CeBIT

This is the end ... my friend ... just the end. I just boarded an IC to Hamburg. I didn´t read the informations correctly, thus i thought that i have to work until 18 o´clock ... but the CeBIT ended two hours earlier. At last: Mission completed, i did my very best. If you liked it, tell it to others. If you didn´t liked it, drill yourself a hole in your knee

We distributed every single OpenSolaris CD we had at the booth. At least i wasn´t able to found one. I even gave a way the CD we put in the optical drive to show the live boot . I just kept one of them for the last photo just before i gave away, too. I will ask Ingo about the number of CD but it must have been thousands.

This CD was really the last one:


I´ve repeated my magic - as my collegue Ingo called it - . But as Arthur C. Clarke wrote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.". The technology was ZFS in this case.

This day was definitely the day of the giveaway opposums. By the way, in the typology of CeBIT visitors this category ranges at the least liked end. I have a mixed position regarding the giveaway opposums. There are really many just impolite people within them, but on the other side i had some really interesting discussion with some of them. The giveaway opposum of today may be the decider tomorrow.

But there are several kinds of opposums anyway ... the Opposoraptor is prey opposum. It just grabs anything that isn´t nailed or glued to the booth. The only way to keep your pen is to keep it body attached to your lanyard or at clipped at your polo. I´ve kept some spare pens in my brochure holder next to my visit cards. One Opposoraptor just grabed into it and took out all of them. Not one, not two ... no ... seven in one strike. A prey opposum can easily yield the pens for their whole lifetime at a single CeBIT.There is another interesting form of the Opposoraptor ... a domestified kind: The giveaway opposum ask you before it grabs away all your pens, all your DVDs.

Of course there are several giveaway opposums that didn´t forget the rules of a good behaviour. I like them most because there remind me, that the ones with this egocentric and questionale behaviour are just a small group. Most of them ask in a polite way. Maybe i´m centering to much on being polite, but you learn most about people from their small gestures, not by the big things.

I don´t know if there is something like halloween in Hannover ... i just assume parents send their kids to CeBIT for getting sweets, small giveways and enough pens until they leave the equivalent of the senior high school. Anyway, as many jokes you make about the giveaway opposums: It´s a symbiosis. The opposum cleans the inhabitant of the booth of surplus giveaways.

The last day of the CeBIT has finally arrive. Just loaded my energy buffers with liquid energy: Coffee with a substantial amount of sugar. I shouldn´t stir it ... the coffee could get really sweet then

I´ve practiced my extended demo case a few times yesterday evening and this morning ... thus i´m reasonably fluent in it to use it today. The next week of work will start directly after the this last day of the CeBIT. I´m glad that my flight to Frankfurt starts at 11:25 tomorrow morning. Some hours of extra sleep would be nice and i hope i get them this night.

Sorry, that this article isn´t longer ... i´m too tired at the moment to write. The last article about this CeBIT will be a little bit longer.

I´m sitting in the train to Hamburg ... there is only a single day in front of me. As i wrote three years ago ... the CeBIT is a monster that eats you, chews you a while and spits you in the next corner with a bunch of stinking clothes.

Nevertheless: This day was cool .. we distributed OpenSolaris CD almost faster than we could get them to our presentation booth. At one occassion Detlef tried to get more DVD. He distributed all CD of a large bunch he got on the 3 metres from the reception counter to the pod. Okay ... even when we assume that 90% of this people were giveaway opposums then we generated a vast amount of possible new installations of OpenSolaris today.

I made my "Monday to Friday" snapshot demo again and again today. BTW: I will use a Special-Extended-Edition of it tomorrow. This time with snapshoting and cloning a volume filled with UFS. I just tested the trick to be sure, that the first demonstration will work tomorrow. We get them all with ZFS. There is a topic that will find it´s way into a tutorial in the next : Why aren´t there different Solaris versions for 32-bit and 64-bit? This was an everoccuring question throughout the last days.

