01:59:53 Tuesday November 18 2003
There were lots of happenings today. Got up early and went to the conference center. I was scheduled for a Globus 3 tutorial. I figured that if I got there early there would be an extra laptop for me to use. Well there weren't any and I was certain that several things needed for the tutorial (most notably Java 1.4.2) would not run on poor little Diogenes. However I installed them and he took it like a champ. It took me a lot longer to compile than other people, but I knew what I was doing and could navigate a command prompt better than most people there. As a result I actually finished before others in many cases. This led to other problems.

The presenters had a cute little visualization that was supposed to help us learn. It showed a fish in a tank with our ip and number of updates when we registered with their service registry. Mike Shuey and I decided that the little Java grid service they were having us write needed a few improvements. So we started hacking. We wrote a little for loop to continuously update our service which led to much breaking of their service registry. We threw strings across the XML hoping to get to name our fish (it didn't work, but did break my fish). We also started stealing other people's /etc/fstab files because the little grid file sharing thing they wrote for us wasn't so careful about keeping us out of places we shouldn't have been. Lots of fun and learning.

At the opening gala for the conference proper (not just the tutorial sessions) we got to play at our (research in Indiana) booth. We had sticky darts and bags and lanyards to give away. Somehow my boss managed to start a holy war. You see, everyone was issued a Microsoft lanyard with their badge. We certainly couldn't have that so we started trading people their Microsoft lanyards for our own. Before we knew it half the convention hall was wearing "Research in Indiana" lanyards. This makes a lot of sense. Many of the companies there are Linux vendors and the like. However, I am still surprised at the success of our anti-Microsoft campaign. Perhaps I should sample people and start plotting falloff of Microsoft lanyards over time. It would be interesting. Sleep now. Keynote tomorrow.