Jelly Side Up

Last week I attended SHARE in Boston.  By an odd quirk of fate, I was President of SHARE up until the elections held on Wednesday.  Now I'm Vice President.  That takes some explaining.  A year and a half ago I was Director of Conference Operations for SHARE.  That's the job I've always wanted at SHARE, and I still have that duty - probably for one more year.  That will be five years, and it will be time for me to pass this job on to a worthy successor.  In June 2009 at a our Board meeting in Austin our Vice President, Jim Michael (CSU Fresno), had to resign (it's a California thing).  I was appointed Vice President to complete Jim's term.  Along with that came a new additional assignment of eLearning for SHARE.  That made me a bit busier as we developed and deployed a webcasting strategy, which we showcased as SHARE Online From Seattle, and then presented again with twice the content as SHARE Online From Boston.  In June of this year at another Board meeting in Austin, our President Pam Taylor (Sterling Commerce), resigned because IBM was purchasing their company.  SHARE does not have a succession policy, but I was appointed President for the duration of Pam's term.  So the past two months have been very busy.  Seems almost quiet now that I'm just Vice President with Conference Operations and eLearning as my portfolio.  I'm pulling together the strategic and tactical documentation for eLearning and looking for some volunteers to transition it from a Board experiment to production status. 

Enough about me...  SHARE in Boston was great!  We had over 1500 people and made our budget projections.  IBM helped by announcing zEnterprize two weeks before the conference, and provided lots of great content explaining this potentially revolutionary technology.  zEnterprise is a hybrid system that consists of the z196 (first edition 96 cores) showcasing 5.2 GHz power processors and attached Blade Centers (zBX) with Power 7 technology.  Here's an Introductory Video  that gives an overview of the concepts.  We had a lot of presentations about the zEnterprise technology including 100 new assembler instructions to support the hybrid systems.  Even though System z uses Power processors, it is still a CISC system.  PDFs of the presentations are available on www.share.org, and most of those sessions were also webcast live as part of SHARE Online From Boston, which is still for sale if you wish to see what you missed. 

SHARE Online From Boston went quite well.  We had four keynote presentations and two concurrent webcast tracks at all other times.  The keynote sessions were really useful to me.  We started off with Jeff Jonas - Chief Scientist of IBM Entity Analytics and an IBM Distinguished Engineer, speaking about Macro Trends and What to Do About It.  Jeff's ideas about how to derive useful information from enormous quantities of data are really revolutionary.   The second keynote was More Power to System z - the kickoff session for all the zEnterprise content.  It was presented by Karl Freund, IBM Vice President System z Marketing and Strategy.  He did a very good job of introducing the product suite and had some (finally) useful and believable numbers about the cost of developing and delivering applications  in Enterprise IT environments.  The third keynote was the one I found most useful for our Penn State IT environment, and it aligns well with our current IT Assessment activity.  This session was Using Business Capabilities to Shape IT's Business Value by Alex Cullen - Vice President and Research Director for Forrester who specializes in IT planning and strategy, governance, enterprise architecture value, and enterprise architecture practices.  Alex talked about real usable practices for aligning IT strategy with business strategy.  To me this was worth the cost of the trip.  I'll be sure to show the video recording to our management team.  The final keynote was Trends in Data Center Infrastructure: Perspective on the Evolution of Technology and Process by Ricard Fichera Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester.  This was a real good business view of where the money is going in data center development, which highlighted the roles of virtualization and cloud in the data center.  One of the webcast tracks focused mainly on Enterprise Application Architecture and the other focused on the new zEnterprise and Cloud Computing. 

It was a very busy week for me, and I'm pleased at how well SHARE Online and zEnterprise content came together.  Now it's time to get busy preparing the program for SHARE in Anaheim, February 27 - March 4, 2011.    

