Archive for the ‘tech•ed 2010’ Category

  • World IPv6 Day

    Date: 2011.06.08 | Category: ipv6, networking, tech•ed 2010, tech•ed 2011 | Response: 0

    Today is world IPv6 day, http://ipv6day.org/ and its great to see all the big providers onboard with finally transitioning to ipv6. In Australia there still no consumer ISP’s that have IPv6 in production via services such as xDSL – but by far Internode are the closest.
     
    Microsoft is giving this a go on the following:
     
    jorke@server1:~$ dig +short aaaa www.bing.com
    ipv6.search.ms.com.edgesuite.net.
    a1877.dscb.akamai.net.
    2600:1409::6011:f6b
    2600:1409::6011:f83
     
    jorke@server1:~$ dig +short aaaa www.microsoft.com
    toggle.www.ms.akadns.net.
    g.www.ms.akadns.net.
    ipv6-selector.www.ms.akadns.net.
    2a01:111:200a:1::14
    2a01:111:200a:1::15
    2a01:111:200a:1::13
     
    jorke@server1:~$ dig +short aaaa www.xbox.com
    www.gtm.xbox.com.
    www.xbox.com.edgesuite.net.
    a1123.dsw2.akamai.net.
    2600:1409::6011:f79
    2600:1409::6011:f82
     
    A couple of the sites we host locally have always had IPv6 Addresses:
     
    jorke@server1:~$ dig +short aaaa techedbackstage.net
    2403:ce00:c0de:c0de:2030:1906:6098:1
     
    jorke@server1:~$ dig +short aaaa noisetosignal.com.au
    2403:ce00:c0de:c0de:fa7:fa57:da7a:fa71
     
    Locally we’ve been forging ahead with IPv6 where we can, you might remember last year we did native IPv6 at tech.ed 2010 and and of course we’ll be doing native this year at tech.ed 2011 – we’ve already managed to get the ipv6 allocations from APNIC.. unfortunately still no IPv4.
     
    Where we’ve seen the biggest change is with the Content Distribution Networks such as Akamai and Limelight where we found the end user experience very lacking previously. Microsoft server products have supported v6 quite well – there are a few bugs we’re ironing out, and days like today really help us fix this.
     
    Official Microsoft Blog here and Bing here .
     
    If you want to get a view of what’s happening out there.. http://v6day.ripe.net/cgi-bin/dns-aggr.cgi
     
    And a site note – If you’ve enabled IPv6, make sure you allow ICMPv6 on your firewalls, assuming your firewall supports it Smile
     
    Have a happy v6 day!
     
    - jorke and the backstage team.

  • Infrastructure Saturday 2010 Slide Deck

    Date: 2010.11.08 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2010, Uncategorized, ipv6, networking, tech•ed 2009, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 0

    We had a great time at Infrastructure Saturday on the 6th of November. An epic amount of work was put in by one Mr Mark Rhodes to make the event the success that it was.

    The slide deck from our presentation is available here:

    Infrastructure Saturday tech•ed Backstage 2010

    Ben Parker presented quite a few slides on the enterprise software stack on DemoNet – content that we really missed out on delivering at the event.

    We hope you enjoyed the talk – No evals through yet but in the wrap up a guy said that he gave us all “1″s because he thought that was the top score (not 5!) Doh!

  • Behind the scenes of the Giant Twitter/Flickr Wall

    Date: 2010.09.21 | Category: Uncategorized, planning, tech•ed 2010 | Response: 0

    TechEd 2010 Community Wall

    In case you missed it, there was a giant 6 metre wide plasma wall at TechEd that streamed tweets (from Twitter obviously) and various images from Flickr. We took the following feeds:

    1. Anything with the #auteched hashtag in it appeared on the tweet slide;
    2. Anything with #news and #auteched hashtags in it from the user @auteched (the ‘official’ news feed for the event) was used for the blue news slide;
    3. Anything from the TechEd Australia Flickr set was used for the photo sets.

    The app itself was written using .NET 4 + WPF and Visual Studio 2010.

    The PC that ran the display (“riceputer”, my blingy gaming rig, named after four-banger rice cars):

    • Intel Core i7 920 @ 2.67GHz
    • Radeon HD5850 (1GB RAM)
    • 3GB of triple channel RAM

    The display formed a centre-piece for the community in the expo hall. It was received really well by the delegates and hopefully this will become a permanent fixture at tech•eds of the future. The expo wall was used as backing on the main stage and there were a heap of beanbags and comfy couches around in front of it – the whole area had a really nice community feel. We saw heaps of people sitting around and tweeting to see if their tweets would pop up on the display (come on guys, as if we’d smoke-and-mirrors you – you’re all too smart for that :) )

    Technical Direction Company (the audio visual supplier to the event) provided the display and the necessary matrix hardware. We provided a 1080p DVI feed (1920 x 1080) and they used a device called a Sypder (from Vista Systems) to split the top 729 pixels of that feed across all of the plasmas. You can see the initial calibration of the display in this video (sorry for the end bit, Patrick :) ).

