AUSCert 2009 Wrap-Up May 22, 2009

Sometimes it’s the small things that makes a conference more enjoyable:-

• Full-time vendor sponsored barrister for good caffeine injections at anytime – nice
• Full-time vendor sponsored drinks fridge for your cold drink alternative – nice
• Full-time vendor sponsored ice creams – nice
• Vendor sponsored Wireless LAN – would have been handy if I wanted to use it

Sometimes it’s the big things that makes a conference more memorable:-

• Insane storm that hit on third day – impressive distraction
• Decent lunch time food and seating – nice
• Gala dinner, MC choice and entertainment (sans bonny and clive) – nice

Its always good to be amused:-

• Hotel staff running through vendor stand at an IT conference asking for electrical equipment to be powered off because of power failure in storm
• Watching a TV entertainer as MC trying to control 8 security experts having a debate – and he probably thought it would be a boring, dry gig.
• Gala event – 100s of men + one toilet block with 3 urinals

The other stuff:-

• Networking was excellent
• As with any conference, you have your mix of good and bad talks
• Use of wireless voting tech was quick and painless. After all, who really fills in the paper surveys at the end of talks.
• David Rice – finally got to see him talk – impressive, entertaining and thought provoking
• Patrick Gray – nice talk on the social media. And kudos for not bowing to pressure for the opinion you wouldn’t give on one of the panel debate questions. It says a lot for your character and journalistic integrity. If anyone disagrees, would you trust Pat with off the record comments, or on the records comments to be kept in context if he had given in to pressure so easy. It doesn’t really matter the reasons why he wouldn’t offer an opinion.
• Peter Gutmann – to talk so fast, concisely and in-depth is impressive.

Will I be back in 2010. Hopefully.

Bootvis replacement for Vista May 12, 2009

In the past, when my frustration with the time it took to boot up my Windows XP laptop finally got the better of me, I would track down a copy of the old Microsoft Bootvis utility. This provides a nice graphical view of what is happening as a machine is booting. However like many things, a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous. Therefore, unless you really have a deep understanding of the Operating System’s architecture, there is a good chance that you will end up using such tools incorrectly. This is part of the reason why I have read Microsoft removed the support for the Bootvis utility. I will happy put myself in the category of “a little bit of knowledge” when it comes to the internal architecture of Microsoft’s kernel. However, because I recognise my limitations I am careful to use such tools to only find obvious potential problems.

The other day, the long boot time for my Vista laptop finally got to me and I went looking for a replacement for bootvis that would work in Vista. I wanted to see if I could find any obvious culprits that were causing such a long boot up time. I came across the Microsoft Performance Analysis Tools (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/default.aspx). This is a much better set of tools than then old Bootvis utility, and the performance hooks are built into the Vista and Server 2008 operating system. At its most basic, you can use the tools to provide you with a similar graphical display of boot performance which was provided by Bootvis.

In the end I found a problem hardware driver that wasnt loading properly and was fixed with an update. The Logitech webcam services seem to have a known conflict with cygwin, so I disabled those (dont use the webcam all that much and I can always turn them back on when I need to), and an update of the VPN software. These were very obvious candidates to research for problems, or do basic testing (e.g. disable and see if there is a boot time difference), when comparing them against the other drivers and services load times that were being undertaken. Given the power of the tools, I am sure there is a wealth of information that can be gathered to find less obvious issues, but it would require me to find some time to really learn how to use these tools as they were intended. So I am happy to fix the obvious problems to provide just enough improvement to satisfy my boot time frustrations.