Day Two of SELF was a bit of a whirlwind. While I love going to conferences, “booth duty” can sometimes be a bit tiring, but for some reason the time just seems to fly at this conference.

Speaking of booths, I got to stop by the Rackspace table. I have a soft spot for Rackspace since they were our first major customer at OpenNMS and if it weren’t for them we probably wouldn’t be here.

They have a reputation for hiring top-notch people, and at the show they have a little “break/fix” challenge. You are given ten minutes to complete eight tasks, and like Spinal Tap the score goes to eleven.

I was a little disappointed with my score of seven, but I can always claim I was distracted by a couple of people coming by to say “hi” while I was taking the test. Not that it would have made any real difference, but what is a day without at least one good rationalization.

I asked Jesse to give it a shot and he score a more respectable nine, and I didn’t hear of anyone getting it completely right, but it was fun to do.

Speaking of fun (well, if you are a network management geek) we set up some more data collection on the show network. We added graphs for the number of people connected to each SSID, as well as the max and average association time between devices and APs. It was cool to see a dip around lunch time as a number of people left to get food, and then it came back up as they returned.

I often talk about how important it is to not only be able to collect data about the network but also to understand why the data is what it is, and it was cool to be surrounded by other geeks who liked to look at the output from OpenNMS and to understand it.

That evening there was a social gathering sponsored by Linode. I was able to hang out until a little after midnight and everyone seemed to be having a good time. There was the obligatory Cards Against Humanity game going on, and it was one of the largest I had seen. Not sure the game play works that well with so many people but those playing seemed to enjoy it.

As I am fond of mentioning, I really like regional Linux conferences. This weekend we are proud to be a Platinum sponsor of the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) which is being held at the airport Sheraton in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Usually the first day consists of classes with the weekend reserved for presentations, but this year my talk was on Friday afternoon. As I’ve been suffering from a sore throat for about a week, this worked out well, since I doubt my voice will make it through Sunday (hard to believe, I know).

I did my “Open Source is Dead” talk from SCaLE with a few revisions, and I was happy that only one person had seen it before. I made a few changes to the slides (Red Hat’s market cap is up a few hundred million from February and I removed my slide promoting the OnePlus One handset since I can no longer recommend them due to horrendous product support). I think the talk was well received. Christine Hall from FOSS Force wrote about it and even included my “Ché Stallman” graphic in her post.

We have a booth staffed by Jesse and Jessi (and me), and it’s right next to the GlobalVision table. GlobalVision is providing the network for the show and they are also a VoIP service provider. They had a cool phone from Ubiquiti. It looks like a sleek executive phone:

but what’s cool is that it is based on Android. They’ve replaced the default phone app with a SIP client, but otherwise it is similar to any other Android device, and so it can do things like play YouTube videos:

Day One was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the rest of the weekend. Hats of to the organizers, including Jeremy Sands, who needed a little break come Friday afternoon.

Just a quick note to mention that OpenNMS will be at the TeleManagement Forum conference this week in Nice, France.

Dr. Craig Gallen, our lead with the TMForum, is working with Microsoft and others on a “catalyst” (basically, a working demo) called “Multi-Cloud SDN-NFV Service Orchestration“.

OpenNMS has positioned itself as a platform versus an application, and so it can respond quickly to changing technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). We are happy to be working at the TMForum with such great companies to demonstrate how we can monitor these emerging technologies.

POSCONN (or the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference) is a regional conference held every year in Columbia, South Carolina. It dawned on me that I travel too much, because when I mentioned to a neighbor that I spent some time in Columbia, she paused and then asked “oh, it’s almost winter down there”. I had to explain that I meant the Columbia that is three hours away and not the Columbia in South America.

I really like regional grassroots open source conferences, but for some reason I was never able to make POSSCON. This year I decided to change that and OpenNMS was even able to sponsor it.

POSSCON is organized by IT-ology, a non-profit dedicated to promoting technology careers for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. I think they must know what they are doing since they really know how to organize conferences (they are also responsible for All Things Open held in Raleigh, North Carolina, each October).

