CMG 2007: Day 2

Since I now have a full-blown cold, I woke up early and unable to breathe which makes it hard to sleep. So, I figured it was a good time to take some sunrise photos from my 15th floor hotel room overlooking the Marina. You can’t see them, though, because I sent them into Cowpie Buzz for her photo contest. I’m sure they’ll show up there for you vote on eventually.

Since the conference didn’t officially kick off until the afternoon and I was up early, I decided to have breakfast in my room. I just have one question, who thought asparagus for breakfast (or anytime) was a good idea?

After breakfast I spent some time catching up with work and actually made some pretty good progress on my paper which is due this coming Sunday. It wasn’t a lot of progress, but certainly more than I’ve made to date – combined. I hope the block I’ve had getting started on it is broken now.

For lunch, I headed back down to Seaport Village to eat at a place called Buster’s Beach House and Longboard Bar. I opted for the Pork Luau sandwich which was really good, but it took longer than I would have wanted for the food to be delivered. Then again, I’m impatient like that.

Keynote

The keynote was given by Jerred Ruble, President and CEO of TeamQuest Corporation and was entitled “Is Capacity Planning Still Relevant?” Obviously, the answer at a conference for capacity planners has to be “yes”, but he had some very interesting things to say about how capacity planners (read: IT geeks) must learn how to frame capacity and performance metrics in terms of business metrics. As tools and techniques have evolved, it’s more critical than ever to convince executive teams that capacity planning is still relevant.

After the keynote there was a panel of former A.A. Michelson Award winners discussing the next steps beyond Best Practices which were dubbed “Next Practices”. I thought it was very interesting and telling that when asked how many in the audience had Myspace or Facebook pages, hardly anyone raised their hands. When the same question was asked about the audience’s children the story was very different.

I’ve already made the observation that the CMG conference still seems to be attended by a lot of Mainframe types and could do with some attention from the social networking and Web 2.0 crowds. The keynote did shed some light on this, but the approach seemed to be for the normal attendees to embrace the new technologies rather than go out and recruit the new generation of developers and bring them into CMG.

The expectation is that the hottest topic for next year will be “Green IT”.

Using Simulation to Forecast Performance: A Case Study

This was an interesting extension of some of the modeling and Queuing Theory covered in yesterday’s workshop on PDQ. This presentation seemed to be lacking in substance and referred a lot to the paper itself, but I understood more than others I think because I attended the PDQ workshop. To the author’s credit, she was presenting a case study and not trying to cover Queuing Theory.

Seeing It All at Once with Barry

This session was the most interesting of the day. It was presented by Dr. Neil J. Gunther and Mario Jauvin, both of whom presented in the two workshops I attended yesterday. The concept was about Barycentric coordinates and other ways to create ways to present large amounts of data in a visual way. This is similar the stuff being done at Gapminder.org and Digg Labs‘s Swarm.

Business Meeting and A.A. Michelson Award

I usually don’t bother attending the Business Meeting, but I knew the buses were leaving for the harbor cruise right after and I didn’t want them to leave without me. I’m glad I attended, it was definitely a positive experience to see the inner workings of CMG and the work that goes into putting on the conference. It makes me think about volunteer besides just writing a paper and presenting for future conferences.

Congratulations need to go out to all of the various award winners this year, but especially Adrian Cockcroft for winning this year’s A.A. Michelson award. His contributions to CMG and the field of performance management, particularly for Solaris are well-known to most in the industry. I think the most interesting part of his acceptance speech was his advice in presenting metrics to Executive Management: metrics should be presented as dimensionless or in terms of dollars or they will try to convert the to dollars. Sometimes they even try to convert dimensionless metrics to dollars as well. I also enjoyed what he called the “Cockcroft Law of Book Writing“.

Adrian also touched on a talk he is giving later in the week on something he has dubbed “millicomputing” because the power consumption must be measured in Milliwatts. These are very small, low power devices with flash storage (limited write capability, but very fast reads). However, Adrian’s idea is to use arrays of these small devices to create a very powerful, low power cluster. Unfortunately, I think I’m going to miss the talk but I’ll have to check out paper once I get back home.

PARS (Performance Analyst Relaxation Session)

This was a don’t-miss event. As far as I know and according to everyone I’ve asked, this is the first year they have had a outing for PARS. Usually PARS is food, drinks, and entertainment in the convention center. This year they moved the food, drinks, and entertainment to a ship, the Inspiration Hornblower, as it cruised around San Diego Harbor.

I would have gotten more pictures, but the battery in my phone was low. We cruised out beyond the large bridge you can see in the photos taken from my hotel room, turned around, and cruised back. We even passed a large battleship as it was heading back out to sea. Speaking of which, everyone was talking about touring the USS Midway and now I have to make time to go see it.

 

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Tags: sandiego, cmg, cmg2007, inspiration hornblower, buster’s, seaport village, barry, barycentric