But even when it´s cool to evangelize Solaris on this large scale and even under the consideration, that i like the CeBIT: My energy buffers are almost empty now. I´m really glad that there is just one day ahead of me. Well ... as usual ... see you tomorrow at CeBIT, just in the case i´m not greeting or talking to you, it´s not because i´m unfriendly, it´s just because of a total loss of voice. Additionally i will be alone there. Detlef took his day off tomorrow to see his family again. I decided to take this day later ...

BTW: It wasn´t Johnny Cash today ... it was Daft Punks "Harder Better Faster Stronger" in the Extended Live Edit that i´ve played on my iPod in heavy rotation.

Okay ... it was a wise decision to make an bahn.comfort reserveration yesterday evening for the train today. The train is really full. Only a few places free .... people travelling for weekend trips meet long distance commuters meets CeBIT travel. So people are standing everywhere .... the restaurant car was filled with people unable to find seats elsewhere. I just got a coffee from there because the coffee guy won´t make it through such masses of people.

In my typology of CeBIT visitors at my booth, i want to write about an additional class after the "Rampants" (those trying to explain, that ZFS is a bad idea, because it´s a rampant layering violation) and the "Gadget Opposums" (collecting everything not nailed or glued to the booth, i assume they would put a coffee mug with still hot coffee in it in their bags when you don´t look at it for a few seconds). Today i want to talk about a really annoying appearance on the CeBIT: I call this class of people "Divertors".

You have people at the booth you try to explain parts of the system. As they know not so much about Solaris, you have to proceed with a didactic concept, as you can´t tell them "ZFS is a self-validating Merkle-Tree with a redirect-on-write to ensure data validity and allocated space on a least loaded strategy. The cache is self-optimizing in regard of MRU and MFU". You have to do it differently. It´s like teaching. The problem: You have just a few minutes to make your point. And then there comes the Divertor. He stands by, waits a moment and ask a question. The Type 1 divertor is just impolite and con´t wait until you closed the discussion with the other guests. The Type 2 divertor is a guy just wants to show how much he or she (mostly he, i didn´t saw a female type 2 divertor so gar) knows and ask you question, it matches to the topic but it´s like discussing about airline meals and then someone asks you questions about the Auto-Throttle function of Flight Management System and why the 737 uses only the left radio altimeter for the throttle control. It completely destroys the didactic concept, as you have to jump on a different level, your first guest understand nothing.

Such questions doesn´t help anyone: Not the first guest, as he understand just "Train Station", the divertor just get a precise, short and answer and the presentor at the pod just thinks "Man, you just had to wait an additional minute, and i would have a little more time to answer your question...." or "Yeah, i´m know you are sooooo coool". By the way: There are two additional subclasses: The super divertor. This is someone from the competition using questions at the booth about the system he learnt from their competitive beat sheet (seldom, as this can lead to a mutual assurred destruction situation and is just bad style in any case).

And even worse is the "Divertor with Girlfriend", asking questions just show his girlfriend that he is better than the people at the booth. This is my fourth CeBIT at Sun and twice i was a inch away of saying "Okay, let´s stop this dick length competition. I know that you are soooooo cool. ".

Just to make it clear .... Divertors are seldom ... almost all visitors are polite, really interested and don´t have a dick length complex It is just a promille of a promille. But you remember them because of their behaviour and the fact that they are seldom Okay .... We just passed the Autobahn 2 ... so just a few minutes to the train station of the Hannover fairground. As usual: See you at CeBIT 2009.

Strange ... my feet doesn´t hurt so much today ... i will check this evening if they are still in my shoes. I hope so I´m not that tired like yesterday. What´s wrong with this day?

The fourth day of the CeBIT has come to an end. I think it wasn´t that full like yesterday, but it was close. I can´t see "Schnitzel Wiener Art" (an escalope with pork, not beef) anymore ... but it´s the only meal available in an finite amount of time in the self-service restaurant, that looks reasonably well. I´m not convinced that putting some cutted slices of a chicken breast filet sausage makes a chicken breast fillet salad out of an otherwise normal salad. And i´m not convinced that there is any justification for the price of this salad ... although ... 15,80 for a faked escalope is something between a bad joke and daylight robbery.

