Panel Discussion: The Green Datacentre

Just to keep everyone on their toes—especially those who can see my calendar, I have switched session to see an interactive one. I thought I would be good to understand the issues surrounding the green datacenter given that we are just getting started on the new ISS building. Let's see what happens.

AMD, Citi, Dell, HP, Intel, Green M3, Microsoft. An impressive cross-section of people in the panel.

• Harvey Cobbold, CitiGroup
  
• Ed English, Dell
  
• Michael Manos, Microsoft
  
• Ramon Huesa, AMD
  
• Nigel Bridgeman, HP
  
• Kevin O'Donovan, Intel
  
• Dave Ohara, Green M3 (moderator)
  

Citigroup are spending $232M on a new datacenter—saving 11000 tonnes of CO₂ and cutting energy use by 75%.

$0.5B data center being built by MSFT in Dublin, complete by mid-2009, with tens of thousands of servers.

Interesting that very early on—talking about the roof on the data center, the operational costs might be lower for the green solution, but the initial capital cost is higher. When we looked at value engineering the new ISS building, did we look at capital plus three years, five years, twenty years? Interesting, for a 20 year lifespan, the capital cost of a datacenter is 6%-10%... that's very low.

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=8110

So it seems that these guys have not developed a set of KPIs—instead they seem to be responding to legislative bodies. Disappointing. It might be worth us looking at what the EU is doing, as, in the lifespan of the new ISS building, we may have to comply…

There seems to be a lot of tap-dancing in this session. No one seems to have KPIs or long term targets for their efficiency of their computer power—without that, the notion of a green datacentre is really a marketing ploy, not an environmentally responsible initiative…

Next Generation Networking in Windows Server 2008

Rafal Lukawiecki; Strategic Consultant, Project Botticelli Ltd: rafal@projectbotticelli.co.uk

Chris thought this session was about food poisoning, but in fact it's about Italian painters… J

• Introducing Next Generation (NG) TCP/IP (crash course)
  
• Teaching us IPv6 assuming good knowledge of IPv4 (crash course)
  
• Discuss enhancements to Windows Server 2008 networking environment
  

We want tings faster, high connectivity, simpler administration—innovative concepts, not just flashy UIs.

Issues with Vista networking—throughput down-throttling during multimedia playback. Performance of large file copy (including local). MMCSS service is the problem. The faster your network, the more obvious this issue is. Will be fixed in Vista SP1 and Windows Sever 2008 RTM.

NG TCP/IP

Entire protocol stack re-written for first time since 1990—for security, performance, and developer support.

Three big scalability enhancements.

1. TCP window scaling, aids both sending and receiving.
   
2. Explicit Congestion Notification – Vista and WS2008 will listen for a packet that the router can send indicating that it is overloaded. If it gets such a packet, it backs off how much it is trying to send, so does not make the problem worse.
   
3. Multiprocessor scalability of NDIS 6.0. NDIS 5.1 did not allow the distribution of packets across processors.
   

Performance enhancements, through following a large number of RFCs (couldn't catch all of them) J

• No restart or reboot needed when configuring
  
• Policy based QoS
  
• Auto-configuring and self-tuning of IPv4
  
• Roaming in IPv4 and IPv6 better.
  

Security

• Full resistance to TCP/IP DoS attacks
  
• Multiple firewalls can be configured, and will not fight each other in the same way they do in XP.
  

CRASH COURSE IN IPv6

There is a university in the States with more addresses allocated than the whole of Asia. We will run out of IPv4 addresses in 2010 to 2011… (Vint Cerf)

• IPv4 makes p-2-p really hard
  
• Security is not built in from the ground-up.
  

3.4x10³⁸ addresses in the IPvb6 address space.

It does look like there are some security advantages to having an environment with both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista. We should be looking at how to combine our plans for deploying Vista with our plans for deploying Windows Server 2008—we should be thinking about which Windows Server 2008 deployments will get us the best bang-for-the-buck.

Windows P2P is for IPv6 only. QoS is managed by GP—very cool demo showing how QoS can be used to restrict the bandwidth available to specific applications or specific IP addresses. Perhaps we could allow certain kinds of traffic if we knew that we could limit the bandwidth that was available to particular services, particular address spaces.

