Knowledge12...

My company (ServiceNow) has an annual U.S. users conference, called “Knowledge”.  This year's conference is “Knowledge12”, and will be held in New Orleans, starting this coming Sunday.  I'll be attending this one, as I have the preceding four.  This year I'm presenting one lab (“Field Normalization”) and I'm helping on a second (“Discovery”) – but the most important reason I'm going is to meet and talk with our customers and prospective customers.  The Knowledge conferences are a wonderful opportunity for those of us who work for ServiceNow to meet our customers face-to-face.

Back in '08 we held the first Knowledge conference in our small (but beloved) Solana Beach office.  For the lunches, we rented tables and ate out in our parking lot.  I don't know the precise attendance figures, but my memory say that something like 40 or 50 people showed up.  Our “presentations” and “labs” were, for the most part, in tiny conference rooms with just a few people packed in.  I remember speaking to a group of perhaps a half dozen people about our Discovery product.

Every year the Knowledge conference has grown bigger and better.  This year is no exception.  There are many ways in which this Knowledge12 (or “K12” in our internal shorthand) has grown, but a couple stand out to me. 

First, we have many customers presenting their successes with our products this year.  In fact, I believe it's true that our customers dominate the presentor's list.  That feels like a significant milestone to me – enough customers have been using our products long enough to have made major achievements with it, and to be interested in sharing their experiences with their peers. 

The second standout item is really a silly little thing, but one that really stuck in my brain.  A few weeks ago, we (in engineering) had a meeting with our IT folks to help them understand the bandwidth requirements for the conference.  Until that meeting, it hadn't occurred to me that bandwidth might be an issue.  The IT folks, though, did the math: well over 2,000 people crammed into a single facility, and every last one of them was going to be using at least one (and often several) WiFi-equipped devices.  Furthermore, our demonstrations, presentations, and labs were all going to be completely dependent on quality Internet access – after all, we're a SaaS company, and our products are all out in the big old Internet cloud.  The bottom line was that we were going to need a lot of Internet bandwidth, and in particular, a lot more than the conference facility had readily available.  The IT folks had to scramble to find alternatives, and they didn't have a whole lot of time to do it in.  In a few days we'll know if the IT team pulled it off!

One consequence of Knowledge12 is that my blogging will be quite spotty between Sunday and Thursday this coming week.  I'm taking my camera, so hopefully I'll be able to post a few photos of the conference...

Opportunity Rises...

We're talking about the Opportunity on Mars, the pluckly little rover that just keeps on going and going.  It's been “asleep” for the Martian winter, and yesterday finally got enough power to motor up and roll around a bit.  All systems are working just fine.  Over the next few weeks, Opportunity will get more and more sunshine on its solar panels, and will do increasing amounts of exploration work around the Endeavour crater where it's currently located.

In a few months, barring some mishap, Opportunity will be joined on the Martian surface by a new rover, this one named Curiousity.  This new rover is much bigger, longer-lived, and more capable than Opportunity – but for those of us who have been avidly following the adventures of Opportunity (and it's lost sibling, Spirit), Curiousity will be hard put to match its predecessors...

Homecoming...

Fired for Doing Her Job...

We're talking about Naomi Schaefer Riley, a journalist who dared to make uncomfortable (and most definitely not politically correct!) observations about the value of Black Studies.  Of course, in modern America, that meant she had to be fired.

If you project political correctness forward, at some point it forces all thought to cease.  The “thought death” of America.  

Three perspectives from today's WSJ, from Naomi herself, from the editors, and from James Taranto.

Thought Experiment...

Imagine the planet Earth.  Now imagine all the water on the planet – the oceans, rivers, lakes, snow, ice, groundwater, water in plants and animals, water vapor in the atmosphere – every last molecule of good old H2O.  Now imagine all that water gathered into a sphere.  How big would that sphere be?  Got it pictured, mentally?

Click here for the answer.  I was off by about 50%...

Remember...

Remembering World War II; very nicely done...

