SCALE - From the Inside out
SCALE is in its third day. For the most part it’s gone exceedingly well, with only minor glitches.
Some good points:
The redesigned registration system, while showing the rough edges of a new application, worked exceedingly well. We had just as many people show up yesterday and today as last year, but the lines at registration trailing clear back to the hotel entrance never occurred. The faster registration process plus a half dozen self-check in kiosks prevent the wait from ever being longer than a few minutes. Kudos to Lei Zhang for the redesign!
There were only the usual couple of defective cables in the SCALE network; the Internet link (4 bonded DSL lines) and the LAN (100 VLANs!) came up with only a bit of debugging by Stu’s Tech Committee, and has stayed up since. Props to Stu, Mike Maki, and the rest of the Tech Commitee volunteers!
Everyone I talked to seemed pleased with the show - the vendors were happy with the traffic through the expo floor. The talks were well attended, and only a few overflowed into the hallway, and then only mildly. Shyam guessed mostly correctly at which talks would be the most popular.
We’ve had very good response from our speaker/presentation survey cards. That is, we’ve had so many turned in, that Jason (on my Publicity team) had to make a run to Kinko’s this morning (Sunday morning) to get more printed.
Last year was the first year we’d tried survey cards. We had a good response, but the questions were too vague and the card was so poorly laid out that I gave up after collating about 50 responses. We’ve overhauled the card, and I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to glean some usable feedback from them this year.
Ron Stewart of Trinity Audio generously loaned us two of his prototype Indamixx DJ stations, based on a Samsung UMPC. They have Debian, Audacity, Jack, and Ardour (among other things) loaded on them (see the blog entry earlier on them). I did two audio interviews with the one he loaned me, along with a wonderful external USB microphone made by Samson that had excellent audio. I recorded an interview with Jono Bacon and one with Ted Haeger (thanks, guys!) and both went well. They’ve been uploaded to the SCALE web site.
Jason Riker, on my SCALE Publicity team, was loaned another of the Indamixx records with a handheld microphone, and he’s done a half-dozen “man in the street” interviews of both guests and booth personnel. I haven’t listened to them yet, but we’ll post the good ones.
Props to Ron for loaning us the Indamixx boxes! For our purposes, they’re overkill, but for someone who’s a budding DJ, or does a LOT of recording in the field and needs to upload in the fly, I recommend taking a serious look at these wonderful little gadgets.
Things that could have gone better:The Westin LAX hotel is a business hotel. Everyone that was staying at the hotel on Friday checked out around noon. But we started in the morning, so parking space was at a premium. To make matters worse, the top level of the parking garage was closed for resurfacing. It was better during the weekend, but improved parking is something that needs to be looked at.
Newly-added to the registration system were self-check in kiosks. We had six of them and they were a major reason that registration ran so quickly. But the user interface needs some loving. It’s plain to the point of being ugly. And in observing people check in, it’s obvious that the elements on the screen could be laid out better.
Cat Allman (formerly of Usenix, now of Google) checked in yesterday morning and I’m told she asked who we’d bought the registration system from 
It turns out that Google has been contemplating having their Open Source group created a registration system. That’s ironic, considering that Lei works for Google… Maybe Google can put some resources towards helping Lei clean up the system. We’ll see.