A Booth Giveaway for the Open Source Crowd, Penguin Poppers

My son's tutor has a game to shoot at sheets of paper with grammar rules with a toy.  My son has a lot of fun being goofy shooting things.

His favorite is the Penguin Popper.  For guys like Dell with their Sputnik Open Source laptop having these in the booth would have lines of people to come by to get one of these.  At least that is my observation from watching my 8 yr old play with it.

Penguin Popper

Get Happy!

Squeeze the Penguin’s belly to launch a soft foam ball. The harder you squeeze, the further it shoots—up to 20 feet! Penguin Popper is the newest and cutest popper yet and is ideal for indoor and outdoor play. Comes with six soft foam balls and convenient carry net.

Penguin Popper: Penguin Popper
Penguin Popper

Who cares when James Glanz speaks about data centers? 122 views on C-SPAN

We'll see if James Glanz writes again about data centers again. Here is a video with James Glanz explaining data centers.

James Glanz, NY Times Investigative Reporter

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This video was published on Jan 8, 2013.  The good news for the data center industry is it looks like with 122 views, very few thought the video was worth sharing.

Published on Jan 8, 2013

This week on The Communicators, New York Times Investigative Reporter, James Glanz, on the data centers that keep and process Google inquiries, Amazon purchases and bank inquiries, and many of our internet transactions -- what these data centers are, where they are, the problems they create and questions raised about how to manage them.

The man (men) behind Blackberry's Developer Effort

News.com has an article about Blackberry reaching out to the developer audience.

Saunders has embraced a concept that RIM had long ignored: that developers and a healthy app "ecosystem" can make or break an operating system. He's tried to make the company more accommodating and responsive to developers. It's the touchy-feely stuff RIM execs never thought was important.

Alec Saunders, vice president of developer relations.

(Credit: RIM)

Two years ago I was standing in line for drink at GigaOm Structure and Alec and I were standing next to each other. We were trying to remember where we worked together.  Win95, yeh.  We caught up a bit and Alec said I really need to find a HW Evangelist Director.  Hey how about Bob T from Win95 days.  Alec said Bob would be perfect.  Great, let me call him now.  Bob this is Dave, you looking for a job. yeh. Here talk to Alec he has a job for you.  BoB T works for Alec within a month.

One of the reasons why Alec is doing well is Bob T is building an evangelism team using the Win95 game plan.  

Some things don't change and having people who know how to execute with developers is a skill that doesn't get old, even though we do.

It is ironic that two ex-Microsoft guys are key executives in the Blackberry developer ecosystem.

Data Center conferences for the experienced ME new to data centers

Going to data center events are difficult to figure out for a newbie.  There is so much specialized knowledge and there are many sub groups that exist within the ecosystem.  I met a company with lots of mechanical engineering expertise in cooling systems, but they are newbies to the data center industry.  The following are events that I suggest they look at attending.  

7x24 Exchange Conferences are a nice mix of data center mechanical types, interesting presentations, and plenty of time to socialize.  http://www.7x24exchange.org/conferences.html

Spring 2013
June 2-5, 2013
Boca Raton Resort & Club
Boca Raton, FL2013 Spring Conference

 

 Conference Quick Links:

 

For information about sponsoring a 7x24 Exchange event please
contact Brandon Dolci, CMP at (646)486-3818 x108 or click here.

Data Center Dynamics are good for one day events that reach out to the locals from an area.  Here are the USA events.  http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/conference

North America

Data Center World can be useful to understand the vendor ecosystem. http://www.datacenterworld.com/spring2013/

Uptime Institute Institute is another event, but if you go to 7x24 Exchange and DCD regional events, there is not really a pressing need to go to Uptime Symposium.  I plan on skipping Uptime again. http://symposium.uptimeinstitute.com

Gartner Data Center Conference is oriented towards the users who subscribe to Gartner reports which in general is not a Mechanical systems crowd and is more oriented to the IT decision maker who runs data centers. http://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/apac/data-center/  I went to Gartner for a couple of years, but no longer go as few of my friends are subscribers of Gartner reports.  Well, actually I can't think of any of the thought leaders I know who aren't vendors who go to Gartner.

Another conference which I have never attended is the Green Data Center Conference. http://www.greendatacenterconference.com  I haven't heard from any friends with glowing reviews to get me to go, so I skip this one as well.

For thought leadership and more entrepreneurial companies i go to GigaOm Events. http://event.gigaom.com which are convenient given I do some work for GigaOm Pro.  There are some data center vendors who are sponsors Dell, Terremark, Rackspace, Softlayer, Amazon Web Services, Dupont Fabros, Equinix

SW = HW Google's Jeff Dean, employee #20

Google has some really smart people and there is an inner circle of smart rich people who keep Google infrastructure going.  Silicon Valley has an article on Google's Jeff Dean.

How Google's Jeff Dean became the Chuck Norris of the Internet

By Will Oremus, Slate
Posted:   01/24/2013 12:46:39 PM PST

 

 
 
"The speed of light in a vacuum used to be about 35 mph. Then Jeff Dean spent a weekend optimizing physics." — Jeff Dean Facts

Jeff Dean facts aren't, well, true. But the fact that someone went to the trouble to make up Chuck Norris-esque exploits about Dean is remarkable. That's because Jeff Dean is a software engineer, and software engineers are not like Chuck Norris. For one thing, they're not lone rangers - software development is an inherently collaborative enterprise. For another, they rarely shoot cowboys with an Uzi.

Jeff is a low level guy who gets to the bits running on the HW.  What really smart people like this get is it is all about processing bits.  Processing bits is done in SW and HW, and sometimes SW changes the HW. 

Nevertheless, on April Fool's Day 2007, some admiring young Google engineers saw fit to bestow upon Jeff Dean the honor of a website extolling his programming achievements. For instance:

Jeff Dean (Courtesy: Google)

Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers.

Jeff Dean writes directly in binary. He then writes the source code as documentation for other developers.

When Jeff Dean has an ergonomic evaluation, it is for the protection of his keyboard. Jeff Dean was forced to invent asynchronous APIs one day when he optimized a function so that it returned before it was invoked.








 

Here is a bit of a peak into the inner circle fueled by cappuccinos

Almost every morning, he comes into work at the GooglePlex in Mountain View, Calif., and sits down for coffee with the same core group of people. "We've made 20,000 cappuccinos together" over the years, he estimates. These people don't all work together. In fact, as Google has grown, some have moved to different buildings on opposite sides of the campus. But when they get together to dish about what they're doing, their problems spark ideas in one another, Dean says. These coffee talks are what has enabled Dean to put his expertise in optimization, parallelization and software infrastructure to work on such a wide array of projects. That and healthy doses of ambition and confidence. "He's always very enthusiastic and optimistic about how much we can get done," says Ghemawat, his longtime collaborator. "It's hard to discourage him."

Here is a presentation that Jeff did on Google in 2009, it gives you some history and pictures of what Google Data Centers used to look like.

 

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