Check out http://www.xtseminars.co.uk

Intel VPro and System Center Configuration Manager 2007

Out-of-band management. Imagine that your motherboard draws a small amount of current even when your machine isn't running—rather than just wake-on-LAN (which has been around for years) there are all kinds of other things that you can do to your machine while it is turned off… J This is the presentation that will tell us what (and I know both the presenters—one from MSFT, one from Intel).

We were a little surprised (or at least I was) that the presentation was not particularly well attended—I wonder if that is because "VPro" is not actually in the title of the session. I guess I knew as a result of the inside track that AMT (Active Management Technology) is part of VPro and that out-of-band management is what you can do with AMT.

• Remote Power Control: power a device up or down over the wire (including, of course, Wake-on-LAN)
  
• Redirecting IDE—allows a help-desk operator to re-boot your machine from a known good image elsewhere on the network.
  
• Serial-over-LAN (seeing the BIOS screen on a remote machine, during boot)
  

SCCM 2007 provisioning of the AMT technology; Query of AMT enabled devices; Remote console (BIOS). Out-of-Band service point is a new SCCM site role. Certificate based security, with mutual authentication via Active Directory and Kerberos.

Can use in conjunction with Operating System Deployment Task Sequencing (in SCCM 2007) – so the ISO image that performs a task sequence – gets kicked off through IDE redirection. Nice. Though the transport differs between AMT 2 and AMT 3, the admin does not need to know what protocol is being used.

UK Education Session

Two different presentations this afternoon—the dominant one was live@edu which took so much time that there was little time left to see the presentation on infrastructure optimization—the latter is where the real follow-ups are—we can complete a significant survey which will tell us where we are with respect to infrastructure optimization. Brad Anderson (see my previous posting) related Infrastructure Optimization to significant differences in Total Cost of Ownership—significant savings on a per PC basis, and something we should be thinking very carefully about—how much is it worth spending on infrastructure optimization given the ultimate cost savings. The assessment is here: http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/bizinfra/ac/bpio.mspx The UK HE folks at Microsoft will help us to also get the third party survey that allows us to assess total cost of ownership.

The breadth of the live@edu offering is quite significant—though the speaker was very up-front that the offering is not going to provide the best student experience, but may provide the cheapest. Given the other (e-mail) discussions about push-mail during the day, I asked some questions about whether and how the experience could be split, and they do expect that live@edu might be a student offering without it being a faculty and staff offering. It provides e-mail (via hotmail); shared calendar; messenger; document collaboration; shared filestore and sharepoint-like workspace. Their profit model is through the search engine—if you search for something through the site, then the search page will have sponsorship—advertising—but everything else is ad-free and free.

One possibility would be to offer this as e-mail for life to alumni—but they do not expect this to be anyone's primary e-mail address, and they do accept that students do tend to flit from one e-mail address to the next—but hope/pray that their spam filters will solve that problem… I am not convinced. Spam seems to come in waves as the war between spammers and filters continued. You only need one wave to hit while alumni are using live@edu and they switch to another e-mail and we have lost them…

The other problem with offering the service only to alumni is that we don't get them used to the experience while they are at the university, so our confidence in their continued use of the service is low…

My inclination is to skip live@edu, but I am more than willing to continue a green hat discussion if that's what people want to do.

Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5

First Microsoft branded release of Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5

Focus on:

• Dynamic Virtualization
  
• Extending Scalability
  
• Globalization
  
• Microsoft Security Standards
  

Application Isolation: keeping the application separate from Windows so that it is not impacted by differences between different versions of Windows and so on. When there is Middleware that needs to be sequenced with the main application, it is not in the "context" of the application. Today, that is solved by "suiting" the application with the middleware. That is a problem when I want to update the Middleware that is "suited" with many different sequenced applications. With 4.5, we can decide at run-time which other applications or Middleware will run in the same "SystemGuard Environment".

4.1 and 4.2 were not sufficiently scalable, or manageable.

Three different flavours of delivery options:

• Full infrastructure: AD and SQL Server req'd; desktop configuration service; dynamic delivery; desktop configuration
  
• Lightweight infrastructure: dynamic delivery; No desktop configuration
  
• Standalone mode: No server req'd—delivered via CD.
  