    In terms of application development (and it will be no surprise to any of the developers reading this): WPF is a thirsty beast. The application had to run 12 hours a day without a glitch or leak and this proved to be very difficult to achieve with WPF.

    The individual character animations on the tweet screen were achieved by:

    1. Downloading the tweets in a background thread and scrubbing that against a profanity filter;
    2. Using GetGlyphTypeface() on the TextBlock object to read the metrics for the individual characters in the tweet (see this http://i.msdn.microsoft.com/dynimg/IC26720.png).
    3. Create a separate TextBlock control for each of the characters in the tweet. We did this while honouring all of the kerning etc in the original font glyphs;
    4. Animate each of the characters individually to achieve arbitrary layout effects and animations.

    In retrospect, this was a LOT of work that probably was lost on people watching the display. If we had our time over we might have just stuck with animating an individual TextBlock or Canvas and transitioning the tweets in in one hit (as was the case on the blue News @ TechEd slide).

    We found that using storyboard based animations was very problematic. Each time the tweets appear we bring in four at a time, in four sets for a total of 16 tweets meaning a worst case scenario of ~2500 individual items in the storyboard. We tried a lot of different approaches to interacting with the WPF storyboards but in all cases we found that there were subtle leaks, even for items that were well out of scope. Over time (and remember we’re running this all day and night) memory usage would creep up.

    In the end, we resolved to ditch storyboards altogether and manually created the WPF animations and queued them up ourselves. Once we did this, the memory leakage issues disappeared and the app would sit on a steady 111 meg of RAM usage indefinitely.

    We found that the static storyboarding in WPF was excellent for prototyping (i.e. just writing up XAML by hand) but as soon as you start modifying those in code you’re in for a world of pain. That isn’t really an isolated experience as far as we can tell – check out the memory usage on Blu, MetroTwit, etc.

    For next year, it would be great to do this again using the new Twitter streaming APIs and XNA.

  • Tech•Ed backstage 2010 – VOC208 – The Presentation

    Date: 2010.09.11 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2009, Australian Partner Conference 2010, Uncategorized, ipv6, netbooks, networking, planning, setup, tech•ed 2009, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 0

    We did a talk on the infrastructure behind TechEd 2010 as one of the very last sessions of the event.

    The video is available here: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Australia/voc208

    The whole talk was very much ‘by the seat of our pants’ as we were insanely busy. Ben Parker, unfortunately, could not make it on stage due to other work commitments at the event. This was a real shame as he is ‘the man’ when it comes to the IT Pro side of the MS Enterprise software stack.

    Unbelievably (given the rushed presentation and that most of the slide deck was a re-heated user group presentation I delivered a few months ago because we ran out of time ), we managed to score the #2 spot out of 165 sessions at the event, with an “Overall Satisfaction” of 4.74 out of 5. This is a great result but I cannot help but think there was a lot of other more deserving content at the event that probably should have rated higher.

    We had a lot of good laughs – half of them at my expense. The notorious review comment from ARC301 came back to haunt me (2m 20s in … Thanks Jorke ;) )

    Evaluation scores follow:

    VOC208 Tech•Ed backstage 2010!
    Friday, August 27 13:45 – 15:00
    Central A
    David Connors, Ben Parker, Jorke Odolphi
    Attendance Count:
    Questions
    Q10 Overall, I was satisfied with this Session.
    Q20 The speaker was knowledgeable about the subject matter.
    Q30 The speaker’s presentation skills helped me better understand the material.
    Q40 The session was effective in demonstrating the product, technology and/or solution.
    Q50 The knowledge/skills I gained are relevant to my role.
    Q60 This session was worth the investment of my time.
    Q70 I will recommend this session to others.
    Q80 Please provide additional constructive comments, suggestions, feedback.

