SCALE 11x - Day 1 Report

This is my first time at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) and it is their 11th year. You see, just a few days ago I had no plans to attend but then Kirill Kolyshkin contacted me via IRC asking if I was available to attend to help staff the OpenVZ booth. If you haven't heard of Kir before, he is the OpenVZ Project leader who is employed by Parallels. Having never attended SCALE I was very excited about going and checked with my two bosses (the wife and work) to see if I could go. Luckily both gave the thumbs up.

SCALE is actually FRIDAY - SUNDAY. Turns out that the Exhibit floor doesn't open until SATURDAY. Living in Montana my flight took me through Denver and by the time I got to Los Angeles and had ridden a free shuttle bus to the Hilton it was about 3PM PST.

I was so excited about going to SCALE, I had trouble sleeping Thursday night and add jet lag to that... I didn't have a whole lot of energy and went to bed around 8PM. Between hitting the hotel and going to bed though, I did do a few things.

1) I stopped by the exhibit floor to see how everyone was getting along setting up their booths. The exhibit floor is actually in two large rooms on the ground floor of the Hilton. One room is smaller than the other and the OpenVZ Booth (#93) is in the smaller of the two. I found the OpenVZ booth and I saw that Kir had already gotten it set up with a nice OpenVZ/CRIU banner and a large flat screen monitor.

2) I then checked in and got my room keys at the Hilton. I'm on the 12th floor. I went up to the room and got my netbook on the network to check my email and get on IRC. In IRC I saw Larry Cafiero. Larry is a SCALE promoter and PR person who is trying to work with a few of us in Montana to get a Montana Linux Fest in the not too distant future. Larry asked me to go to the Catalina C room to visit with him to touch base. I have visted with Larry several times at various shows (LFNW and UTOSC) when he was still associated with the Fedora Project. We chit chatted about the trip thus far and when I might start concentrating more on a Big Sky Linux Fest.

3) I attended Robyn Bergeron talk entitled, Managing the release and life cycle of an open source software project in a community. She jokingly said it as the longest presentation title ever.

4) Then I went to Carls Jr across the street from the Hilton and had one of their turkey burgers.

5) Then I went back to the room and the phone rang. It was Kir. His room is on the 3rd floor. He said he was doing some last minute work on his CRIU presentation (that is on Saturday at 3PM in the Century CD room) but that he wanted to get together to discuss the latest happenings in the OpenVZ world and what he has been working on... so I'd be better prepared for the booth. So, I went down to his room and we talked for about a hour or so. I got a gigantic brain dump worth of information. Turns out Kir (and his wife and two children) moved from the Moscow Russia area to the Seattle area sometime in December. Parallels has a small office there. Also in the same office is Linux kernel hacker and Parallels CTO of Server Virtualization, James Bottomley. You might have heard that James has been working lately on a secure boot setup for The Linux Foundation. Anyway, Kir mentioned that James wanted him to attend Matthew Garrett's Saturday morning keynote entitled, The Secure Boot Journey. Kir also wants to attend a presentation on Linux Native Containers (LXC) and of course he has his own presentation at 3PM. That means I'm going to be at the OpenVZ both for quite a while by myself. That's ok. Kir said that if there were any presentations I wanted to go to on Sunday, I could. I haven't really looked at the schedule yet.

Then Kir's wife and children (a boy and a girl) got back to the room after having toured around Hollywood. It just so happens that the Kolyshkin family had driven down from Seattle to L.A. which is quite the drive (about 1,000 miles or more?) although believe it or not, still shorter than some of Kir's flights over from Moscow to the US for various trade shows. They invited me to dinner but I was still full from the turkey burger and declined.

I went back to the room only to notice the Fedora Project had pushed out a considerable number of Fedora 18 updates including the 3.7.9 kernel and Firefox 19. I got my netwook all updated. I ssh'ed into my MontanaLinux build hosts at work and rebuilt with all of the updates. While that progressed I watched a little American Pickers on the History channel. It wasn't too long after that that I drifted of into the world of slumber.

I just woke up about 4AM PST and began writing this blog post. Getting up so early, I have about 5.5 hours before the opening of the OpenVZ booth. Wooo hooo.

I definitely have a lot to share from the talk I had last night with Kir but I'll wait until later to do so. Hmmm, I guess I do have to turn the light on in the room to get the coffee pot going. :)

I didn't bring my video camera because I thought I'd be stuck in the booth the whole time but I did bring a camera so expect lots of pictures from Saturday and Sunday. Assuming I have Internet connectivity (we as supposed to) at the booth, I'll be on IRC "live from the SCALE booth" just for the fun of it.

Oh, I guess I missed Jono Bacon's presentation late Friday about the Ubuntu Phone. In all honesty, I had no interest in attending.