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There is a special track at the CEC that is called "Luminaries". It´s reserved for colleagues that are really capacities on their field. One of these luminaries is person known in the whole industry: Radia Perlman. Most of you will know her as the inventor of the most annoying but equally most butt-saving feature of Ethernet ... the spanning tree protocol.

Her talk was a really enlightening about the past, present and the future in networking. But the best were the endless amount of good examples and stories (i´m only able to paraphrase them):

- Ethernet is not a network ... it´s a shared access link layer.
- It´s was a good idea that ISO didn´t substituted TCP/IP ... because one them is a standard body, the other a protocol.
- She hates HTTP. She thought ASN.1 is too complicated until she saw XML. In her opinion, it´s even more complicated than ASN.1 from a computing perspective. Thus any protocol transporting XML over HTTP combines the two most insulting protocols.
- The trend to tunnel much communication about port 80 to be more firewall friendly is indeed firewall hostile, as it prevents the firewalls from properly do it´s task
- You should know the problem before you try to solve it. Her best example: When her son was three he cried about a problem with his hand. She kissed it several times and asked him about the problem. He peed on his hand.

It was a really exciting presentation. Many insights from a woman which really knows her stuff.

PS: One of the last point was really insightful, too ... End2End encryption in the Internet would be the end of the world ... well at least the end of the Internet as we know it. The reason is obvious. With encryption you wouldn´t be able to look into the communication between a spammer and it´s target mail account, thus antispam techniques other than filtering on the client would have no vector to work as they can´t look into the mail or mailheaders There wouldn´t enough bandwidth to transport the SPAM otherwise filterered out before reaching to many hops in the internet.

I´ve wrote in my Twitter feed about the number of attendees: 4000 engineers. This number is interesting out of two reasons: At first its a large amount of people that came together for this conference. Think only about the logistics challenges like breakfast or the problem of 4000 people leaving the room right after the keynotes.

But the more interesting point is: As far as i recall 40 % of the customer facing enginner force of Sun was invited to CEC. This means there are round about 10.000 customer facing engineers out there to represent the technology. Really a huge number .... but when you hear about all the new and cool stuff we will do now and tomorrow, not a single engineer too much ...

IT changes the life, it changes processes, it changes business. Interestingly the way the presentation has to be staged, it showed how huge the possibilites are in everybody´s hand. Alec wasn´t able to make it to Las Vegas out of private reasons. Thus he had prerecord it, send to Las Vegas to a colleague to show it.

Would you believed 10 years ago, that we would able to record a presentation with voice on you home computer, generate 166 MB of files and send it via Internet over the world? And this is the point Alec made in his talk, the world of computing will change within the next 5 years even more massively than it has done in the last 10 years, which leads to complete different way to store, to distribute and to process it, leading to the ultimate red shift application. There is only one problem with it ... there is no need for servers in this possible future. But there is a need for other Sun technologies: Encryption everywhere, assured data integrity and so on ...

This was the best presentation so far and in the way presented on of the biggest proofs of it´s contents. Alec, this was really big cinema. Well done! I really hope, that you will publish a single-file version for the public.

PS: I don´t present on CEC, but my notebook came to CEC honours today, as it was the only one in the room with a recent version of Quicktime installed. But i have still no idea where is annoying ping every two 5 seconds came from ...

I visited the Project Darkstar breakout. It´s really interesting how weak the fundaments of massive online games are. Errorprone, scales badly (you need concepts of so called zones and multiple non-interacting servers) to scale up to the large amount of users.

Project Darkstar wants to solve that. Some interesting concepts like an centralized store of data and actions to enable a real failover an real scalability. It was quite interesting to hear, that the MMO gamin industry has no problem with loosing 5 or 10 seconds data, because today a really nasty fault would cause the loose of weeks or month worth of data. A financial CTO would go insane about 5 seconds data.

People, who ask why we develop such a software: Jeff told us about closed and pending wins for this software. Was a really informative presentation. This isn´t exactly a technology i will use at customers sites, but it was an really interesting look into the challenges of a completly different business.

The executive keynotes started. At the moment Andy speaks about new developments in x86. Sounds really cool, but the presentation is tagged confidential. You can expect really cool new things in this space.

PS: More up date messages of the conference you will find at my twitter feed because i can update it from my mobile phone.

Nothing is real in this city. It´s a copy. Albeit it´s an archievement to copy on such a scale, it misses something ... i wasn´t able to find something like a soul ... It´s really strange to look on the miniature Eiffel Tower. I was at and on the real tower some weeks ago, so i have a comparision: The real one breathes history, the Las Vegas one is just backdrop. I don´t like this city, it looks like a bunch of shopping malls, hotels and casinos with some urban areas for the people working in the first. On my tenth Starbucks mug there is the tagline "Capital of entertainment". I would change it into "capital of copy"

PS: Well i´ve shoot dozens of photos today while walking on both sides of the strip ... expect really a vast amount.

Oh no ... i don´t believe we will leave Berlin on time .... dense fog ...

I think, i can become accustomed to fly as an Lufthansa Frequent Traveller. Lounge access is really cool. Better coffee, free food and at foremost chairs! Plenty of them ... And power outlets ... enough power outlets.

