Away Mission - Upcoming in November '09

By Howard Dyckoff

It's nearly time to retire 2009, yet many conferences for the Linux and open source community are just about to happen. A plethora will happen in the first week of November, so this preview may give you ideas for 2010.

Here's a short list of what's on offer:

LISA '09 - 23rd Large Installation System Administration Conference

Nov 1-6, 2009, Marriott Waterfront Hotel, Baltimore, MD
http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa09/

Cloud Computing & Virtualization 2009

Nov 2-4, Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA
https://www3.sys-con.com/cloud1109/registernew.cfm

iPhone Developer Summit

Nov 2-4, Santa Clara, CA
http://www.iphonedevsummit.com/

Enterprise 2.0 Fall 2009

Nov 2-5, Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA
http://www.e2conf.com/sanfrancisco/

VoiceCon-SF 2009

Nov 2-5, 2009, San Francisco
http://www.voicecon.com/sanfrancisco/

ApacheCon

Nov. 2-6, Oakland, CA
http://us.apachecon.com/c/acus2009/

2nd Annual Linux Foundation End User Summit

Nov 9-10, 2009, Jersey City, NJ
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/end-user-summit/

QCon - San Francisco

Nov 18-20, SF, CA
http://qconsf.com/sf2009/

As you may know, the End User Summit organized by the Linux Foundation is by invitation only. The event is closed to the press, as was the first summit, in 2008. The Summit is primarily an opportunity for big corporate end-users to meet with leaders from within the Linux community, including the highest-level maintainers and developers. The event was originally created at the request of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board.

The Summit will take place November 9-10, 2009, at the Hyatt Jersey City on the Hudson. Its location, just off the Exchange Place PATH Station, will give corporate Linux users quick access from East Coast hubs.

There will be sessions on open source legal fronts, Linux and the challenges of a down economy, tracing and performance management, scaling Linux to 4096 processors, and other technical sessions.

LISA '09, the annual sysadmin conference organized by USENIX, starts the month off in Baltimore. Locals in the Baltimore-DC area can get the new LISA Evening Pass. This allows access after work for conference receptions, the Vendor Exhibition on Wednesday only, the popular Birds of a Feather sessions (BoFs), and more.

There will be sessions on cfEngine, VMware vSphere 4.0, and zero-emission data centers. Cutting-edge practices and new or developing work are presented in the paper presentations and the poster sessions. Check out the list of accepted posters at http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa09/posters.html. Also, all registered LISA '09 attendees are eligible to received a Google Wave Sandbox invitation.

Here's an overview of LISA '09: http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa09/ataglance.html

Here's a link to past LISA conference proceedings: http://www.usenix.org/events/bytopic/lisa.html

ApacheCon '09 will be held in Oakland, CA; this year is also the 10th anniversary of the Apache Foundation. The venue is the Marriott City Center Hotel (and that's a very safe location). Last year, it was held in New Orleans.

The first 2 days include half-day tutorials. There are also several free events paralleling the conference tutorial days, including the Hackathon and the BarCamps.

Apache Hackathon is held over the two days prior to the main three-day conference, November 2-3, and everyone can join in this free codefest event. Coinciding with the traditional Hackathon, BarCampApache is open to the public, and the schedule will be determined by the participants. Topics at BarCampApache need not be Apache-specific.

Here's a conference overview: http://www.us.apachecon.com/c/acus2009/schedule/grid/

There will be several BoFs or MeetUps at ApacheCon '09, and the current list is here: http://www.us.apachecon.com/c/acus2009/schedule/meetups/

Video recordings from the keynotes at last year's ApacheCon are here: http://streaming.linux-magazin.de/en/archive_apachecon08us.htm

The theme for Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco is "unlocking the business value of Enterprise 2.0", with an emphasis on how real customers are using enterprise 2.0 social media to enable a more efficient, agile, and highly productive workforce.

Conference topics include, among others:

• Social Networking in Business
• Social Networks as New Media
• Social Messaging & Twitter
• Enterprise Mash-ups
• Enterprise Software
• Enterprise RSS & Syndication

Since this is a new conference, you might want to take a quick look at the keynotes from June's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston: http://www.e2conf.com/e2tv/

Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco is held jointly with VoiceCon, at the Moscone Center this year. Registration for one event allows access to the other.

QCon SF. This is the third annual San Francisco incarnation of the enterprise software development conference, and its focus is on developer team leads, architects and agile project management. This is primarily an open source conference, and has separate Ruby and Java tracks.

Organized jointly by the JAOO conference and the InfoQ.com Enterprise Software Development Community (original creators of TheServerSide.com and Symposium conferences), QCon is "...organized by the community, for the community."

One unique aspect of QCon is its Euro-centric origins. Many - but not most - of the speakers are leading developers and architects from Europe, and QCon is a great opportunity to meet peers from across the Atlantic without a passport and plane ticket. The global prospective is refreshing, and there is no overbearing presence of giant software vendors. All content, no spin.

QCon speakers include Martin Fowler, Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels, Spring creator Rod Johnson, Hibernate creator Gavin King, Scrum co-founder Jeff Sutherland, LINQ inventor Erik Meijer, JRuby core developer Ola Bini, and others.

Here's a list of the conference tracks by day: http://qconsf.com/sf2009/tracks/

And here's a link to the archives from prior QCons, so you can see for yourself: http://qcon.infoq.com/archives/

Happy Thanksgiving, and a Happy New Year to all!

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Howard Dyckoff is a long term IT professional with primary experience at Fortune 100 and 200 firms. Before his IT career, he worked for Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine and before that used to edit SkyCom, a newsletter for astronomers and rocketeers. He hails from the Republic of Brooklyn [and Polytechnic Institute] and now, after several trips to Himalayan mountain tops, resides in the SF Bay Area with a large book collection and several pet rocks.

Howard maintains the Technology-Events blog at blogspot.com from which he contributes the Events listing for Linux Gazette. Visit the blog to preview some of the next month's NewsBytes Events.