Everything Sysadmin

Quicken 2010

Writing papers for Usenix LISA (and other) conferences

Update: Someone else said it very well here

When I last mentioned LISA, I forgot to mention the big news! This year submitting papers is a lot easier! Less work for the authors!

Rather than having to submit the entire, nearly finished, draft in advance, you can submit a briefer summary. If it gets accepted, then you have to write the entire thing. This saves a lot of time in case your submission is not accepted (how would that happen?). It also lowers the bar to submitting, which is important. I think more submissions is better. If this is your first time submitting a paper, this is a good opportunity to go for it.

There are three things you might consider proposing:

• Refereed papers: Did you invent something? Prove a new theory? Create a new tool or software system? Submit a paper. Submissions are simply extended abstracts, 500-1500 words plus an outline of what the final paper will look like. (Details here.)
• Practice and Experiences Reports: NEW! This is a new category. It's a bit different. This is a story telling category. Have you completed a major project and would like to share what experience they gained? I think of it as "Here's what we wish we had known before we started." Very useful. (Details here.)
• Invited Talks: A lot of people don't realize this, but some (not all) invited talks are proposed by the people that give them. Hey, the Invited Talk chairs don't have ESP nor are the omnipotent. So if you have a hot topic that you are an expert at, or would like to put together a panel of debating debutants, propose it as an I.T. or a "Guru Session". (Details here.)
• (Other things you can submit)

The deadline is May 17, 2010 (The 2011 deadline is June 9, 2011.). Less than 2 months away!

This year I'm on the committee that will be judging the papers. I thought it would be useful to tell people my personal process for evaluating papers.

I've been on the Usenix LISA program committee a few times. People ask me for advice about submitting papers a lot. Usually I tell them to read the CfP, pay attention to the deadlines, etc. But the real important advice is what I'm about reveal below.

Don't give me a "surprise ending". Please don't force me to read 4 pages before you tell me what your point is. I want to know right away. It saves me time.

A "surprise ending" paper is where the abstract says, "We've developed a new way to do X", the next 10 pages explains the history of X, then their experience with X and what problems they've seen with other systems that do X, and then at the end they finally present their surprise ending: they do X differently.

Or worse, the last paragraph says that they do it with a secret that they'll reveal in the final version of the paper, only to be revealed if the paper is accepted to the conference. I kid you not. People have done that.

The problem with the "surprise ending" is that now I have to go back and re-read the paper because now I finally know what I needed to know to understand the paper.

A surprise ending is great if you are writing a film, not if you are writing a paper.

When submitting papers to conferences, give away the surprise ending in the first sentence:

We present a backup system that is more appropriate for backing up thousands of laptops because it uses file hashes to avoid backing up files that are common to multiple laptops. Our architecture scales to 1,000 laptops.

If this is truly a "first", then I know right away you will have gotten me exceited about reading the rest of the paper. Otherwise, at least I know what I'm in for and can judge it on other merits.

As I read the opening of a paper I construct a mental rubrick that I will use to judge the paper: There better be a section of the paper that validates each of these claims: statistics that demonstrate that there is a problem (how often the same file exists on laptops), proof that demonstrate that this solves the problem (metrics about the reduction in backup time, bandwidth used), proof that shows this doesn't cause new problems (performance impacts), other problems that come to mind (laptops in "sleep mode"), and validation of their claim that it scales.

I will create this list of checkpoints and produce a grade for each one of them. If they wrote the paper well, I can do this in one reading.

By telling the audience the conclusion in the first sentence you save the audience time. This is true for the judges deciding whether or not to accept the paper, or after publication when people are deciding whether or not to read the paper.

Don't think that by holding back the good bit until the very end it will entice people to read the paper. If they are reading the entire book of proceedings they're more likely to skip a paper entirely if the relevence isn't made clear at the start. Sysadmins tend to specialize on storage, networking, operating systems, or so on. People usually read the papers that have to do with their specialization. If they can't tell your paper is about their specialization in the first paragraph, they're going to skip it.

The essence of good writing is brevity. Tell me what you are trying to say, then stop. Just be complete.

Why are you coming to the conference?

LOPSA PICC: Complete program announced

New review of TM4SA

Josh Brower blogged a highly complimentary review of Time Management for System Administrators.

Thanks, Josh! I'm glad the book helped you!