Late-night checkins are really a usefull thing, most of my colleagues in Hamburg have to wake up at five to be 3 hours early at the airport. But the (although canceled) meeting in Berlin saved me from flying Continental in a 757. Call me conservative, but i think that Richard Branson is correct with "4 engines 4 longhaul". I know, the 757 has an ETOPS certification ("Extended-range Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards" but i prefer "Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim") but it´s a matter of trust (i don´t like Boeing) and of comfort (according to all sources the A340 is a really quiet plane)

Hopefully i have some time to write at Frankfurt, but the next main blog entry will be made from Las Vegas. From my view, Las Vegas is a bad location for a conference. When you tell you friends. you go to San Francisco for a conference they say "Have a nice conference and don´t forget to do some sightseeing". When you tell them, that you fly to Las Vegas for a conference, they answer "Have fun, and don´t forget to visit the conference".

Apropos Las Vegas: Television has an interesting effect on the perception of a city. In former times it was the city of Siegfried&Roy, the city of the Rat Pack, even the city of the Mob (of course besides of Chicago). But nowdays i think about plenty of dead people. Why? I assume i´ve viewed to many episodes of CSI Las Vegas. And that "happy slapping"-episode (aired a week ago in Germany) doesn´t generate confidence as well

Well, it´s 6:30 ... breakfast ....

PS: I´ve recognized, that i forgot something important ... batteries for my Quiet Comfort. BTW: I think Constantin is incorrect ... i´ve tried in-ear headphones but active noise canceling yields at least for me more silence ...

Bad thing: My meeting was canceled due a really bad cold (according to voice) by the customer. The good: For the leg between Frankfurt and Denver i´ve got an emergency exit row seat. It doesn´t get better than that in Economy. Legroom galore. Row 26 is the best you can get in an A340-600 according to the usual websites. Yippie !

At this time in seven days, i will be at the Sun Customer Engineering Conference 2007 in Las Vegas, and i´m starting to prepare things the travel for the event. Yesterday my FTL card arrived, so this may fasten up things a little bit at the checkin and the security.

In an attempt of insanity, i´ve scheduled a customer meeting late at friday in Berlin. Thus i fly from Berlin instead of Hamburg. Is quite a trip this time: From Berlin to Frankfurt, from Frankfurt to Denver (hey, my first flight in a A340-600) and from there to Las Vegas. And on the backhaul from Vegas to San Francisco, from San Francisco to Frankfurt and then back to Berlin.

I´ve spend almost all miles in my account to get a business class upgrade for the leg between SFO and FRA. But until now, they didn´t want my miles: No confirmation so far. I assume this will be a quite awful trip back as the last time: With 1,92cm any known economy seat in any known airline is just to small (things will be better in A380 as far as i know, but this doesn´t help next saturday). I hope, that i´m able to gather a exit row seat or it´s likely that my mood will be abyssimal when arriving ...

PS: I even finally found my passport last week but now my appartment looks like after a bomb explosion.

The official invitational mail reached me a few days ago: I will travel to the CEC this year again. I wrote it before, this year in Las Vegas ... i assume, it gives you more bang for the bucks than downtown San Francisco to hold a 3500 heads conference, besides of the issue of not being San Francisco, my favorite city on this planet But, well, wasn´t in Las Vegas before. All i know about the city comes from various CSI episodes

Ben Rockwood put together a list of features for U3. The most important single feature for me is the iSCSI target support. Thumper gets more and more usefull by this. Imagine ripping out all this small 10 percent filled disks out of your small servers and consolidate them to a stack of thumpers on thin provisioned emulated volumes with ZFS ...

Das CEC2006 liegt jetzt zwei Tage zurück. Nachdem ich schon ein wenig über meine persönliche Zusammenfassung meiner Anwesenheit geschrieben habe, möchte ich vielleicht hier an dieser Stelle auch noch mal zusammenfassen, was ich vom CEC2006, dem eigentlichen Grund meiner Anwesenheit, mitgenommen habe. Mit diesem Artikel beende ich meine CEC-Berichterstattung und so wird dies auch gleichzeitig der letzte Zweisprachen eintrag.

Es war eine gute Veranstaltung. Ich habe viele interessante Menschen kennengelernt. Auch wenn das Niveau sehr gemischt war, so waren doch fast alle Veranstaltungen auf sehr hohem Niveau. Es liegt in der Natur der Sache, das nicht alle Vorträge so brilliant sein können, wie jener von Mauro.

Vor allen Dingen durch kurze Gespräche im Hintergrund der Vorträge habe ich einige sehr interessante neue Sichtweisen auf alte Problemstellungen gewonnen. Alles im allen, hat diese Veranstaltung alle meine Erwartungen erfüllt.

Storageville war auch eine sehr gute Idee. Einfach mal die Geräte, von denen man in den Vorträgen gehört hat, gleich live und in Farbe angucken zu können, hat was ...

Es gibt doch noch einen Verbesserungsvorschlag von meiner Seite: Nächstes Mal besseren Kaffee bitte! Die Leute tragen ihre Verpflegungspauschale sonst directement zum Starbucks Mission St Ecke 4th Street.

Ich hoffe, auf jeden Fall, das ich nächstes Jahr auf irgendeine Art und Weise wieder dabei sein kann, entweder als Attendee, Speaker oder als Blogger (Hint!Hint!Hint!)

Wenns mal wieder etwas länger dauert, nimm dir nen iPod ... es gibt am Flughafen von San Francisco tatsächlich einen iPod-Automaten ...