Nice that the streaming happens in the background to ensure the maximum amount of streaming has happened by the time you are trying to use the application. Right now, streaming does not happen until you require the next page of memory. It sounds like this is really solved with 4.5.

4.5 will also allow sequenced applications to be run by people that access them across the internet (if we sequenced applications we could provide them to students and staff off campus—even people who never came to campus). Integration with SCCM 2007 R2—the infrastructure from SCCM 2007 R2 can be used by Application Virtualization.

Active Directory Domain Service in Microsoft Windows Server 2008

What a mouthful. Starting with the notion of the Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC). There's a new tool for preppin a machine to be an RODC. If no accounts are cached on the RODC (which is the default) the machine is very secure; the RODC is not responsible for replicating to other DCs—only the recipient. It does not require that a domain admin ever needs to log on to the machine—so it sounds like this is a great machine to put in a branch location where there is no IT admin staff… hmmmm… wonder if there are applications for us at the University.

Fine-grain password policy can be set to global security groups or users. So no longer do we need the same password policy for the whole domain. Where there is overlap and multiple policies would apply to the same person, they have a precedence algorithm. They do not apply password setting to OUs.

Apparently we really ought to regularly back up our DCs…

Unified Messaging

I made a last minute change and decided to go to a talk on Exchange unified messaging. Imagine having a number to call where someone could read your e-mail to you—Outlook voice access. So far, they are focusing on setup—nice thing is that there is a useful default if the user has not gone through the setup process—including voice synthesis of the person's name. It is a little surreal to watch a demonstration of someone going through a voicemail setup process. J Cool—setup. Though it can be interactive, can also be done via script in a shell—thousands or tens of thousands of users.

The UI is singularly unimpressive, but the demos are great—showing how easy it is to set up voicemail menus—with voice recognition. Within seconds of typing "sales" as the phrase that the system will listen for, the presenter is saying "sales" and having the phone call routed correctly.

When it comes to listening to voicemail, it is a great feature that you can type in any phone number and have the voicemail played on any phone rather than on your laptop speakers (imagine being in an airport, using Outlook Web Access [OWA] and you see from your inbox that you got a voicemail—you note a pay-phone's phone number and get Exchange to call that phone and deliver your voicemail message).

OWA also allows you to set your voicemail "out of office" message. Very impressive demo of someone using voice control to listen to voicemail and e-mail messages. Exchange even realized that one of his messages was in Spanish, so the text-to-voice engine spoke in Spanish rather than English. There was not a single mis-step—every time, first time, he could control his messages with his voice. He could control his calendar, and he could inform other attendees at a meeting that e would be late. Imagine a lecturer having the option to send such a message to everyone in a lecture that he/she was going to be late. Marvelous.

Looks like, if we wanted to do that, we would need to have got our telephony systems from specific vendors: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/telephony-advisor.mspx

Not sure if they will be extending support to other phone systems…

 

 

Business Intelligence

Ulrich Knechtel of AMD, talking about Business Intelligence.

<aside> IBM have made a $5B deal for Cognos—its biggest ever deal. </aside>

BI splits into: basic queries; reports; OLAP; data mining and EIS (Enterprise Information Systems). Excel; SQL Server Analytics server (and reporting server); Proclarity Analytics. From the hardware perspective, we need to be worried about the sheer volume of data that might be required to do BI.

Truism, but worth pointing out—not sure how this relates to BI: Performance is determined by the component with the lowest performance (e.g. CPU perf versus front-side bus perf). 64-bit does not help with Memory I/O but does help with large memory size and CPU perf. Database performance is 80% influenced by Memory I/O (as opposed to floating point and address calculation etc).

Memory I/O can then be broken down to Access speed to memory; transfer speed between memory and CPU; memory size and caches (how many caches, how they are shared by cores, cache size). 32 gig of memory is addressable with a 64-bit architecture.

After the first few minutes, this could have been about any processor intensive processing—not specifically BI. What a shame. Really not nearly as useful as we hoped or expected.

 

 

Alex Weinert – Identity Lifecycle Management

Releasing second half of 2008, is ILM 2 (not yet got a street name—which means to me it may not ship until 2009—the cut off is the end of the calendar year).