Computer Science Blogs...

A very nice list of CS-related blogs.  At least half of these were new to me...

Quote of the Day...

Spoken by Dilbert in today's strip:

Do whatever makes you feel less absurd.

Awesome!

Which Sort?

Which sort of human flesh should you eat?  In medieval Europe, that was an important question...

Dinosaur Farts Caused Global Warming...

...around 150 million years ago...

Oh, Great...

Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

Time Lapse Canaries...

The Canary Islands, that is.  At night.  Beautiful!

El Cielo de Canarias 2012 / The Light of Stars from Daniel López on Vimeo.

CIA Thwarts Terrorist...

Now there's perhaps one of my very favorite word pairs: “thwarts” and “terrorist”!

There's not a lot of detail available, other than the most important: terrorist fail.

I'm Not Allergic...

So far as I'm aware, I'm not allergic to anything (unless you count liberals).  I grew up on a farm...

Sparse Fourier Transform, or sFFT...

Many years ago I had a consulting gig that required me to analyze the sound made by ball bearings in (very expensive) rotating machinery.  After a bit of research, it became obvious that an algorithm known as the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) was the way to go.  On the processors of the day (in the '70s), computing the FFT was a lengthy process – one run of the final firmware I wrote could take almost an hour. 

Recently four researchers at MIT came up with a much, much faster way to compute FFTs when the signal has structure of some kind.  That was certainly true of the signal I was analyzing!  With just a software change, that piece of gear I built could have been much faster.  Dang!

Backup for GMail...

If you're comfortable at the command line, and you have a gmail account, here's something that might interest you: an open source tool (written in Python) that will backup your gmail account to your local computer, and let you restore those messages to any gmail account.  I'm trying it right now (my backup is going to take a while!).

I actually have exactly this program on my list of “Maybe I should write this!” projects.  I'll probably get rid of it now :-)

Before and After...

Before and after the Soviet Union, that is.  Der Spiegel has a slide show of before-and-after photos of East Germany.  These could just as well have been taken in Estonia of 1991 vs. Estonia today...

Rachel on Greece...

My girl Rachel Lucas is back blogging (at last!) from her new home in Italy.  Here she makes some observations about recent events in Greece:

“Europe’s voters don’t know they’re committing suicide — or don’t care.”

Post title is about yesterday’s French and Greek national elections and is a quote from Arthur Herman at NRO. I can’t figure out which it is, either, even though I live in Europe. My main impression is more along the lines of, they know they’re being accused of committing economic suicide, but they just don’t believe it and don’t see it that way. It’s not really ignorance or lack of giving a shit, it’s denial.

Which is exactly what I think is also happening in America, a few years behind schedule but right on pace to catch up.

Anyway, this is all I’ve been reading about all day so here is my depressing Monday post that is really just a collection of links and quotes. You’re welcome.

Making the “Soft Sciences” More Accountable...

What a great idea!  I wish them every success, and I hope this gets replicated for other sciences where reproducability hasn't been traditionally required...

The Government Dependency Index...

The Heritage Foundation has taken a stab at measuring the degree to which Americans are dependant on government assistance.  Even better, they've computed this index over time, from 1962 to 2010 (the most recent year for which they have data).

The general idea is to provide an objective metric that reflects the totality of government-provided assistance of all types.  There's an old saying in the business world: “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it!” – this represents the first attempt at an objective measure of something I (and many others) would dearly love to manage.

My first reaction to seeing this chart was this: that the index has increased by at least a factor of 15 within my lifetime.  That factor is assuredly substantially higher, actually – because this chart leaves off the first decade of my life, and the most recent two years.  Ouch!  And no wonder the government's meddling seems all-pervasive to me when compared with our government when I was a youth.

My second reaction was this: how did the Heritage Foundation put this together?  Fortunately for all of us, their methodology and supporting data is readily available on their web site.  The article announcing this index is chock full of interesting (though often quite depressing) compilations of information.

I would love to somehow require everyone to read and comprehend this article before voting in November...