    Overall Results

    Evals Submitted Q10 Q20 Q30 Q40 Q50 Q60 Q70
    19 4.74 4.74 4.58 4.68 4.53 4.53 4.58

    Rollup Results

    Question Avg % Strongly Disagree % Disagree % Neutral % Agree % Strongly Agree Num. Submitted
    Overall, I was satisfied with this Session. 4.74 26.32 73.68 19
    The speaker was knowledgeable about the subject matter. 4.74 26.32 73.68 19
    The speaker’s presentation skills helped me better understand the material. 4.58 5.26 5.26 15.79 73.68 19
    The session was effective in demonstrating the product, technology and/or solution. 4.68 5.26 21.05 73.68 19
    The knowledge/skills I gained are relevant to my role. 4.53 10.53 26.32 63.16 19
    This session was worth the investment of my time. 4.53 15.79 15.79 68.42 19
    I will recommend this session to others. 4.58 15.79 10.53 73.68 19

    Comments

    Please provide additional constructive comments, suggestions, feedback.
    Great look at the unsung heroes of etched. Great way to finish the conference.
    Great session to end Tech Ed on. More of an FYI session than a learning one but still really enjoyed it and found it interesting.
    interesting to know how the backend stuff is deployed so if i ever need to do something on a similar scale i will have an inkling of what to do
    Need to use standard template – one used very hard to read.
    This session was brilliant – I saw just how much work went into Tech.Ed to get it going, made me even more appreciative of you all!
    Wicked stuff!

  • Frankly Speaking Episode 42

    Date: 2010.09.06 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2010, ipv6, networking, planning, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 0

    Andrew Coates and Michael Kordahi interviewed Jorke and I for their Frankly Speaking podcast. Tune in and listen; hopefully I was making sense with the amount of sleep I did have at that point of the events. :)

  • tech•ed 2010 / APC 2010 IT Press Round Up

    Date: 2010.09.05 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2010, ipv6, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 1

    Here is a quick collection of the press articles specifically about the infrastructure. There are a lot of others about Windows Phone 7 etc but we didn’t list those here.

    This is a pretty good summary of the event in general:

    More write-ups coming … no, really!

  • IPv6 – bringing a horse to water..

    Date: 2010.08.24 | Category: Uncategorized, ipv6, networking, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 0

    So you may have seen some press here , here and here around work that we’re doing at teched bringing brave new world of IPv6 to the delegate experience.

    Why are we doing this?

    It’s well know that ipv4 address space is running out, while this is problematic for service providers and telcos – in our opinion it also as just as big a problem for application developers.

    So this is our challenge this year – giving every delegate the chance to experience this first hand. We’ll be giving full native IPv6 addresses for each and every device that can support it.

    We’ve learnt a LOT about the ins and outs of IPv6, those learning will be transparently displayed on this blog as per our normal policy.

    If you’re at Tech.Ed you can check this out by going to http://ip6.me or http://www.v6.facebook.com and see the IP address you get!

    I also hope you’ll enjoy our planned IPv6 celebration hours we’ll have during the event, where only IPv6 will be available on the network!

    - The Backstage team.

  • We come in peace!

    Date: 2010.08.16 | Category: Uncategorized, planning, setup, tech•ed 2010 | Response: 4

    Your friendly technology team

    Thank you to everyone for the kind feedback on our recent BIGAU presentation both at and after the event. I couldn’t resist including this picture again as a) I love it, and b) it was the only politically correct on in the slide deck (sorry Princess Parker!).

    We’re on site now and work has begun in earnest on provisioning the infrastructure for the event. Jorke and Ben are still in Brisbane busily setting up all of the HP blades for DemoNet and these will ship down to the venue on Wednesday.

    Pile of work

    We’re going to try and keep the blog up to date as we build out the network infrastructure – but as always, delivery of the event will take priority.

    If you have any cool ideas for topics you would like to see covered on the blog, post a comment at the end of this article and we’ll see what we can whip up in response.

  • tech•ed backstage @ BigAU – Tues 13th July 2010!

    Date: 2010.07.09 | Category: Uncategorized, networking, planning, setup, tech•ed 2009, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 2

    I will be presenting tech•ed backstage at the Brisbane Infrastructure Group. Guess appearances may include Nathan Wright from GCCEC and Ben Parker from Parker Tech Pty Ltd

    Venue
    Microsoft, Level 9, 1 Eagle Street, Waterfront Place, Brisbane City.
    Time
    1700 for Pizza.
    Date
    Tuesday, 13th of July 2010

    Further details on #BigAU.

    I’ll be covering off stuff that happened last year, stuff that’s happening this year + our wins and losses. Shock/Horror! I actually have some good news re Cisco WLCs this time around too!

    See you there!

  • abducted. returned. changed.

    Date: 2010.03.29 | Category: networking, planning, tech•ed 2009, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 1

    Toothless slack-jawed yokels win again

    Cisco 4404 Marketing Poster

    Long time readers of this blog (and the tech•ed 2009 team who have to put up with my whinging) will know that we had a significant number of challenges getting the wifi at GCCEC up to a scratch. Today I am happy to announce, however, that we have had a win. The 5508 delivers in the areas the 4404 didn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

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