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!

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We’ve been trying to document what goes on at SCALE every year. Not just in written documents; we’ve tried audio recordings and some video with mixed success.

This year SBLUG will be assisting us with video recordings of the sessions, the keynotes, and the expo floor (props to Tom King and his crew!)

Ilan, the SCALE Chair, scored an opportunity for us to try out some spiffy new audio recording gear from a startup. That startup is the Trinity Audio Group, and they have a nifty product called the Trinity. Here’s a picture of it:

We’ll have an opportunity to test them out, as Trinity Audio has loaned SCALE two of them to try out for “man in the street” audio recordings!

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We finished assembling the program and sent it off to the printers for proof. By assemble, I mean we gave all the ads, bios, and schedules and other content to Ron Golan, our graphics arts guru. He assembled them, posted a draft PDF online, and we critqued it, all in the SCALE IRC channel. When done, Ilan pushed it onto the printer’s FTP site. We had to send it back to them again due some issue with ads and transparencies, but they turned it around quickly. Here’s more evidence that SCALE has grown: the program last year was 12 pages. This year it’s 20 pages. And props to Ron for putting out an excellent piece of work! We’ve used Dot Graphics in Chatsworth for our printing needs for the last three or four years, and they’ve been very responsive to our requirements and the products have been of good quality. We’ve used them for programs, posters and other signage, and postcards (both printing and mailing). Recommended.

It’s two weeks away from the So Cal Linux Expo, so we’re all pretty busy:

• Gareth and I were on Digital Village on KPFK yesterday (Saturday). It went very well; this is the third year we’ve been on Digital Village pimping SCALE, and the hosts are very comfortable with the concept of FOSS. Due to the inclement weather (ice and snow), their FM transmitter on Mt. Wilson went down sometime late this week (it was down Saturday morning, and it still off the air at this writing). Fortunately they weren’t completely down; they stream their program content on the Internet. So, even though listeners with radios couldn’t hear us, those with computers could. And apparently someone was listening, we had several SCALE registrations shortly after the show with the promo code Gareth gave out during the program

• Ilan and I will be on The Linux Links Tech Show podcast on Wednesday, Jan. 30th, at 5:30 p.m PST. That is, the show starts at 5:30, and it seems like it runs about two hours. I don’t when we’ll be on during the show. I’ll post that afterwards.

• We finished assembling the program and sent it off to the printers for proof. By assemble, I mean we gave all the ads, bios, and schedules and other content to Ron Golan, our graphics arts guru. He assembled them, posted a draft PDF online, and we critqued it, all in the SCALE IRC channel. When done, Ilan pushed it onto the printer’s FTP site. We had to send it back to them again due some issue with ads and transparencies, but they turned it around quickly. Here’s more evidence that SCALE has grown: the program last year was 12 pages. This year it’s 20 pages. And props to Ron for putting out an excellent piece of work! We’ve used Dot Graphics in Chatsworth for our printing needs for the last three or four years, and they’ve been very responsive to our requirements and the products have been of good quality. We’ve used them for programs, posters and other signage, and postcards (both printing and mailing). Recommended.

• Last year Stu (Tech Committee chair) designed a bulletproof LAN for SCALE, with about 75 VLANs for isolation of booths and wireless. It ran almost flawlesslly. He’s doing the same sort of thing this year - but we’ll have over a hundred VLANs(!). He’s elbow-deep in programming switches for SCALE at this point.

• Registration for SCALE continues to run well above last year. It’ll be interesting to see how many more visitors we actually get compared to last year. We’re concerned about it being overcrowded, in spite of moving what we believe will be the most popular sessions into the theater at the Westin LAX. Regardless of how SCALE 6X goes, this is almost certainly our last year at the Westin; we’ve outgrown it.

• Interest in SCALE from the press is up, too; I’ve given out more press passes and press lists than in the past.

So it’s down to the wire - SCALE is less than two weeks away!

– Orv -

SCALE Publicity Chair

Linux Journal’s Mr. Gadget podcast recently posted a video review of KySoh’s Tux Droid. KySoh is a Silver Sponsor of this year’s SCALE event and will be present on our expo floor in February.

The So Cal Linux Expo is two weeks from this weekend (Feb. 8-10), so we’re in the final stretch. All the booths are filled, all the speakers are committed, the web site is finally current, with all content posted. The stockings are hung by the errr - no - wrong month.

Gareth checked last night and our registration is running 200% ahead of last year (!). That either means we’ll have the usual crowd+15% ’cause everyone’s registering ahead of time for a change, or the usual 50% register ahead of time and we’ll have a CRUSH of people there this weekend. That’s a nice problem to have - I think. There were complaints last year about the popular talks having standing room only. We’ve tried to put the popular tracks in the larger rooms, but you can only do so much until you run out of room.

The press registration is running 30-50% greater than last year, too, from what I remember. That’s exciting in itself. And a ‘news’ outlet we haven’t had in the past is very active: speakers are mentioning in their blogs that they’ll be speaking at SCALE. Their audiences are ones that we might not have reached with conventional press releases, so that’s probably driving increased registration too.

The Westin has booked almost all of the rooms we had blocked for SCALE, and we’ll have to pull another block of rooms. That makes the hotel happy (and us; I think we get a small cut of room sales).

This time of year, my inner geek gets a bit frustrated. That’s because I spend so much time working on SCALE, I don’t get to play with the tech stuff much. Fortunately, while working on the Linux Expo is a lot of work, it’s also rewarding.

We’re seeing a lot more out of state registrations than in the past. That means we’re drawing attendees from a wider geographical area. That will make the Westin hotel happy. Ilan told me that we’ve already sold 95% of the block of rooms they allocated to SCALE.

We put out our first invite to the press corp a week ago, and naturally the return email address in the invite had a typo :-/ Fortunately it was easily decipherable.

Sugar CRM also gave us some grief. Apparently there’s a bug in the version we’re using that makes pushing out campaigns problematic. Jason Riker, whom I stick with all my Sugar CRM work struggled with it for a couple of days, working with Stu, the tech committee chair, trying to figure out what was going on. We finally had Ilan push it out manually which worked. We’ll do one more invite soon.

Our SCALE webmaster is a young kid named Matt Gallizzi (His web page is here. He’s a couple years out of high school, but quite good technically. He volunteered to take over the web site so Lei could concentrate on rewriting the registration system.

I don’t think he knew what he was getting into. He did a good job rebuilding the web site, but it’s like any other resource; if you have more you use it more. There’s probably double the content of info on this year’s SCALE web site than in the past.   It provides a lot more information about SCALE to the site visitor now.  So I’ve beaten him up (nicely!) quite a bit getting things put up in a timely manner, especially recently. To his credit, he’s responded very well.

We have a general info email, info@socallinuxexpo.org, and it comes to me. Most of the emails I get are asking for information that is probably available on the web page, but the volume of traffic I get via that email address is 2-3 times more than last year. I hope that’s a good omen..

We added two LOPSA training classes to SCALE, each 3 hours, to be held on the Friday of SCALE at the Westin. We’ve always wanted to provide more substantial education opportunities than 45-minute sessions at SCALE, and now we have our foot in the door. We may expand them in the future, perhaps offering a two or three day class of some sort, on some pertinent topic the week prior to SCALE. John Terpstra, of SAMBA fame (among other things), had offered to do a multi-day class on SAMBA in the past, but regrettably we were unable to take him up on it.

== Orv ==

SCALE Publicity Chair