Jeff's Professional Side

This post is a bit late in coming, but I’ve been working on it since my body was somewhere over southern Utah during my flight from Atlanta (home to me) to San Francisco. Having had my nose buried in Lyle Estill’s book Small Is Possible, my mind was in Chatham County, North Carolina (home of OpenNMS Group World HQ). Walking from the head through business class back to my seat I thought that one of the guys I walked past looked familiar. For a brief instant I could see his face at Chatham Marketplace. That notion was plausible because I’ve been there a couple times with Tarus, but not at all likely. I climbed back across two neighbors to my window seat in coach, looked out again at canyon country, and got out my laptop to start writing this post.

Originally, nobody from the OpenNMS project was slated to go to LWCE. We have had a booth in the .ORG pavilion in past years — up until last year, in fact:

Page 42 of the LWCE 2008 Attendee Guide features Ben (left) and Antonio in the OpenNMS booth at LWCE 2007!

Despite having been offered a booth again, we decided to pass this year as the show has become increasingly commercialized and decreasingly about Open Source software. The purpose of my trip as I understood it was to provide technical support for a demo, to run in the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) showcase, showing how alerts from Hyperic HQ could be turned into help-desk tickets in Concursive ConcourseSuite (formerly Centric CRM). Both Hyperic and Concursive are OSA members; The OpenNMS Group is not a member, but has independently developed integrations with both HQ and ConcourseSuite. The idea was to show off a software stack that David, in a clever play on LAMP, dubbed OUCH:

• OpenNMS
• Ubuntu
• Concursive
• Hyperic

David had built an Ubuntu virtual machine and installed OpenNMS, HQ Open Source, and ConcourseSuite Community Edition before his plate filled up and he handed off the project to me. All that was left for me to do was to set up the integrations. As luck would have it, the VM became corrupted on setup day (Monday) and I had to start completely from scratch. I’d left my Ubuntu media at home, and the Internet access both on the show floor and at my hotel was slow and unreliable. I hit up the team from Canonical for a Hardy x86 server CD. Those guys have a real penchant for giving away install media, and would not let me leave without also taking DVDs of the desktop version for both x86 and x86_64 and a pile of stickers. In exchange for their help, I promised to put an Ubuntu sticker on my Macbook Pro for the demo. Chalk one up for a project that does business without ever charging for the right to use its software, and therefore has no agenda that could put it at odds with its community of volunteer contributors.

On the way out of the hall that day, I stopped by the Hyperic booth to say “hi” to Stacey, and also got to meet Jeremy Hogan, Hyperic’s new Directory of Community Management. Jeremy lives in the RTP area, right in the back yard of our World HQ. Hopefully we’ll get him to join us for lunch before he gets whisked away to the other coast!

I spent Tuesday fighting crappy Internet access, working out operational kinks in the integrations among the three applications in the OUCH stack (with lots of great help from Josh and Ananth of Concursive), watching people walk through the OSA Showcase area without watching the demos, and wandering the show floor dodging the Dice operatives who simply could not fathom that I am employed at what is literally my dream job. Outside Canonical’s mammoth booth and the .ORG ghetto (where I ran into Josh from PostgreSQL), I spotted only one software exhibitor that actually gets what Open Source means and lives it the way we do. That vendor is OpsView, a Nagios® integrator that sells only services. The guy I talked to in their booth was Adrian, who not only works with OpsView but turns out to be a co-worker of the OGP’s own Jonathan Sartin. Truly it’s a small (Linux)world. I was happy to learn that OpsView won Best System Management Tool in this year’s Product Excellence Awards at LWCE even despite all the money that another Nagios integrator (one that tries to do a hybrid Open Source / commercial play) was spending to put people on the floor wearing penguin costumes and carrying sandwich boards.