A first résumé after four days: Despite all this crisis discussion it was a good CeBIT so far. It wasn´t that crowded like past CeBITs but he level of the CeBIT visitors was really high this year (at least in my humble opinion). Just a few gadget opposums. Many interesting people with interesting problems and interesting challenges giving interesting insights in their business. I´m really curious what the both weekend days will feature.

I´ve met several interesting people at the presentation pod today, had an interesting discussion about the future of professional IT services (Not Sun PS, the whole business ...) as i was a project engineer the first years at Sun, we´ve talked a while about it while pitching Sun as a innovative technology company giving them a competive edge (hey, it´s CeBIT, i´m there for pitching, not for discussing) .

The daily pet peeve for this day: Please use a non-obtrusive after-shave or/and perfume when visiting CeBIT. I´ve got a terrible headache from some of the perfumes today. When you stand at the presentation pod and you have several people bathed in a mixture of Tobacco and Old Spice on one side and Tosca and 4711 on the other side your brain wants to jump out of the skull. So: Everyone standing at a booth on any fairground on this planet will thank you when you just use a light deodorant.

Okay, i´m almost in Hamburg ... i will close this article now.

PS: The feet are still there ....

Okay, i´m in my 07:01 train from Hamburg towards Hannover. It´s the fourth day of this CeBIT. At the moment there are as many hours in front of me than behind me. My summary of the last day: The mindshare of OpenSolaris got vastly bigger since my last CeBIT 2 years ago. The opinion of the visitors about Sun got much more positive and nobody seems to question our position about open source.

My expectations for this day: Hell on earth. Professional user who didn´t find an earlier slot in their schedule to visit the CeBIT, many people who use the CeBIT to get earlier out of office. And we will see the first waves of "Beutelratten" at the late afternoon, the well-known class of people collecting everything that isn´t nailed, glued or otherwise fixed to the booth.

By the way: I didn´t wrote about it yesterday, but i did one of my Moellenkamp-Specials. I went for lunch, tried to pay and well ... i took the wrong portemonaie out the safe i´m sharing with two colleagues in our wardrobe. When i told this the owner of the portmaine with the comment, that i recognized this because i didn´t knew i wear glasses, he just annotated "Obviously you need glasses". But to my defense ... both were black

And to the usual state of mind in my CeBIT articles: I really like this idiots in the train ... you sidestep into a seat row to enable the people walking in the opposite direction to pass by and there are still people, that just overtake me and block the aisle instead of understanding the concept of breaking a deadlock introduced by the Pauli principle.Being polite seems to be a forgotten art. And i´m starting to get really weird ... listened to the live cd of Kraftwerk while traveling to Hannover. The live version of "The Robots" is really great. And no ... i´m not going insane ... at least not even more insane than usual. Perhaps tomorrow ..I assume i will listen to Johnny Cash tomorrow morning ... Having said this: A nice boing bumm-tchack peng to you all.

Pheeewww .... this day was really fscking hard. It´s 18:51 and i´ve just entered the IC towards Hannover. Towards Hannover? Well ... i had a presentation in Braunschweig for a customer. So i have to drive back to Hannover now and from there i will board an ICE to Hamburg. ETA in Hamburg: 20:54. ETA for my home 21:15. ETA for my bed: 21:15:00:01.

This day is over. Let´s call it a day. Detlef, I really hope that your remaining day alone at CeBIT OpenSolaris pod wasn´t too hard for you but i promised the presentation today a while ago.

In the blog article of yesterday evening i´ve mentioned, that ZFS is still a major point of interest for the audience. I even recycled my "monday-tuesday - snapshot - wednesday - snapshot - delete monday - thursday - snapshot - friday - recover monday" ZFS pitch from two years ago ... this pitch has still the "audience puzzled" effect. Perhaps i´ve lost the astonishment as i´m working on a daily basis with ZFS.