Day two of the SHARE conference in Seattle, and I'm delighted with our success in webcasting sessions from the conference.  I'm sitting in the first session of the day Cloud Computing: Immediate, Urgent , Inevitable.  The speaker is Peter Coffee the director of platform research from SalesForce.com.  He is presenting a very interesting view of cloud computing that argues that it is not about platform, but rather about delivering services from the cloud.  He is talking seriously about issues about managing intellectual property and managing security at the same time as gaining rapid development and deployment at much more cost effective levels. His information about security in cloud services is surprising and encouraging.  It will all be a revelation to people who assume that clouds can not be secure. We are webcasting this session, and the recording will be available on www.share.org later next week.

Yesterday was great for me.  I've been working hard to get SHARE to move into this century and reach out to the rest of the world online.  The first offering started off really well.  We had Don Tapscott as our kick off keynote yesterday morning.  He was tremendous!  His presentation ran over by 1/2 hour, but no one left.  This, too was webcast and will be available on the SHARE web site.  The idea to webcast was just an interesting thought last December, and it is real three months later.  We are using hosted WebEx services to deliver the sessions through a browser interface.  I'm delighted and relieved that it is working, and working well.

More informtion later - I'm going to pay attention to what Peter is saying. 

Many of you know that I've been serving the past four years on the SHARE board as the Director of Conference Operations.  Since 1955, the only product that SHARE offered has been in-person conferences.  During my time in this position we changed the conference from  five plus days to four days; from over 800 sessions to about 400;  and from a purely heads-down technology focus to a more IT services aware conference.  We added thought provoking keynote sessions to get attendees and volunteers thinking about key issues facing our businesses.  The deep technical content and expertise is still there in System z, and we've added focus on Application Architecture and Integration; Enterprise Data Center; and Information Management.

My assignment changed this past six months.  I also picked up responsibility for a SHARE eLearning initiative (yes, I know - I hate the name, too, but don't know a better one).  With a lot of help, we are taking some risks and changing a whole lot of things.  Last August at SHARE in Denver, we started recording sessions to make them available online.  That continues at the SHARE in Seattle conference next week, and is not new news.

Next week we are sticking our neck out and going live with SHARE Online From Seattle.  We are offering 24 webcasts live from the conference - a full week of the best session per hour from the conference.  If you register for the online event and happen to miss one of the sessions, that should not be a problem.  All of the online sessions are being recorded and will be available online for six months.  I'm delighted that our keynote speakers are all participating.  They are worth the price of admission in themselves:
 
Dan Tapscott - Grown Up Digital:  The Net Generation and the Transformation of Talent, Marketing and Learning

Tom Rosamilia - System z: Systems for Smarter Planet

Peter Coffee - Enterprise Cloud Computing: Immediate, Urgent, Inevitable

Ray Bender - The Need for IT Leadership in Difficult Economic Times

The last six months have been very busy, and I'm pleased with the resultant online content as well as the diverse set of topics that are offered at the conference. 

  Al W.


 

Last month I attended SHARE in Denver from August 21 through August 28.  Much of my time was spent in SHARE Board activities.  This coming year will be my fourth as Director of Conference Operations.  That means that I am responsible for leading the team that produces the content for our two conferences per year.  It is with mixed emotion that I announce that I am now the Vice President of SHARE.  I was appointed to that position for the next year replacing a SHARE colleague (Jim Michael, Fresno State) who was not able to continue in that position because of the economic crisis at Fresno State.  For this next year I will be picking up additional SHARE Strategic Business responsibilities in addition to Conference Operations.  Some of you may know that I was planning to run for the position of Director in the Denver elections.  This explains why I was not on the ballot.  We felt that it would be improper for me to take this appointment and stand for election at the same time. 

So, as you might imagine, I was pretty busy during the Denver conference.  I will not try to detail all of that here; however, I have built a more lengthily report on Wikispaces at SHARE in Denver 2009  That report has some of my notes from sessions I got to attend - mostly the keynotes, and information that I could share about my activities on the board.  The next SHARE conference will be in Seattle March 14-18, 2010.   

