Conference Report: 1999 LISA, Announcements

The first session started with the traditional announcements from the Program Chair, David Parter:

• There are 1825 attendees as of the start of the technical sessions.
  
  
• There are 6 major tracks during the day:
  • Referreed Papers (in ballroom 6A), where we accepted 27 of 69 submissions
  • Invited Talks (in ballroom 6B)
  • Practicum (in ballroom 6C)
  • Guru (in room 609), where specialty-experts answer audience-posed questions on their topic
  • Vendor Trade-Show Floor (in ballroom 6E)
  • Hallway (everywhere else), where you can discuss anything with anybody
  In addition, there are Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions in the evenings.
  
  
• Thanks to the hundreds of people who put the conference together: the Program Committee; the Invited Talks and Practicum chairs; the USENIX Liaison; the paper readers; the Conference advisor; the USENIX Conference and Office staffs; the Tutorial Coordinator; the Terminal Room Coordinator; all the volunteers and student slaves; all the authors, friends, and coworkers of those of us who worked on the conference.
  
  
• Logistics: All daytime events are in the Convention Center; all evening events are at the Sheraton. The Reception Wednesday night is an exception, and is held at the Museum of Flight; shuttles will leave from the hotel and run round-trip as needed.
  
  
• Program Change: Since nobody admitted knowing Python well enough, the Tcl/Perl/Python Bakeoff session was cancelled. In its place was the Conference Round-Up, where summaries of the past several USENIX conferences were presented.
  
  
• We held a moment of silence to remember W. Richard Stevens.

Andrew Hume, President of the USENIX Association, requested feedback on the direction of USENIX and SAGE. If you have any comments, please feel free to forward them to him, to a member of the USENIX Board, or to a member of the SAGE Executive Committee. [Editorial note: You can send them to me and I'll forward them along if you wish.]

Hal Miller spoke next. Due to a variety of personal issues, he has retired as President of the SAGE Executive Committee (though he remains on the Committee). Barb Dijker is the new President of SAGE, effective November 9, 1999. She then stepped up and presented the 1999 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award to Wietse Venema for his "continual work to improve the security of systems," including such tools as tcp_wrapper, satan, and postfix, as well as the coroner's toolkit.

David Parter then presented the best paper awards:

• Best Paper: "Dealing with Public Ethernet Jacks — Switches, Gateways, and Authentication" by Robert Beck, University of Alberta
  
  
• Best Student Paper: "A Retrospective on Twelve Years of LISA Proceedings" by Eric Anderson and Dave Patterson of the University of California at Berkeley

The LISA 2000 Program Chairs were announced: Remy Evard and Phil Scarr.

David next introduced our keynote speaker, Joe Ruga from NASA (now with IBM Global Services). Joe is a systems administrator in the aerospace industry and he discussed his experiences with changes in the technology industry, with owning versus leasing, centralized computing versus distributed computing, and so on. He touched briefly (too briefly, in most attendees' estimations) on managing the shuttle launches. The two most important tips he mentioned were to befriend your users (to keep them from yelling at your boss) and to document your work (to be able to understand it yourself in a month or six). In summary, things will change over time — organizations, structure, what you do, how you do it, to whom you do it — so be prepared to manage expectations.

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