We piled five of us into the Ulf-mobile and drove down Monday night. Ben came along even though Tuesday was his birthday, so we decided to go out on Monday night to celebrate. There are a number of highly rated restaurants in the downtown Columbia area, and with my penchant for vintage cocktails and Ben’s taste for whiskey we decided on Bourbon. It was a wonderful evening and for his birthday we bought him a flight of Pappy Van Winkle, an incredibly difficult to find bourbon. The verdict: it is worth the hype.

The show officially started on Tuesday and spanned two days. The first day consisted of roughly hour-long talks like most conferences. Where it differed was that the talks were held in different buildings around downtown Columbia. While it made it a little harder to jump from one venue to another, the weather, for the most part, was good.

The opening keynote was held at the Music Farm. As a sponsor we had a table which was also in the auditorium and I really liked that. One of the issues with having any sort of booth is that they are often set off in a side room. If you have booth duty you can’t see any of the presentations, and traffic between presentations is light. This way we had some down time during the presentations and yet got a lot of foot traffic in between them. Seemed to make the day go faster. The mayor of Columbia spoke and claimed to be the only mayor in America who was into open source, but I know of at least one other mayor, the mayor of Portland, Oregon, who attends these shows (I should disclose that the City of Portland is an OpenNMS customer). I didn’t want to bring it up though, ’cause this is a good thing to be proud of.

My presentation on the Linux Desktop was held at the Liberty Tap Room (‘natch) and while it was cool, it wasn’t the best place for presentations. The projector screen was dim (more useful for sports broadcasting at night then for tech talks in the middle of the morning). During one talk I had to listen to the Miller Lite truck idling on the road outside the door as the driver made his delivery.

Mine was the last one of the day, but I wanted to check out the venue so I went early and stayed for a talk on open source licensing (by one of the other sponsors) and one by Jason Hibbets of opensource.com fame.

I thought the presenter of the law talk was pretty brave discussing licensing with Bradley Kuhn in the room, but while I enjoyed the talk I could tell it was over the heads of most of the audience (you have to have lived it to really enjoy the finer aspects of the GPL and enforcement). I liked Jason’s talk, which I had not seen before, on the tools and processes they use at opensource.com to build community.

Toward the end of the day I saw a talk by Erica Stanley on open source and the Internet of Things. It was good but due to the lack of a sound system it was hard to hear everything. I presented after her and didn’t have that problem (grin).

I think my talk on using the Linux Desktop went well. Now three years after leaving Apple I’m still using it and still loving it.

Tuesday evening there was a reception back at Music Farm followed by a speaker/sponsor dinner held at Blue Marlin. Ben, Jess and I ended up at a table with Bradley Kuhn, Erica Stanley and Carol Smith from Google. We talked briefly about the Google Summer of Code. OpenNMS was involved for several years, but these last two years we were not accepted. Last year I was told it was because they wanted to give other projects a chance, and this year, to be quite frank, I don’t think our proposals were strong enough. Instead of complaining like some projects, I am hoping this will motivate the team to do better next year. I think GSoC is a wonderful program and I wish it was around when I was in school, as both the pay and work environment would have been better than the hours I put in at a non-air-conditioned plastic injection molding plant (although I will say the experience motivated me to finish my degree).

Wednesday’s format was a little different. Everything was held at the IT-ology offices, which was good since the weather was rainy all day. It was made up of workshops, and I did two and a half hours on OpenNMS. Everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Overall, it was a great conference. Over 800 people registered and I think they all got their money’s worth. It was also a great way to market Columbia (I know we spent some money there). It has made me look forward to this year’s All Things Open conference (note that the Call for Speakers is open).

#NotAprilFools

I love the fact that with the possible exception of OSCON (which has blacklisted me as a speaker for some reason), the main open source conferences all tend to be grassroots, regional affairs. I love going to them and find them to be much better than the commercial and corporate shows.

One I have never been able to attend is POSSCON. Although only one state away, my schedule has not worked out to allow me to go. I’ve heard a number of good things about it, so this year I was determined to attend and The OpenNMS Group is even a gold sponsor.

We will have be a booth where you can come by and see the new OpenNMS shiny, and I will be giving a talk on the first day about switching to the Linux Desktop, and on the second day there will be a workshop on using OpenNMS.

Hope to see you there.

