I actually really love the feeling one gets when pushed to their limits of sleep deprivation. For me, my ego tends to shrink and go away after this long without sleep. I did catch a few winks on the plane, but they were mostly drunken winks, so they weren’t quite as restful as, say stretching out on a pile of broken glass. With the sun hanging in the air while my body wanted it to be under foot safely blocked out by a ball of mud, magma and water, I arrived feeling pretty much like I was in outer space.

That feeling was rather fitting, given that the first Canonical employee I met at lunch was none other than Mark Shuttleworth, who actually *has* been in outer space. It was quite random, I grabbed a place in the salad line, and there he was. We had a pretty good discussion ranging from why people still choose CentOS to Darwin’s Theory of Sexual Selection, its really awesome knowing that the guy at the helm gets what we’re doing.

The afternoon was spent in sessions, and I have some quick take aways from them:

• Puppet integration in Ubuntu Server is about to get really damn good. Some things that have been discussed are making client registration automatic and decoupled from hostname, allowing re-provisioning without reconfiguring anything.
• PPA’s for volatile software that releases nightly builds are continuing to flesh out. This makes upstream bug reports much easier, as when they say “try the latest nightly build” you can, in fact, try it without suddenly shifting from the package installed version to a custom compiled, or trying to build your own package. I think one challenge for that is going to be making sure that users know that the PPA exists.

Well, I got some sleep, so now I’m up at 0-dark-thirty and ready to attend some sessions. My favorites for the day are:

https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/server-maverick-monitoring-framework

Monitoring is near and dear to me. Mathiaz has some awesome ideas about how to make it fault tolerant.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Specs/ARMServer

A full rack of servers using only 7.5kw  … can’t wait to see this presentation.

https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/server-maverick-hadoop-pig

I want to learn more about this and play with it.