I attended the Open Repositories 2009 Conference in Atlanta, GA this week.  It certainly has been an interesting experience. So, what is Open Repositories?  That's a bit hard to answer in one sentence.  Even their website http://openrepositories.org/ does not explain other than to say they have a conference each year.  It appears to be a group of people who have several strong beliefs about how to build repositories for universities, libraries and research institutions.  They believe in open source, open access and sharing of ideas about how to make all that happen.  The people who attend are a mix of Librarians (information science), Researchers, Computer Science people who are interested in repositories, Application Developers who create these repositories and the various companies that supply repository services.  There are three main repository players here: Fedora Commons, DSpace and EPrints.  This year Microsoft Research joined in with a free offering called Zentity that extends Microsoft Office 2008 to build, access and modify a hosted repository. 

One of the big news items at this conference was the merger of Fedora Commons and DSpace into a single not for profit company called DuraSpace.  The sessions range from vendor presentations, to presentations about repository design, and includes presentations by developers about how they build some applications.  There is a group of the applications developers who attend (or not) who actively build and contribute code for the the three main players. 

I took a lot of notes during the conference, and started to post them on the DLT Department wiki, but as I gathered more information, I decided to put the notes in my personal space because I think the information may be of use to more than just the DLT department.  They notes are at Open Repositories 2009

Last night (about 8:15 pm) my daughter Katie (now Verbano) delivered a perfect little boy.  Gavin Christopher Verbano is 20 inches long and weighs in at 7 lb 11 oz.  The picture above is father Chad with Grandma Grace in the background, and of course, the star Gavin.  You can see more pictures at
http://tinyurl.com/GavinV/
I'll post more pictures later today.  I'm heading back to the hospital to visit.

   Al W.

I put them on picasaweb at http://picasaweb.google.com/alw023/RobinRetirement#
I'm a tiny bit late announcing this, but you'll see why in my next blog.

  Al W.

I put them out on my Picasaweb Space.
This year I tried to avoid using the flash as much as possible.  The results are a bit mixed. No red eye to fix (Yippee!).  It certainly was less intrusive for taking pictures; however, the lighting was pretty dim in some instances.  I set the camera to Manual mode, bumped the ASA up to 800, set the speed down to 60 and the aperture to 3.5.  That worked pretty well in most cases.  In the dimly lit rooms, the pictures required a lot of post processing.  The result is grainy with drab colors.  The other challenge was to catch perky speakers and conveners when they were standing still at speed 60.  I'm sure there is a lot I need to learn about low light photography, and I welcome any suggestions. 

  Al W.

As we all should, I worry about how to protect data on my laptop, especially when I travel.  I use a Mac, and have had some experience with FileVault that makes me want to look at alternatives.  I think I found an interesting one.  It is called TrueCrypt.  It does not encrypt a whole volume, nor does it make you partition you volume to make encrypted volume images.  You make encrypted containers by creating encrypted files that TrueCrypt mounts as if they were disk volumes.  Encrypting content is quite easy - you just move files or folders into the mounted container, and it is automatically encrypted.  It is not perfect, but there are some endearing features:

• TrueCrypt is open source and free
• It works for Mac, Linux and Windows
• It looks like it does a good jot encrypting - though I'm not an expert

I'll be back with more detail, but for now, I've put everything that might possibly be sensitive into encrypted containers, including my Thunderbird email.  I'll be traveling with that laptop next week, so I'll know better how it worked by the time I get back.

 Al W.

In ET we want to try a project with cloud computing using Amazon Web Services (AWS).  As I was poking around to get an estimate on the cost for a project, I found the AWS Blog.  This has some interesting content that gives practical examples that we can use as guidance when we start our project.  There are also some neat things available to help with your presence on AWS:

• Elastic Fox is a Firefox plugin that helps track your Amazon Machine Images in EC2
  
• There is a Service Health Dashboard to track the status of all your Amazon Web Services
• Here is an example of Dynamic Scaling if your web service is wildly successful
• Assay Depot is another success story.  This blog includes a discussion of how they do backups on AWS.

I'll be back with more as we get familiar with the AWS offerings and services.

Al W.