Regarding to reaction of the customers Sun really seems to have an different way to staff the booth. Yes, there were already comments about you people in this blog, but at least three occasions some customers told me, that they were positively surprised about the deep knowledge of our people. One was really impressed, that there was someone able to explain the way how the update of the ZFS uberblock is done. Looks like most other booths are staffed with sales peoples.

Otherwise i started to have a simple answer to people who wants to offload "There is a bug/a missing feature in Opensolaris". It´s simply: It there an bug case or a RFE case in Opensolaris. We need them! 1 RfE of a customer is better than 3 yelling Sunnies. Another point: We have good knowledge about Solaris but we really don´t know how to help with every configuration and/or problem. Or as i tend to think (i do not allow me to say this aloud) "Hell, do not a zfs send sunsolve@today | zfs receive joergs/brain every morning". We really like to help with every question you ask us, but don´t be too disappointed, when we can´t answer every question right at the booth! Jörn from ende-der-vernunft.org, was at our booth today. A nice guy and he seems to know what he does the whole day! Met him the first time in real-life. Gregor aka Anfalas made a pass-by in the early morning, but i´ve met him before in Erlangen two times. Nevertheless nice to meet him again!

Okay ... It´s 19:33, the ICE rolls towards Hamburg, but the train crew announced a 9 minute delay at this very moment. I hope it stays this way.

I´m sitting in the train towards CeBIT fairgrounds at the moment. My anger totally disappeared when i´ve read this tweet written by cypromis.

Thank you or the kudos, but we have many excellent people at the CeBIT booth. Just to name a few: Detlef Drewanz as my colleague at the OpenSolaris presentation pod. As i wrote on other occassion. Extremly competent about Solaris et al. Or Thorsten Lange from the OpenStorage part. He talks all day long about the future of storage. He is really on of the experts regarding storage and archiving at Sun. Or Michael Tievenow. He shows xVM at our booth... i´ve worked with him in a large implementation project for the N1 Service Provisioning System (yes, implemention not presales). Or Abdi Mohammadi, a Principal Field Technologist at Sun, he forgot more about large-scale LDAP implementation (really large scale, take the biggest implementation you know and add several magnitudes to it) and Sun software than i will ever know. Hinrich Tobaben ... highly experienced Sun employee for several years now. When i started to work for Sun in 2001, he was already longer at Sun than i´m today. Or Ingo Frobenius ... technical marketing done right. And there are more colleagues with such a deep technical background at the CeBIT booth. I assume, this is the reason why we get such positive comments from customers and partners. This must have been said ...

So ... we just arrived in Hannover - Main Station. See you at CeBIT today and otherwise: Have a nice day

Well ... it´s good that between my presentation pod and the train and the first possibility to write a blog entry (the train station) is a 15 minute walk. And it´s even better that i have to travel two hours between my presentation pod and the first opportunity to send this article. This is the eleventh iteratio or so of this paragraph. I was really pissed off in that very moment. I was really angry a second later ... now i´m just upset. I assume i will not think about it when i´m home, because i didn´t expected something else from a person i´m connected with in mutual dislike (and i assume total disrespect for me on the other side and starting disrespect for him on my side). I will not write more about it ... my professional attitude don´t allow to write more at this location. I will not wash this laundry here . This paragraph is just a small pressure valve for me to prevent explosion ... it´s just the first milimeter of a meter of anger ... but the guy doesn´t read this blog anyway.

But otherwise this day was really good. It was a excellent day I had many interesting discussions ... i´ve met several readers of my blog. Most of them just told me, that they read my blog after the discussion. It´s really nice to see my reader in reality. Pageviews are nice. But a simple "Thank You" from real people is a better incentive to keep blogging than any pageview and visit counter.

The aisles were vastly more frequented this day. The frequency of discussions was vastly higher today. There were many good discussions. At least at the presentation pod of Detlef and me people often just stops by and just listening to the discussion we have with other people and often i think there were many lightbulbs appearing over their heads. And as far as i observed the other presentations pods it was pretty much the same at other Of course you have a fair share of problematic customers: I had one of them today ... going into a "rampant layering discussion" when i just try to explain the virtues of ZFS to another customer. I don´t like such booth visitors.