Motivation for sysadmins to write documentation

How to "un-send" email.

It is a fact of modern life that you can't unsend email. The problem is that to really unsend email you need a time travel device.

It's a shame, really.

MS-Exchange has the ability to send a request that will hide the email, but most non-Exchange providers don't support the protocol. Besides, the horse has left the barn. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Gmail has the ability to unsend an email if you sent it in the last 10 seconds. Useful and cute, but not awesome. (Awesomer is their "prove you are sober before sending a message" feature.)

One way to mitigate this risk of wishing you had an "undo" is to send out a first paragraph plus a URL to the entire message. This way you can rewrite, refine, and update the body of the email as much as you want.

We use this technique at work. Suppose we want to tell people that the printing system will be down on Thursday evening so that we can upgrade the print server software. We put the basic message in a 1-paragraph email, and list a link to a document with more info. The link might be to a ticket # that tracks the issue, or a blog post (yes, we have internal blogs), a web page, or a document. We can constantly update the document over time.

Maybe we should extend this. All email should be a subject line plus a URL to the actual message. Made a typo? Correct it. Regretted what you said? Delete it. Called your boss an asshole? Change it to be a loverletter.

You still need to get the subject right, but the message can change. Maybe we could invent a way for the email to be "frozen" once the person reads it (one way would be for the email client to cache the message once it is downloaded). Spammers would have a harder time spamming us, since we'd be able to track their message back to their web site and therefore identifying them would be, well, if not easier, differently harder.

Or maybe we shouldn't even send email. The user interface would still look the same. Behind the scenes it would just be sending URLs.

Usenet made this transition. Usenet was replaced by RSS feeds, which are just lists of URLs. Maybe email should make the same change.

End every helpdesk request on a good note

LOPSA Conference schedule published!

If you were waiting to register until the complete schedule was revealed, get that credit card out!

LOPSA PICC last night published the final slate of papers and speakers (if you didn't get your accept/sorry email, please let us know). http://picconf.org now contains the complete schedule.

You can attend for as little as $249, or $99 for students. The training program is extra.

If you aren't sure how to ask your boss for permission, we have some advice.

Tom

Tom @ LOPSA PICC in NJ, May 7-8, 2010

Tom will be the Saturday opening keynote, plus he will be teaching his two most popular half-day classes: Time Management for System Administrators, and "Help! Everyone hates our IT department!". LOPSA NJ PICC is in New Brunswick, NJ, May 7-8, 2010. It is a regional conference, everyone is invited. For more information: http://picconf.org

Tom @ Usenix LISA 2010, San Jose, CA, Nov 7-12, 2010

Tom's is teaching tutorials and giving two talks during Usenix LISA 2010, San Jose, CA, Nov 7-12, 2010.

• Half-Day: Time Management for System Administrators (MONDAY morning)
• Half-Day: Time Management: Team Efficiency (MONDAY afternoon)
• The Guru is In: "Time Management Open Q&A" (WEDNESDAY morning)
• Invited Talk: "Data Structures from the Future: Bloom Filters, Distributed Hash Tables, and More!" (THURSDAY morning)

Register early! Space in my tutorials is limited!

Countdown to LOPSA PICC!

Tonight's LOPSA-NJ Chapter meeting

Zeno Place, San Francisco, CA

A series of pictures taken last month in San Francisco.

Time management is like juggling 5 balls

Very Short But Amazing Speech by Coca Cola CEO Bryan Dyson

Submit your talk proposals to PICC today!

(PICC is a regional sysadmin conference to be held in central NJ on May
7-8, 2010. I'm on the planning committee. http://picconf.org)

Today is the deadline for proposals for papers, talks, and such.

We're a little low on submissions so I'd like to make one more "beg". We'd love to have a talk about PHP for sysadmins, something fun you've done with Arduino, your favorite JS
library, a walk-through on setting up Google Apps. Demo your favorite open source project, or propose a panel of people to talk about something you find interesting (I can help find others for your panel). It is an excellent way to spread the word about a project you are involved with.

We've tried to make the proposal process really easy. Just send your
contact info and topic plus a 1-2 paragraph description to
submissions@lopsanj.org

For more info IM me and/or view:
http://lopsanj.org/events/picc10/cfp

Tom

P.S. Today is the deadline but we can grant extensions to anyone that writes and asks.