Finished off building the lab today and it’s rocking.
Setting up the Lab
Plexi-Glass walls are awesome
Did the staff meeting at 6pm and then went to the Welcome reception beach party.
We celebrated the finishing of the lab build with the final of The Lotusphere Limoncello Contest.
Limoncello Watch is over
So we started the day with an empty room.
Empty room 1
Empty room 2
And here is me wearing my Paplebon Red Sox shirt ;o)
Tim C in Red Sox shirt
Later in the day we have tables and laptops and some network being patched in.
45 laptops now have Ubuntu 8.10 on them and we are putting VMware Player on them too.
Tomorrow (Sunday) we will be adding the lab images and testing them.
Lab end of Saturday
As you can see we have a great spot in the “Product Showcase” and we have some great material too, so come find us, and find some great technology and ideas you can take straight back to your desk at work and use right away.
See you Monday. ;o)
TimC
So today we discussed room layouts and sizes of the room and what we are going to put where.
We also found this awesome stuff called 3M Vikuiti film that you can put on glass and project onto the back of it. We are going to try and find out if there are cheaper alternatives and if we can get some applied to the plexi-glass wall we are having as one side of the room. Then we can project information onto it and attract you all into the lab.
The plexi-glass wall idea is so that you can all see into the room and see that we are not a store room. Lots of people last year thought we were just somewhere for the partners to store their stuff during the show.
Also there is hot debate about where our room banner should be placed. Last year it must have been attached to the ceiling by someone who has no idea about ascetics, marketing or general exhibition infrastructure. The guy who put it up must have thought that paying a lot of money for a sign for four days meant that not being able to see it was a good thing. We are going to be very explicit this year about where it goes.
So off to the full lab staff meeting tomorrow with more information for the troops.
I really can hear them hammering their bit of our lab into shape. They have all downloaded the VMware image that we created and are busy making it work for them.
One of the Notes guys is saying that he wants to use Gold code for his lab and it may make him miss the deadline we have set for his lab to be in. So we have cut him some slack and will make him load it onto his machines himself if he misses the extended deadline. ;o)
It sounds as though the crafting of the Quickr labs is in full swing as we had a virtual memory question come through just yesterday. That solved, work continues apace.
Staffing for the labs was discussed today and we have been making sure that we have the right number of people to cope with the crowds this year. Some of our lab rats are also elevated to the lofty heights of speaker for a few hours during the week. But don’t worry, we’ll be sure to bring back down to earth to make sure they are there to answer your questions for you.
Right back in the mines to look for more nuggets of wisdom we can share.
Cheif Elf, twice removed (for bad behaviour) ;o)
WOW, what a task this morning. To get as small as I can a VMware image of Microsoft XP so that people can download it without too much trouble.
I started by downloading the image from the USA ftp server. 7.67Gb in 1Gb .rar files.
I then expanded this out and it was a total of 13.6Gb when totally expanded. I then ran the tools recommended here. (I had to dig around for the vOptimizer, but found it on cNet’s website)
I managed to get the uncompressed VMware image down to 3.71Gb, which I was very happy with. Half the size of the original, almost.
Then I created a .rar file in 1Gb chucks so that people could download it easily. This turned out to be a stunning 1.4Gb in size.
So all in all a good mornings work. 6.27Gb saving on network traffic. Multiply that by the number of people to download it, 12-15 and that’s a monster saving of just under 95Gb
Today we are deciding what needs to be in the client image for each machine. To save time we are using a VMware image and trimming it down. This will then be posted on an FTP site for our lab developers to download.
The lab developers will get detailed instructions on what they can and can’t do in the image and what the maximum size can be. They have to finish their development by Thanksgiving so that we have time to check them all through and image the machines to take to Lotusphere in January.
118 days to go…