By the way: In it´s third year after it´s integration to Solaris 10 ZFS gets more and more positive comments from users. "ZFS is more sophisticated than any other filesystem", "ZFS is great", "If just Linux would stop with the politics and simply integrate ZFS". I really thought i must talk about new stuff in OpenSolaris to attract new customers as i assumed that ZFS starts to wear off as one of the lead feature of Solaris. To the contrary: It attracts more and more users. We distributed over two-hundred OpenSolaris 2008.11 CDs today. The recent article in c´t about OpenSolaris and ZFS seemed to have an amplifying effect to the interest. Another eye opener is VirtualBox. I really like the puzzled look of some of customers, when they look at a OpenSolaris Desktop onto a OpenSolaris Desktop.

Despite of the occurances described in the first paragraph i´m really looking forward for tomorrow. I really like to be at CeBIT. Weird ... i know ... but everyone has a perversion, and enjoying the CeBIT is only a harmless perversion. I think i will close this day with looking the recent House M.D. episode i´ve recorded yesterday evening, take a shower, chat a little bit with really good friends like local to ensure them that i´m still alive and i still like them and it´s just the CeBIT that lead to the silence .... and then find my way in my bed. Thursday will be hefty. I´m at CeBIT until noon or so ... afterwards talk about Solaris and Opensolaris at a customer event near Hannover. See you tomorrow in Hannover!

Yawn ... 2nd day of CeBIT has just begun ... or to be more exact ... my second day of CeBIT has just begun, as the fair grounds will open at 09:00. My day starts a little bit earlier. At 05:30 to be exact ... my train goes at 07:01. Well ... they should distribute caffeine IV in this trains.

Communiting everyday? As the best hotel pillow of the world is silver , but your own pillow is golden, i decided two CeBITs ago to commute by train between Hamburg and Hannover Fairground. Better short and deep sleep than a longer, but shallow sleep.

You can drive there with a high-speed train in one hour thirty minutes. And you can use the trip back to Hamburg to look a video. BTW: I think i really shocked my seat neighbour with looking an anime with people beheaded by female androids ... yes ... viewed Ghost in a Shell 2 again ... i love this movie.

The reaction and the Sun booth is a little bit mixed, but i really like the rule "No suits" for the CeBIT booth teams. It´s a little bit hard for some of our sales peoples not to wear a suit. A colleague told me, that we all look like hosts and hostesses. To be exact: We are hosts and hostesses, just with a different job: Normal hosts deliver coffee and organisatorial stuff stuff (no CeBIT booth would work with out them), we deliver explanations, informations and insights. Not that different. And it really helps when talking with younger admins.

Oh my god ... younger admins. I felt so old sometimes yesterday ... some of the people were at least 10 years younger than myself. I assume I´m one of the experienced, older ones ... I´m not one of the young and wild admins. 10 years from now i will tell stories about the good old time, will be full-bearded and tell everyone stories from the trenches 20 years ago like "I´ve repaired hard disks with nothing else than a screw drive, a dirt devil and a soldering iron for a last backup read." just to earn a puzzled look "Hard drives????". Time is a monster eating you away, year for year.

But back to the dress code: We wear black at CeBIT. Black throusers or skirt (no, i don´t wear a skirt ...) and a long-arm polo shirt. But i spell the curse of ever-lasting stinking socks on the person, who decided to opt for "skinny-fit" shirts leaving nothing for imagination in regard of tendencies towards different stages of upcoming adipositas ...

PS: I really like this moments, when arrogant looking people trying to remove someone from a seat they think they have reserved ... just to recognize a few seconds later that they didn´t understand the concept of seat numbers, numbers of the car and train numbers ....

