The WelDuh!

I really do miss the 90s, I don’t think my taste of music has changed since then either. Anyway I got my hulu.com invite today and what did I do? Watch The Simpsons! Even though I have heard good things about hulu.com I am disappointed at the clip to episode ratio. Besides that it is a great player and I haven’t had any problems playing it on my windows or linux box. Further review to come… until then have fun watching The Simpsons

Muscle Memory, is it muscle or memory? A couple weeks ago while listening to “East Meets West” Tom Merritt showed a huge aversion to the term “muscle memory.” I twittered him and didn’t get a response, but someone did write in to the podcast to get clarification on Tom’s dislike of it. What it is really that Tom views “muscle memory” as inaccurate for really it is not your muscles that actually memorize anything. Then further explains that it is a body building term used to explain how after conditioning a muscle group that it is easier to regain that conditioning after a period. But I would just call that that conditioning.

I honestly haven’t heard “muscle memory” used that way before. The way that it has always been used in my circle is not from the weight lifting perspective, but from the fighters perspective. It was used to describe a programed response or reaction. To turn a sweep, a throw even a counter punch into something that happens without thinking, that is muscle memory. A reflex quick response to an action put against you.

Though I agree with the base of Tom’s argument, the term “muscle memory” can be confusing. For it implies that the muscles are doing the storage which is wrong. But it is a Pavlovic response that one does not have to think about and just does.

These guys were a big sponsor at SCALE, they gave me a few T-shirts actually. But the reason why wasn’t the greatest. I wanted to find out more information on their servers and told them that we would be looking into getting another server for work and that I wasn’t the main guy making the decision. As soon as they found out that I would not be making the decision they asked me who was and gave me shirts for them and a card and displayed no interest in talking to me further. But hey they were nice enough to sponsor SCALE so here is their plug.

SILICON MECHANICS is a leading manufacturer of rack-optimized servers, storage and high performance computing products. We were founded with the express objective to provide rack-optimized server and storage equipment directly to IT end-users. We design and manufacture solutions based on innovative technology, superior performance and higher reliability.

You can now watch the first three seasons of the original Star Trek and other classics like MacGyver through a flash player on their site.

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The MindTouch guys were pretty cool, think I might try it out, I am looking for a wiki. The back end is written in c# while the front end is written in php which I find an interesting mix. It might help me implement it at work though since where I work is a windows shop.

MindTouch Deki Wiki is the most popular vendor backed wiki. It delivers much more value to the enterprise than any other wiki because it is a distributed application platform with a wiki interface.

This is not actually a T-shirt but a red hat, which completely makes sense, since it is “Red Hat.” I actually got the hat a the Fedora booth, the guy I talked to was cool we chatted a bit and I told him how I like the distro and always give every version a try. Red Hat will always have a place in my linux heart for my first distro was Red Hat 5.2 and without them I might of never discovered linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a central component of Red Hat’s Linux Automation strategy, which covers all facets of the IT environment necessary to enable any application to be run anywhere, at any time. The strategy creates an infrastructure which is built for automation, including virtualization, identity management, high availability, and performance capabilities.

Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that showcases the latest in free and open source software. Fedora is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. It is built by people across the globe who work together as a community: the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is open and anyone is welcome to join. The Fedora Project is out front for you, leading the advancement of free, open software and content.

This is the shirt you get when you register at SCALE. I can’t believe that I have missed it the past three years that I have lived just over an hour away. It was a great experience and anyone who is even just curious about linux should come and check it out. Scale is just a great place to learn and network with other linux users.

The Southern California Linux Expo features an exhibit floor for vendors to meet and interact with attendees. Past expositions have featured exhibits from companies such as IBM and Google, Linux user groups such as the San Gabriel Valley LUG, and non-profit organizations such as the Linux Public Broadcasting Network.

I really don’t have much to say about this booth. They just threw a T-Shirt at me and then almost ignored me. So I just took off but here is the shirt that they gave me:

The Splunk booth had some of the best shirts, “We take the SH out of IT” was one and another was “algorithmic acts of kindness” and the one I got was “Australian for grep” meaning Splunk. Right now I am running splunk on my home server to see if it can help out with our boxes at work. The sales tech at their booth was really helpful and informed, which I found throughout SCALE as opposed to other conferences where they just hire booth babes.

“Splunk is the IT Search engine. Search, navigate, alert and report on all your IT data in real time. Logs, configurations, messages, traps and alerts, scripts and metrics. If a machine can generate it - Splunk can eat it.”

SCALE was a great experience, period. I have been to a few conferences this past year including: Podcast and New Media Expo, North American Mixed Martial Arts Expo (NAMMAE) and e-Tail. In review SCALE had to be one the best of the expos, maybe tied with NAMMAE, but they are two totally different expos. The worst I would say is e-Tail because it was just market speak all over the place.

On to the T-Shirt Reviews! First it was the Zenoss booth. They were really nice and gave a good explanation of their product. “Zenoss provides a complete suite of software and services to help you succeed in monitoring your IT infrastructure. Our software provides a single, integrated solution for monitoring your entire IT infrastructure - network, servers, applications, across the full lifecycle - inventory, configuration, availability, performance, events.”