Dramashack:

It is 6pm PST, I am back in California, yet I am still operating on Malay Time. My brain says it’s 9am Saturday morning. I feel a little dizzy. I was only able to get about 3 and a half hours of sleep early this morning. For some reason I just can’t shake the jet lag. I’m sure it’ll get better after the iX company picnic tomorrow.

Malay Time is the term we used on our trip to describe the laid back and relaxed manner in which the Malay people operate. I found it to be nice at times, but also frustrating when trying to get something done quickly. Everything thing was done with care and much attention to detail, which caused simple activities like ordering a burger or checking in/out of the Hotel to take much longer than expected.

We joked all week about Malay Time, and how it’s even more laid back in Hawaii. It made for a nice relaxing trip, for most of us ;-).

Overall, my experience in Malaysia was a positive one. I loved the food, which is good, because they eat about 5 times a day, minimum. The portions for drinks were on the light side, but being an overweight American male, I let it slide. The people were wonderful, welcoming, and quick to make friends. We took a lot of pictures and videos, so I will be posting more stories of my trip as my jet lag wears off. Stay tuned.

So we’ve been promoting BSD here in Malaysia for the entire week.   It’s been really fun, the people here are really embracing open source, and it’s been exciting showing them that there are alternatives to linux.

I have to admit, I am exhausted.  I think my body has decided that it should be back on USA time and that I’m trying to be awake at 3am or something.

The people here have been friendly, and I am really looking forward to this conference running again next year.

That’s right, PC-BSD is going to Malaysia!
Matt Olander, CTO of iXsystems will be speaking on how to “survive an economic downturn using PC-BSD and open source software”. The conference will be held at the Berjaya Times Square Hotel & Convention Center in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. The conference website states the following:

Positioned as [an] International forum for sharing and exchanging ideas on technical advancements, applications, development and business cases on open source, and its positive impact in meeting challenges of the current economic climate. (www.mscmalaysia.my)

Sounds like a great conference to showcase the infinite potential of PC-BSD, I can’t wait!

We will be flying out of SFO in about 12 hours, I’ll keep you posted when we land.

The third annual LinuxFest NW was held at Bellingham Technical College again this year. Denise and I manned the FreeBSD / PC-BSD booths and had a great time demonstrating the new Galileo Edition of PC-BSD. I was surprised at the amount of BSD enthusiasts that came to LinuxFest NW. I wonder why so many shows are Linux-centric. LinuxWorld caught on and renamed their show to OpenSourceWorld; let’s hope to see more of that in the future!

Our booth was next to the folks behind Mer Linux, a linux distro for mobile devices based on Ubuntu. They also demonstrated Linux on the Wii for fun. Everyone came to our booth for the horns, but left with a DVD, a t-shirt, and some stickers as well. We passed out all of our horns, Galileo Edition DVDs, and even some Fibonacci Edition DVDs.

The first day of the show 778 people were in attendance, which means we will need far more DVDs and horns for LinuxFest next year… Read more…

This post may be considered trivial to most of you, but I thought I’d post it up here for the sake of documentation.

The production manager approached me this morning and asked if I could make a bootable ISO for a customer who needed to flash the BIOS of several servers.  I suggested they PXE boot, but because of the volume of servers they have with PXE booting disabled, human involvement would be unavoidable.

I have several bootable floppies for flashing BIOSes, but our customer had specific configuration requests, so I had to switch out the zipped ROM file located within the floppy image.  Simple enough, right?

Read more…

I love my blogging class!

We are going over why corporations should blog and what the benefits are. We may learn something if the class would quit asking questions 15 minutes in… Ask smart questions, do not ask if you can ask a question, and please stop asking what the class is going to cover, listen and learn!

Posting pics of the iX bathrooms for my kfriends.

Part of my job at iXsystems is attending tradeshows to spread the word of FreeBSD, specifically PC-BSD. The booth was full of SCaLE-ians of all skill sets and styles. We had a lot of fun testing out the latest PC-BSD 7.1-Alpha-2, which ended up fixing a mode issue with our Westinghouse LCD.

The BoF was a success, we hung out with some linux guys and suggested they upgrade and install PC-BSD, to which they promptly obliged.

I am sitting in a group of 10 or so people, which is always a great time to focus on blogging from my peice of shit G1 phone that may crash and force before I am able to post. Don’t worry - I’ll include a couple of pics to prove I was paying attention.

Tradeshows like SCaLE are always a lot of fun because of the wide variety of people and distros in use. We give the linux dewdz a hard time - but that should be expected if you are a Ubuntu user. They will understand the irony once they switch to PC-BSD, many laughs will ensue.

Okay, time to bring my attention away from the phone and back to my peepz.

We arrived at the Westin LAX, woooo! That was a pretty easy trip, but hey, I didn’t have to drive. Thanks Matt, you are a trooper! Right now were relaxing in the bedroom and I am finally getting around to installing PC-BSD on Matt’s Lenovo. We want to demo Alpha 2 of PC-BSD 7.1 Galileo at tonight’s BoF - but we may end up demoing 7.0.2 and 7.1-Alpha-1 instead.

Thankfully, the Invincibook (from iXsystems) lives up to its name after surviving the fall from Matt’s luggage to the pavement in the Westin Hotel parking garage. No worries though! PC-BSD booted right up, yay!

Update: I would have installed the latest PC-BSD release on the Lenovo but Matt left the external DVD drive at home. Not a big deal, we have an Alpha on the Invincibook and we’ll have Alpha 2 by tomorrow afternoon.

Also, the PC-BSD USB Keychain installer I have failed me. I’m not sure if I wiped it or if I’m too hard on my keychain. FFS!

We’ve been in the room for about an hour now, I’m ready to eat and be merry.