At lunch time on Wednesday, OGP member Jason (who also cooks a damn tasty pork chop) came by for a while. He and I walked around the floor together and talked to a couple of interesting hardware vendors on the NGDC side of the show. Apart from those guys and the .ORG ghetto, I’m inclined to agree with Jay’s assessment that the show at large amounted to “a lot of vendor wankery”. After more help from David my demo was finally ready to go, so I took over the podium and the big screen. Despite looping among a pretty slide show, a video loop that I had made for LUGRadio Live USA 2008, and a demo of the actual integration, only a few people ever sat down, and probably 75% of those who did had stopped just to rest their feet. At one point I abandoned the presentation entirely and sat down to talk with two gentlemen who were more interested in substance (”So what’s your demo actually supposed to show me?”) than in flash, and in ideology (”Wait, you’re not pulling an open-source bait and switch?”) than in hype. Even so, I suspect the number of people I truly reached and engaged is larger than the number drawn in during the rest of the show by the other demos from the OSA Showcase.

I came home early on the Wednesday night redeye and felt fine about missing the last day of the show on Thursday. All in all, I think the week affirmed our assessment that the U.S. LWCE is no longer a worthwhile show for us. I’ll see you in London in October!

Geeky, OpenNMS, Software, Travel

I’ve just wrapped up a trip to Austin, Texas. This was my first visit to Austin despite my parents having lived there for over a year, so Mandy and I went out on Friday afternoon and spent the weekend at their place. We had no idea how beautiful Austin is — the hill country is breathtaking in much the same way that Dallas and Houston (both fine cities!) are not.

There’s also very good eating. From Bergstrom we went to the Eastside Café for a tasty and healthy dinner. Saturday brunch at Chez Zee left us literally lying around the living room (the crème brulée French toast is delicious and formidable) for a few hours before heading to The Oasis for drinks and an unfortunately hazy view of Lake Travis. Duly libated, we proceeded to Siena for an excellent Tuscan dinner. Sunday included a new Egoscue menu work-up with my dad and lunch at the Kerbey Lane Café, which besides good food has perhaps the coolest 1960s-retro sink counter ever in its men’s bathroom.

I spent Monday and Tuesday with one of our customers, a video game development house that’s integrating OpenNMS into the system that will monitor and manage the health of the many servers that will power a new MMO game. These guys are using our software in a way that’s not quite like anything I’ve heard of before, and it’s going to be really cool. As a testament to the flexibility of OpenNMS we were able, in just two days, to come to a good understanding of what they want to accomplish and how to approach the project.

Back to food for a moment We broke for an authentically Austinite Tex-Mex lunch at Chuy’s (whose salsa rivals the hole-in-the-wall Mexiclone place near our house) and had dinner at Rudy’s for my first-ever helping of Texas brisket barbecue. On Tuesday one of the guys took me for a quick lunch at Conans, which besides excellent pepperoni and veggie supreme pizza also boasts a really unique atmosphere that I’m told is very Austin.

When I got back from lunch on Tuesday, there was a voicemail waiting in our sales mailbox from Kathleen, the former boss who unwittingly launched my career in the network management field. She wanted to talk with somebody about using OpenNMS to replace an installation of HP OpenView Network Node Manager (HPOV NNM).

Now there’s a bit of history here — when I turned in my notice eight years ago to Kathleen, it was to go to work for a vendor whose software she had paid to train me on. She wasn’t terribly happy about that situation, but I heard that the vendor gave her a couple of free training seats as penance.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll realize that this voicemail arrived on 01 April. I was well primed for pranks already, having been pwned hard-core by YouTube’s masterful RickRoll and having made the OpenNMS “Enterprise Edition” price calculator for one of Tarus‘ series of blog posts. I immediately IMed Johnny to see if he had put her up to calling, but he had had nothing to do with it.

If you’re reading this, Kathleen, thanks for considering OpenNMS and I hope to see you soon in one of our training classes or as the guy doing your GreenLight!

Tuesday night I met up at Koreana with some folks from one of our other Austin customers, also a video game house, who also want to use OpenNMS in their MMO game server monitoring system! If OpenNMS keeps spreading through the video game industry at this rate, the old stand-by of blaming slow game servers for a failed raid will soon be history The bluefin sashimi was great, by the way.

Geeky, OpenNMS, SNMP, Software, Travel

IEEE Spectrum Online has begun a series of travel guides for geeks visiting cities worldwide. The guides are linked from the extras section. I figure I’m most likely to visit NYC next of the two cities they’ve done so far, especially considering that the other is Dublin, Ireland.

Geeky, Travel