Every now and then, I get in one of those moods where I vent against some abomination of programming that just kills performance. One of my more routine rants was against cond_broadcast()/pthread_cond_broadcast()/notifyAll() - depending on your language and platform of choice.
I do my best to go "Green", but seeing as how I tend to get on a plane more frequently than I would like; I probably have a much larger carbon footprint than most (especially since I get on MD-80’s frequently). That being said, it is not exactly what I meant by the term "Environmentalist".
I was lucky enough to be the first user of DTrace outside of Sun, and started cutting my teeth on real-world applications in the 2003 time frame. During these past 5+ years, I have had the opportunity to look at hundreds of applications and systems. In addition, I have done training, seminars, presentations, and boot camps. This has given me opportunities not only to interact with systems, but also with those that maintain and develop them.
You know, I always hoped I wouldn't be one of those bloggers that drops a few posts and then disappears into the ether for months on end. It looks like I failed misearbly in my resolution. The good news is that this is a clear indicator that our Solaris 10 Practice at Forsythe is growing. The bad news is that it means I have been too busy to keep up with the blog.
There is only one way to describe dtrace.conf(08) - sick.
The software developer talent present at this conference (at a mere 70 or so folks) has got to be the highest concentration of insanely gifted develepor talent ever assembled. When you have presenters talking about pte's, TLB's. CR3's, VMM's, and traps and the majority of the audience is not only engaged, but experts in the field - you have a conference at the next level.
I am not just talking about MacOS X or FreeBSD here. DTrace works great for Solaris versions prior to Solaris 10 as well. In fact, it works great for Linux and Windows too.
So, I will be at dtrace.conf(08) on March 14, 2008. I can't express how excited I am that this conference will be taking place. For over 6 years now, I have spent almost every hour of every business day using DTrace to look at applications. It will be quite refreshing to have a a room full of like minded individuals who are all about DTrace.
Okay, maybe not totally meaningless, but the way that many people use the metric certainly is meaningless. This is especially apparent when it comes to what some believe is a black art - Capacity Planning. This ties back to my first blog entry when I spoke of how often simple upgrades go horribly wrong.