[Note: Today marks the start of my thirteenth year of blogging about open source. Wow]

Sorry for the delay in getting this post written. We’ve had a couple of bouts of winter weather in North Carolina this week and it has really messed up the schedule. This was quite unlike the beautiful weather we experienced in Los Angeles for SCaLE 13x.

Saturday, Day Two for me, was a long one. The expo floor was open for eight hours so outside of giving my talk and lunch I was pretty much in the booth. I think my talk was well received, but Jeff’s talk later in the day was standing room only. I was told that the talks were being streamed live so I hope to see archived recordings soon.

I missed Jeff’s talk because I was in the booth giving away another set of MC Frontalot CDs. The winner did not want to be identified, so I don’t have a picture.

I didn’t take many pictures that day (we were too busy) but I did get a lot that evening. There was a game night with food and a bar, and that’s where the OpenNMS-sponsored Frontalot show was held.

Before the main festivities, they opened up the room for kids. They had a bunch of games set up. Jess told me that this was “Super Smash Brothers” (I think) at the Mario Kart stage.

About 9:30pm Damian started his set.

I think it was well received – I at least had fun. He hit all of my favorites with the exception of “Critical Hit” and this was the first show I’ve been to that he also had video. For those songs with official videos, those were played, but he’d also arranged some graphics for the others. I thought “Victorian Space Prostitute” worked particularly well, although Jess was the only one I think who recognized all the cosplay.

After the show there was a raffle. Colleen did a lot of the giveaways but since I had to spend the entire weekend in the booth I didn’t get to play (sniff).

I did get a nice picture of another SCaLE organizer, Ilan with his lovely bride:

After the show I ran into Jono Bacon and most of the Bad Voltage crew.

Jono seemed convinced that I looked like George Jetson:

but I think I much more rock the Fred Flintstone:

Comments? I doubt it is as divisive as the color of that dress.

[Note: Does any else remember that short lived show Wait Till Your Father Gets Home? Hanna-Barbera’s The Flinstones was set in the past, and The Jetsons was set in the future, and this was the show for the present. Yes, I’m old]

As the evening wound down I helped Damian get his gear back to the hotel and then we hit the bar in the Hilton. I had met the wonderful Stuart Langridge earlier, so I offered to buy him a drink (and learned that there should be no fruit in beer) and before you knew it we had a nice little crowd in our little corner of the bar. While I love going to conferences for the things I learn, sometimes it is the moments around the conference that create the most memories.

On Sunday I managed to hit the booth right on time (at the ungodly hour of 10am) and then, before you knew it, it was over. The wonderful Cynthia Aguilera was the winner of our third and last set of Frontalot CDs.

After we got everything packed up for the trip home, I just kind of crashed. We ended up watching the Oscars and then going to bed.

Thanks to everyone who made this year’s SCaLE conference awesome, and you can next catch us as April’s POSSCON.

Well, technically it was Day Two, but with the launch of the new OpenNMS Group website, our Meridian product, and actually trying to finish up my slides for my SCaLE presentation, it was the first day I actually made it to the show.

I love this show. It was the first real grassroots open source conference I ever attended (at Scale 5x back in 2007) and it was amazing. I haven’t been able to make as many of them as I would have liked (they scheduled one on Valentine’s Day once) but I always welcome the opportunity. This year they can accommodate 3000 attendees and while they haven’t released actual numbers, that is a lot of geeks.

I spent almost all of the day in the expo hall. We introduced the new Horizon/Meridian booth:

which I think turned out well. I also got to wander around and talk with a few of the other projects that are here. One was the Kodi team:

and having used it for several weeks now I think it is an amazing piece of software. I also got to talk briefly with Jeremy Sands, one of the organizers of the SouthEast LinuxFest:

and I should point out that the dates have been set for the conference this year (12-14 June) and the RFP is now open.

My talk at SCaLE is about the changing nature of open source, and it has never been a better time to be involved if you want a job. At most shows I see signs like this:

and there is even a career booth hosted by Disney, of all companies:

We had a nice amount of booth traffic. The OpenNMS shirts went in the first hour (should have brought more) and in honor of MC Frontalot performing on Saturday night, we are giving away signed sets of all six of his CDs.

The Friday winner was Ganeshbaba who registered at the very last minute, but we still have two more sets to give away.

Anyway, if you are at the show be sure to stop by and if you aren’t, well, why the heck aren’t you here?