USENIX 2006 wrap up


I recently got back from the annual USENIX technical conference, and thought I would BLOG about my adventures while I was in Boston. The following is a day-by-day breakdown of the sessions and events I attended:

Day 1 The first day I arrived, I attended a presentation from Alex Russell titled “Ajax and Advanced Responsive Day Webapp Development.” Alex began his talk with an overview of Javascript, and then proceeded to talk about the pros and cons of the numerous AJAX toolkits. His talk was exciting, and it was interesting seeing how AJAX fits into the web development model

Day 2 On day 2, I attended the keynote “PlanetLab: Evolution vs. Intelligent Design in Planetary-Scale Infrastructure,” which I was hoping was a talk on deploying and managing large distributed systems. The talk was ok, but nothing special. After the talk let out, I listened to several researchers talk about enhancements to Xen. This was an interesting track, and I thought Optimizing Network Virtualization in Xen was a cool paper. I also got to attend a a Perl guru session and a storage performance workshop during day 2, and had fun chatting with folks at the FreeBSD BOF.

Day 3 I started day 3 with John Sellen’s “RRDTool: Logging and Graphing” guru session. I got a lot of John’s talk, and found that the information was directly applicable to my job. Next I attended Steve Bellovin’s “Permissive Action Links, Nuclear Weapons, and the History of Public Key Cryptography” talk. Steve is a great public speaker, and one of the top security reseearchers in the world. His talk was interesting, especially the techniques he used to gather information on nuclear technology. I attended two additional talks after Steves, but they were somewhat dull and not worth talking about.

Day 4 On day 4 I attended David Sklar’s “Learning PHP5.” This was an awesome talk, and brought me up to speed on how PHP5 works. David is an exceptional speaker, and he definitely knows PHP inside and out.

Once David’s talk let out, I hopped on a plane and zipped back home. I have to say that I was somewhat dissappointed with USENIX 2006. The BOFs where non-existent, attendance seemed to be down from past conferences, and the vendors where nowhere to be seen. In the future, I think I will stick with LISA.

This article was posted by Matty on 2006-06-10 10:47:00 -0400 -0400