I recently had the opportunity to speak to Matt Simmons, of http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog. He just moved to NJ and also joined LOPSA; I had the privilege of being on the USENIX/LISA blogging team with him a few weeks ago as well.

I ask Matt about being a standalone system administrator, and how his blog, online and local face-to-face communities help him in his daily tasks. We talk a bit about volunteering for one’s community as well.

Please take a listen to the audio, available on http://www.youtube.com/pamelaEsoteric.

I will post the transcript here sometime later today.

With LISA 09 in like a couple of days, we’re all Baltimore all the time. And what’s more Baltimore than The Wire?
Here are are a couple prequels put out by HBO once the show really hit its stride.

The man admits it’s not really fair to lump Baltimore, Detroit and Buffalo together into one TV episode. But he does it anyway. Adn the food looks good! Enjoy LISA 09.

Legendary rockers Van Halen famously said NO BROWN M&Ms while touring (see below, from Smoking Gun) and in keeping with the rockstar theme of the Sysadmin of the Year contest, there will be NO BROWN M&Ms at the rock ‘n roll awards gala Nov. 4. Well at least not in the Ace of Cakes cake that …soihadto rocker Duff Goldman is baking for 200 Sysadmins in Baltimore.

Cake details, it has been revealed, are as follows:

• Flavors:  a symphony of almond, amaretto cream, Caribbean black rum flavor, carrot, and red velvet.
• Design: to include the 2009 Sysadmin of the Year logo.
• No: Brown M&Ms

Here’s the logo:

And here’s the Smoking Gun source of one the most impressive rock’n'roll memes ever.

This Is The Last Day to Get Nominated (Or Nominate Yourself) Photo Credit: Sister72

Lotsa money at stake. Lotsa prizes at stake. Lotsa industry cred and career-advancement mojo at stake. If you’ve not yet been nominated (you would know), send this link and make it happen. You can also nominate yourself. Contest is sponsored by LOPSA, Usenix/Sage and BigFix. Award gala is Nov. 4 at the LISA conference in Baltimore.

With just a month left for nominations, BigFix is adding a new prize to the 2009 System Administrator of the Year contest – a progressive jackpot up to $5,000. The prize will start at $2,000, with $200 added to the pot for every 10 new nominations. The final prize will be split between the winning sysadmin and his or her nominator. In the case of self nomination, the entire cash prize will be awarded to the sysadmin.

Do you want to nominate yourself or somebody else? Here’s the link.

You could win $5,000

This cash prize will be the new Grand Prize, with the runner up receiving a laptop, a conference pass to the 2010 Large Installation System Administrator (LISA) Conference, Guitar Hero 5 and their choice of Wii, xBox, or PS3. The next Top 3 entrants will win Guitar Hero 5 and their choice of Wii, xBox, or PS3.

BigFix proudly sponsors the 2009 System Administrator of the Year contest, which acknowledges the under-recognized rock stars of information technology who are vital to the smooth functioning of business, government and public services.

Sysadmins are the unsung heroes of information technology, keeping computers up and running, defending infrastructures from malware and hacking attacks, and helping end-users maximize their productivity. The contest is also an opportunity for the sysadmin community to share information on best practices and new ways to deliver value to their constituencies.

Judges include:

• AEleen Frisch (author, Essential System Administration)
• Doug Hughes (serial presenter and guru at many USENIX LISA conferences)
• Ben Kus (founder, BigFix User Group)
• Thomas A. Limoncelli (sysadmin author, http://www.everythingsysadmin.com)
• Johnny Long (founder, Hackers for Charity, http://www.hackersforcharity.org/)
• Ryan Russell (author, Stealing the Network)
• Robert Scoble (blogger, http://scobleizer.com)
• Amrit Williams (blogger,http://techbuddha.wordpress.com)

Nominations are open untilOctober 23, with contest winner and runners up announced on November 4, 2009, at the USENIX Large Installation System Administrator (LISA) Conference at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel.

A financial services technology group is developing standards for making secure mobile payment transactions.  The project is an effort of the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC), an industry group comprising banks, technology vendors, researchers and government organizations, which develops technology standards for the financial services sector.   The goal of the project is to develop standards and processes so that banking customers are able to securely pay a merchant or another bank customer using their phone, no matter what mobile device or carrier they use.   The FSTC recently announced the completion of phases one and two of the project, in which goals for improving mobile payment security were established and technologies were identified.  It will now move on to phase three and four, during which standards will be created and roll-out strategies established. 

