LISA ‘04: Tuesday and Wednesday
The flight down from Boston Tuesday night was uneventful, and by the time I made it to baggage claim my flight’s luggage was already rolling off. Mine came out fairly quickly, so I decided that I had enough energy to deal with MARTA instead of wimping out and taking a cab. Through the mall, to the hotel, checked in, and got a nice high room in a hotel designed around a huge atrium with glass elevators. Sigh. I think the architect hates acrophobes.
Wednesday: got up, got breakfast, got registration stuff. The keynote was reasonably interesting, though I’m a little more jaded about mere 20TB storage systems than I used to be…that’s about the minimum amount we’ll put a PO together for these days. CNN’s throughput needs are a bit more demanding than ours, though.
On to the technical sessions themselves. First, I went to the refereed papers presentations. The Bogofilter paper was interesting for the general issues of Bayesian filtering with a shared word list, something I’m already doing with amavisd-new; this gives me additional confidence in going forward with implementation of something similar at work once I can get a feedback system set up.
After the late morning session, a swing through the vendor display (much busier than at the Advanced Technical Conference), including a chance to say hello to various semi-random folks (hello, Randal!) and then off to Chick-Fil-A for lunch.
For the afternoon, invited talks. First, the talk by Brad and Lisa from LiveJournal on the architecture and scaling of the system. I’d seen the slides previously, but the presentation added a lot to them, and it was also amusing to participate in LJ-posting about people LJ-posting about people LJ-posting about the LJ presentation…during the presentation. (Not counting the non-LJ blog posts by LJ users posted here and here, and, well, this entry too.)
For the last session of the day, the IT on documentation. Very enjoyable, with lots of quotes from the Alice books as analogies for specific topics. Would have been more enjoyable if my phone hadn’t decided that vibrate mode was boring, followed by crashing while ringing (yes, crashing…I had to physically remove the battery to reboot it). I think it needs a Ctrl-Alt-Del option.
Dinner was taken care of by the simple expedient of the vendor display pizza feed, which also gave me a chance to talk to someone who I never see while in Cambridge; after all, he works two blocks away, and I only get over to that part of campus three or four times a week.
After dinner, various BOFs; the LegatoEMC BOF, where they were having a drawing for an iPod (I didn’t win) and discussion of the disk-based backup options (which we’re already using and reasonably happy with). From there to the DDR BOF (not to play, just to watch and be amused) and thence to the GPG key signing BOF.
After that, an aborted visit to the NetApp event (in the bar…the smoking bar…I didn’t even get 2 feet past the door), some hanging about in the lobby area where the free conference wireless was, and off to bed.
Thursday report later.
