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Away Mission - Recommended for March

By Howard Dyckoff

The Great Recession's impact continues to grow and there are fewer IT and Open Source conferences on the horizon. However, three upcoming events are worth mentioning - the annual RSA security confab at the beginning of March, the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), and EclipseCon. All three are in the SF Bay Area and you could spend a great month dropping in on all three venues. Of course, you will have to risk getting swabbed down by TSA agents to get there. Security first.

This year, much of the discussion at RSA will focus on the Advanced Pervasive Threat, or APT. These are the increasingly sophisticated, multi-pronged attacks and compromises from criminal syndicates and, reportedly, from foreign state cyberwarfare agencies. Perhaps WW-IV has already started - but you'll have to come to this year's RSA to find out.

As always, or at least in recent years, a prominent security Fed will be highlighted in a keynote. This year, the high-profile industry experts include:

If you would like to attend, visit this link: http://www.rsaconference.com/2010/usa/last-chance/prospects.htm

On the other hand, some vendors like Tipping Point and Qualsys are offering free expo passes that that will allow you to attend the Monday sessions organized by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG). I definitely recommend going to the Monday TCG sessions. It may be a little late for this deal, but try code SC10TPP.

OSBC is in its 7th year and is the leading business-oriented venue for discussing open source companies and business models. However, some of the sessions do seem to be updates from the previous years.

It will be held again at the attractive and compact Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco which is a bit of a tourist magnet by itself. The West exit of the Montgomery St. BART station brings you up right by the entrance.

For this year the keynote addresses look at the developing open source market:

Here's the agenda for this year's Open Source Business Conference: http://www.osbc.com/ehome/index.php?eventid=7578&tabid=3659

And this link shows the sessions held in 2009: http://www.infoworld.com/event/osbc/09/osbc_sessions.html

The EclipseCon schedule gets morphed for 2010. It will offer EclipseCon 2010 talks on dozens of topics, going from 12-minute lightning talks, which introduce new topics, to three-hour tutorials. For four days, there will be morning hands-on tutorials, then technical sessions in the afternoon, followed later by panel discussions. This format might led to less conference burnout.

EclipseCon this year will offer a new Unconference in addition to its usual evening BOFs. The first three nights (Monday-Wednesday) will offer three rooms with AV and a chance to present any Eclipse-relevant topic on a first-come, first-served basis. These presentations must be short (a maximum of 25 minutes) and focused.

If you are quick, you can save a bit on the EclipseCon price - the advance registration price is $1795 until March 19, 2010. Here's the link to register: http://www.eclipsecon.org/2010/registration/

Last year's EclipseCon was enjoyable but compressed and filled with session conflicts. To view many, many recorded videos from last year's eclipse, just go to http://www.eclipsecon.org/2009 and select a session to play. I would recommend the sessions on Android and the Eclipse Ecosystem, e4 - flexible resources for next generation applications and tools, and Sleeping Around: Writing tools that work in Eclipse, Visual Studio, Ruby, and the Web.

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Bio picture

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.


Copyright © 2010, Howard Dyckoff. Released under the Open Publication License unless otherwise noted in the body of the article. Linux Gazette is not produced, sponsored, or endorsed by its prior host, SSC, Inc.

Published in Issue 172 of Linux Gazette, March 2010

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