Yesterday's Women in Tech Panel was moderated by Lois Bennett, who was joined by panelists Carolyn Rowland, Máirín Duffy, and Deb Nicholson. Lois started the discussion with the question, “Is there a problem?”
After a delightfully overdone comedy routine by Tom Limoncelli and Doug Hughes, Ben Rockwood took the stage to deliver his keynote speech titled "The DevOps Transformation." DevOps is a growing movement in IT designed to blur the line between developers and operators. DevOps is a cultural and professional movement, not a tool or product. It is not a title, nor is it a person. Most importantly, it is not just dev & ops, it’s *dev*ops*.
IT doesn't exist for its own sake, but rather to serve the needs of some external entity. In the work sphere, this means serving some business need of the employing organization. Unfortunately, sysadmins and business leaders often have different perspectives. This can put a strain on IT's relationship with the rest of the organization. Mark Burgess and Carolyn Rowland's training on Tuesday morning was aimed at giving sysadmins the perspective and skills necessary to effectively communicate with business leaders.
I'm sitting in the Mozilla BoF at LISA'11 and they just now announced that beginning with Mozilla 10 (currently in the Aurora status, which is similar to Alpha), not only will plugins become compatible by default, but that upon release, it will be the first "Extended Support Release".
The support term that Mozilla will offer will be"about one year". No new features will be backported from later revisions, but security updates will be added.
Ever had a hard drive failure? Ever kicked yourself because you didn't keep backups of critical files, or you discovered that your regular nightly backup didn't succeed? If this sounds familiar then Theodore Ts'o training "Recovering From Linux Hard Drive Disasters" should be on your LISA schedule because this tutorial covers in depth details on how to recover from disasters caused by software or hardware failures.
The Internet is facing a slowly-unfolding crisis. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) ran out of assignable IP address blocks in April of this year. APNIC ran out of its allocation in April as well. The other regional registries have only a few years' worth of addresses to issue. There is an obvious need for the larger address space that IPv6 provides, yet adoption remains low. Shumon Huque's training session on Tuesday afternoon aimed to fix that.
During this morning's open remarks, Tom Limoncelli and Doug Hughes, LISA'11 program co-chairs, announced the dates and location for LISA '12. Next year's LISA will be held December 9-14, in San Diego, California, and Carolyn Rowland will be the program chair.
Adam Moskowitz has been around LISA for a while...long enough, even, that he actually chaired my first LISA conference, back in '09 (yes, I'm that new here). He's been in IT for even longer, and over that time period, he has made a study of public speaking in a professional capacity.
The Workplace Presentations class isn't designed to make the attendees the next Winston Churchill - great public speaking only comes with practice - but to help the sysadmins come to grips with speaking in front of their peers and coworkers.
When he's not busy demystifying RRDtool, Tobi Oetiker is a language evangelist. On Monday afternoon, he brought Perl 6 to the masses. Brian Sebby joked on Twitter: "Perl 6 has a lot of cool features that I'd really like to use. I also felt this way when it was just around the corner at LISA '02." Indeed, Perl 6 has been 11 years in the making, and still hasn't gained much of a foothold in the sysadmin community. Perhaps that's not too surprising, considering how useful Perl 5 remains.
