Paul Anderson's blog

November 7-8, 2009, Baltimore MD

Started in 2007, ACM CHIMIT Symposium is the leading forum for discussing topics on IT management with a focus on people, business, and technology.  At CHIMIT, researchers and practitioners share issues, solutions, and research drawing upon fields such as human-computer interaction, human factors, computer systems, and management and service sciences to address cognitive, social, and technical issues in managing the increasing complexity of modern Information Technology (IT) systems.

The summaries of the sessions at LISA ’08 are now available here.
There is also an article I wrote to go with my talk which is available to Usenix members.

The CFP for LISA ’09 is now available. Feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss submitting a paper or participating in some other way.

I’ve just started using the Freeway web design software. This seems to produce good code from a GUI interface, but includes all the flexibility that I want. This is the first time I’ve found something which seems to fit the bill between the extremes of Dreamweaver and iWeb.

The website Wordle generates really nice-looking word clouds.

We have a Microsoft-sponsored Phd award available on “Constraint-based specifications
for system configuration”. See here for the application process and further details.

Unfortunately, I had some problems and missed the LISA Workshop on Virtual Infrastructures. But Kyrre Begum did a great job of running this & the notes are now online here.

The Unison File Synchronizer is great for synchronising files between two systems – it handles things really well when files have been changed at both ends. It runs over ssh, so it works well for backing up changes when travelling. I always used to use this for synchronising my laptop with my Linux desktop, but the older version didn’t work too well on the Mac. I’ve just installed 2.27.72 on the Mac and it is great – seems very robust and has a more Mac-like interface.

The SAGE Booklet on LCFG is now available:

http://www.sage.org/pubs/17_lcfg/

This year, I will be running a workshop at LISA on “Virtual Infrastructures”, together with Phil Huber from Xcalibre. Full details and application information are available here.

Students can apply for full Usenix grants to attend LISA (or any other Usenix conference).