.  In fact, If the db_stat version is not the exact version that the underlying sleepycat db is, you can corrupt your data.  So it's not a tool to play with unless you really know what you are doing...  In fact, forget everything I just told you...

OpenPTK is the Open Provisioning Toolkit.  It's a kit that was assembled by some rockstars from the field(Sigle,Fehrman,Harcey).  Terry Sigle drove the effort of getting it officially released as an open source project.  As of (about) 5:35pm PST, OpenPTK is now officially released.  In a nutshell, OpenPTK allows you to do remote provisioning operations, utilizing SPML, without having to know SPML.  There are command line interfaces, so provisioning events can be scripted, and there is a webservices interface for "SOAfied" environments to make provisioning calls.

 (Pics, from today either didn't come out well, or were just plain boring...  Will try to take some good ones today)

We made it to "Grand Canyon West" on Sunday.  It was a 2.5 hr drive from Vegas to GCW, and well worth the trip...  The last 21 miles of the road were "primitive" highway, gravel with potholes and "rumble strips" the whole way.  (Fortunately, we were in a rental)  Doing the Skywalk is a bit expensive.  We opted for the cheapest package ($81/ea) but the views and the sensation of walking in the air were absolutely amazing.  It is a must do.  No cameras were allowed on the walk, so this is the only picture I could get for the blog.

 

The Hualapi tribe members are great people.  We probably stood on the walk for 45 minutes talking about the canyon and the construction of the walk.  During a discussion about why no personal items are allowed on the walk with the guy manning the "pay for a photo" station he said, "It a LONG way down, and there is nothing soft down there"  It's just over 4000ft from the floor of the Canyon.

 

So next entry should contain some geek speak from CEC...  

 

So my CEC roommate and I decided to come out a day early and do some site seeing.  The plan was to get the rental car and make a mad dash for the Western rim of the Grand Canyon to do the Skywalk.  The timing didn't work out for us today, so we just went to see Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam. 

So our plan (since there is nothing on the schedule until later tomorrow) is to head out to the Canyon first thing and do the Skywalk around midday.