Got to the booth at 9 AM. Got the laptops setup. Set out the DVDs. Kir had some flyers he had printed at Kinkos... and the banner was hung nicely.

All five of us were there in the booth today so we all got a chance to take turns talking to people. The booth had quite a bit of activity. We gave away all 25 DVDs we had burned within the first few hours so Kostya and Warren were busy burning DVDs on both of their laptops for most of the day to keep up with demand.

The basic question everyone asked was... how is OpenVZ different from VMware... or Xen? I got rather good at explaining OpenVZ's seven main points.

Front DoorToday is Tuesday and the show started today BUT I haven't written about Monday yet so this is about Monday.

Decided to go the Moscone Center around 11 AM. Checked in at the exhibitor desk and got an exibitor pass. While we were walking around trying to find the OpenVZ booth I had my video camera out and was taping the journey. Warren was taking pictures with his digital camera. The exhibitor floor was chaotic. There were dozens of fork lifts and various other vehicles running around. Many of the exhibitors have very elaborate booths that take a long time to setup. Finally found the ".org Pavilion" which is just a section of booths in the fair right corner of the exhibit floor. Most .org exhibitors just have a table, two chairs and perhaps a banner. More pictures in full article.

For those interested in telephony on Linux, I ran across this engEDU video on Google Video this morning.

Next Saturday (August 4th), Warren and I head off to San Francisco for the LinuxWorld Expo 2007. We will be helping to staff the OpenVZ booth at the .org Pavilion.

This opportunity kind of fell unexpectedly into my lap when Kir posted an announcement that they were looking for a few community members to help staff the booth given the fact that they had seven exhibit passes and would only be sending two of the OpenVZ developers over from Russia, "as to not stall development."

I've been increasing my OpenVZ knowledge and plan to practice giving demos with Warren a bit on Sunday and Monday. I've been using OpenVZ on a daily basis for over a year now, given two public OpenVZ presentations, written several articles... so interacting with community members and promoting OpenVZ to the crowd at LinuxWorld Expo seems like a natural progression. I really look forward to meeting Kir Kolyshkin and Konstantin Khorenko from the project as well as Marc Perkel who will also be staffing the booth.

I noticed a blog posting by Daniel Veillard on Fedora People about initial support for OpenVZ being added to libvirt. If you aren't familiar with libvirt, it is an underlying library/API that can be used by higher level tools to create, manage, and monitor virtual machines. libvirt is trying to be technology agnostic by supporting several virtualization technologies. They started off with Xen and QEMU but have since added KVM. libvirt is used by the GUI tool Virtual Machine Manager which first appeared in Fedora Core (now Fedora) but became part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Looking at some of the postings in the libvirt mailing list archive for this month, it is mentioned that adding OpenVZ support is a bit different than previous technologies because the OpenVZ tools are already GPLed, "simple and straight forward", and than OpenVZ additions to libvirt "ends up looking very close to the original". I don't know how far away complete support for OpenVZ is in libvirt nor when it will show up in Virtual Machine Manager but I definitely look forward to it... although I doubt it would completely replace vzctl and the other OpenVZ tools for me.

Rocks ClusterI finally got Rocks Cluster installed today. I installed it on the six dual Xeon/P4 machines that Intel donated. Getting this going has taken me a lot longer than I had hoped. It wasn't the fault of the Rocks Cluster software package but the odd combination of hardware.

I learned about a handy dandy program today named recordmydesktop and the GUI for it, gtk-recordmydesktop. Seems to work pretty well. How well? So well that I actually ran out and bought a microphone so I could record the following video.

I've done a few presentations on OpenVZ and I had some slides made so... what the heck... I thought I'd slap together a presentation video.

The video is 800x600 and I didn't want to stretch the center column on the front page, so read the full story to see the included video.

I've been mucking around in the world of distributed programming recently. In my defense, I was investigating this topic BEFORE Scott got his hands on a stack of rack mount computers from Intel. But I will admit the sight of all those idle CPU's put the angst into my code-writing fingers. So I've gone ahead and actually written a distributed application.

A little background on distributed computing. First off, we need the obligatory "Linux is awesome." There is a kernel module for Linux called MOSIX that will transparently move CPU/Memory bound applications away from the machine they were launched on, and return those processes as soon as they need to make a system call. That's awesome.

Thanks to everyone that showed at C4K in June for the MythTV presentation.

We successfully installed a complete digital video recorder system from scratch on a standard PC. The final product displayed its ability to watch live TV, pause and rewind live TV and record shows. The guide data is very nifty and pulled across the internet from zap2it. Which has recently announced that they will be discontinuing that service. So the MythTV developers are hard at work attempting to come up with a better (and hopefully truly open) solution.

I wish I could identify everyone in this video. I believe each person to be an expert in a particular field. I see Penny Marshall and Muhammad Ali. Can anyone identify some of the others? IBM must have spent quite a bit of money making this commercial.