My feeling about theis CeBIT are a little bit mixed. I had some great discussions today with customers, many questions and i had enough to do, so i didn´t felt bored for a second. And our management talked about an all-in-all successful day. At the moment i don´t really have an idea how to transform the discussions in the univeral currency of trade shows in regard of measuring performance. Creating leads is difficult, many discussions are with people just asking "How is Solaris different to Linux? Why should I use it?". While many want to try it, you can´t make a lead out of it. On my way back to Hamburg i just decided to ignore all this lead-generation stuff for most of the disussions and try to evanglize as much as possible for Solaris.

But i was a little bit shocked on the other hand: The aisles in the CeBIT are wide and many booth looks like being planed for a much smaller area and now they doesn´t know how to use the larger amount of space. Unused space everywhere albeit they used some blocking elements so you you have no insights to this areas.

I can´t help but i have the feeling that this year is clearly a crisis CeBIT: Two years ago the train station at Hannover Fairgrounds was filled with people ... this time it was no problem to get a place at a table to type some lines about the CeBIT. No problems to get a seat -yes , a seat - in the bus shortly after 18:00.

By the way, dear Deutsche Bahn: Please repair the electronic time table at the train station. It´s a terrible business card for our country, when some lines of aren´t functional at all and many letters just display any letter, but not the correct one.

Well ... i hope the following days will bring more visitors to CeBIT.

Okay, first day of the CeBIT. I´m really a little bit tired. I almost finalized the virtual OS image for my GUUG tutorial next week last night. I´ve tried to anticpate of longer running jobs to save some time in the tutorial.

Well ... i really like the CeBIT ... i was really a little bit sad about the fact, that i couldn´t help last year. So ... when i complain about the CeBIT just ignore it. I wasn´t forced to go to CeBIT, i asked if i can help at CeBIT. So it´s my fault. I just didn´t realized that i have a meeting in Mannheim on 9.3, GUUG at 10.3. and 11.3 in Karlruhe and a meeting in Berlin on 12.3. To falling in pieces is allowed on 13.3

But I´m diverting from the topic: I´m really looking forward to help at CeBIT. Well .... when you look at the number exhibitors at the CeBIT you could joke: Visit the CeBIT as long as the CeBIT still exists. 25 percent less exhibitors. That´s a large heap. I´ve already wondered about the vast empty spaces at CeBIT 2007 and this year, it looks to be even more extreme.

Perhaps the time for such large exhibitions is over. You can get really in close contact with your customers via blogs. The flow of informations isn´t limited to such big events.

The CeBIT has it´s official blog this year: 01blog.de. At the moment, it look like yet another gadget blog. But let´s wait for the things to come when the start of the CeBIT is imminent. BTW: I don´t know if i´m working on the CeBIT this year.

Wer sich angucken möcht, wie sehr sich Studenten und andere Bezieher von Kleineinkommen zur CeBIT zum Horst machen, möge einfach mal auf den Vorplatz des Messebahnhofs gucken. Dort laufen violette Plüschbuchstaben herum. Wenn nicht ein paar Buchstaben gerade auf Klo waren, war das wohl eine Werbemassnahme von BenQ. Also ich würde ja schon deswegen nicht so rumlaufen, weil ich nicht herausfinden wollen würde, was Mobilsiemensianer machen, wenn sie diesen Namen lesen ....

Obwohl: Das arme Mädchen, das meine Firma 2005 in ein Krankenschwesterkostüm gesteckt hat als Werbemassnahme für Sun Services tut mir bis heute leid ....

Nun da ich in den vergangenen Tagen 8 mal im Skywalk am Samsung Werbebanner vorbeigelaufen bin kann für mein ästhetisches Empfinden sagen: Beyonce ist ausnehmend unschön. Für das Aussehen auf dem Photo ist glaube ich der Begriff "billig" geprägt worden. Noch ein Grund mehr für mich, kein Mobile von Samsung zu kaufen.

Ja, ich hab geschrieben "normale Berichterstattung" ... aber je länger ich über die Veranstaltung nachdenke, desto mehr fällt mir ein.