Mobile payment methods have been widely adopted in Europe and Asia, and soon will become more widespread in North America, allowing consumers to pay businesses or other consumers from their mobile devices.  But mobile security technology is in its infancy, and lags behind the security solutions available for PC platforms.  Most financial services companies still rely on basic multi-factor authentication to validate mobile user access to cash and stock accounts, because it is it involves little in the way of innovation or investment on their part.  Remember…these are the same people who brought us the “great recession”, so their approach should not fill us with confidence. 

At a recent USENIX Security Symposium, the leader of (Google) Android security, Rich Cannings, said that “The smartphone OS will become a major security target.”   Rich is correct:  The number of smartphones is on the rise, and these devices are capable of holding lots of sensitive personal and business data.  It will take a third-party approach by consortiums like the FSTC and innovation from the technology industry to ensure that effective security solutions are available for mobile devices.

USENIX (The Advanced Computing Systems Association) has setup its group on Facebook. Join this group to connect with other members, keep up to date on the latest USENIX news, or just write on the wall. The group address is at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=11660807102.

“The USENIX Association (The Advanced Computing Systems Association) relies on Campus Representatives to reach out to their campus community and students to make them aware of the Association, its conferences, member services, and student programs. (Participants in this program are sometimes referred to as “University Liaisons.”) We encourage students to participate in the organization by submitting papers, becoming members, and attending events.The program funds one representative per campus to act on behalf of USENIX. The representative should be faculty in computer science, electrical engineering, or a related department (see the requirements for participation at their website).

To find out if your school has a representative, check the current list of USENIX Campus Representatives.”

To find out more about the responsibilities of a Campus Representative, please visit here.

Over the last 3 days I had the opportunity to attend the technical sessions at USENIX 08, thanks to my job at my CS department. Systems researchers from various universities and companies were in attendance and presenting their research. The companies that were there included Google, Microsoft Research, Sun, IBM Research, VMWare, and many more. There was somebody from Red Hat, but Canonical and Novell were not represented. There was also a representative from the Free Software Foundation with their usual assortment of neat stickers.

Topics concentrated primarily on virtualization and parallel programming, but other systems topics were covered as well. Peter Kronowitt from Intel talked about how Intel has leveraged open source and commented on some of the struggles they had in opening up drivers. Adrian Cockcroft talked about current and upcoming mobile gadgets and how the millicomputing technology can be used toward energy efficient datacenters. Jim Waldo from Sun reported on their project to create a distributed system for MMO game servers. When asked why they were working on the server when a major current issue is parallelizing game client programming, he ended the talk with this gem: “We’re sun. We know servers better than we do clients.” He later also did an interesting talk on why Java is useful as a system language despite not being “cool” like Python and JavaScript currently are, which I think answers Brandon’s question. I really liked those talks in part because of Jim’s very candid talking style.

Ajay Anand and Allen Wittenauer from Yahoo! talked about Hadoop, the open source implementation of the Map/Reduce distributed computation algorithm we used in class. The conference was closed out by Matthew Melis of NASA presenting on the space shuttle and the Columbia accident. Being fascinated with space exploration since I was a kid, this was a really great talk to go to.

Naturally, I looked around for who was running (K)Ubuntu. Despite being familiar with the phenomenon from the faculty and sysadmins at my university, it continues to surprise me how the people most of whose work depends on Linux, do not run it on their desktop/laptop. I’d say 60-70% were running Mac OS X, with most of the remaining on MS Windows. I saw a couple people with Ubuntu and one young Sun SysAdmin running Kubuntu.

It was a long three days, but the talks were great and I met many interesting people and had interesting conversations, so despite barely having time to check my email, I feel like it was very productive and time very well spent.

Πολύ σημαντική απόφαση από τη USENIX, η οποία διαθέτει πλέον για όλους ελεύθερα τα Papers και Proceedings από Conferences που έχουν γίνει μέχρι τώρα..

Αρα μπορούν και όσοι δεν είναι μέλη να πέσουν με τα μούτρα στο διάβασμα

(via)

USENIX Security ‘07 Technical Sessions is in mp3 format for downloads. wow! But what stops them from using ogg? Who knows!

Other conferences’ proceedings should also have been released in audio format. Say The 2007 Kernel Summit is on lwn but I couldn’t find its mp3 or ogg files.

Some other conferences’ proceedings are available in mp3 too. Just click around to check