<aside> spent lunch with Chris D and Mark J along with some folks from Microsoft (particularly Dominic Watts) and discussed a project that they have been working with some education authorities. Next week (on Thursday) they are running a workshop to discuss the future face of higher education (from the IT perspective). Sounds interesting—next generation VLE with collaboration tools? Anyway, I am looking forward to participating in the workshop. </aside>

Yay—finally a demo. Group Management. The portal is build on top of Windows SharePoint Services. Working with Office 2007 to add a toolbar for groups. They use a mail paradigm to make requests, so that requests can be made off-line and you don't have to wait on-line for requests to be approved. Can use same approval mechanism for new accounts and all the other functions of ILM. The approval processes are all encoded in Visual Studio—ILM consumes the workflows you create elsewhere.

React to events on sets of resources with processes. When a new employee starts, give them access to x and y…

This might come too late to be a viable alternative in the UIM program, but in another year or so, might have been a viable alternative.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) may be something that we want to look at as an alternative to Aqualogic—building an application directly from the process (or workflow)… Seems that some of what it does is similar (though I haven't looked at how Visual Studio workflow editor). There seems to be a simplified version of workflow editing here, but they are using WWF. Maybe there are other areas where it is worth us looking at Windows Workflow Foundation (in residences for example?). Chris just suggested that it might be a good replacement for K2 for Freedom of Information. What do you think of that Lee? I wonder if there were any talks on WWF last week…?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Microsoft IT Identity Management

Brian Phul, Microsoft IT.

This is the smallest room I have been in so far. I don't think you could get more than eighty people in here before it is standing room only, and it is mostly full. I am hoping that everyone else has got it wrong, and that listening to Microsoft IT talk about how they do Identity Management will hopefully prove informative. I am also hoping that, as a smaller more focused session, I am less likely to hear the phrase "industry megatrends"—a phrase that grates even when I type it in (partly because it doesn't get green underlined by MS Word—let alone red underlined. The dictionary thinks that megatrend is a word!)

Core principle: "Active Directory should not be authoritative for anything". (Otherwise there is nothing against which to compare it to ensure it is correct). All the important stuff, MIIS synchronizes to AD from other systems. Group management is self-service, through a portal; synchronized by MIIS. SLA for account provisioning is now four hours, and actual time is usually much lower.

"Deprovisioning" an account does not mean deleting it. Account is disabled and moved to an OU that cannot be accessed by anyone but the Identity Management team.

Active Directory is the publishing mechanism for various other directories—telephone numbers (for example) are owned by "Real Estate and Facilities" and offer the identity management team the up-to-date data from a SQL database, to be published to Active Directory via MIIS.

They don't support roles based access—they leave it to individuals to decide (for example) what security groups they want and who they want to put in them. Unfortunately, that doesn't help us—I can't imagine us telling an academic to use a portal to create a security group to lock down some work space on the university network…

Employee ID is the unique key for all employees and they are never recycled—huh. I will forever be 43658 J

It would be interesting for us, in UIM, to determine what our principles ought to be. I wonder if their "principles" are published anywhere…? Apparently not, but he did point me at: www.Microsoft.com/itshowcase so there may be something there to help us to develop our own principles…

Barcelona

I am spending my first session here listening to some old colleagues discuss the new version of SMS—which is now called System Center Configuration Manager 2007. I think that, given some of the figures that I heard yesterday about management maturity model, that deploying SMS at the University could result in some significant cost savings in the long term.

Ensuring that all PCs connected to the network have the right software updates applied; providing reports that indicate how many instances of how many applications we are using, and therefore require licensing; operating system deployment (avoiding the visit to every desktop to deploy Vista…

Yesterday morning, Mark and I went to see Sagrada Familia (church of the holy family) a church that was architected by Antoni Gaudi. The church is still being built and has been under construction for over 100 years. Gaudi dedicated the last fifteen years of his life to its construction. It is incomplete now, and, from the knave you can look up in places and still see the sky. As you walk around the outside of the church, you can see the different eras during which construction has continued—with different styles of statuary, different styles of column, window shapes and so on. Inside, it becomes even more clear how the very construction materials of the church have changed. The famous spires are made of solid stone; but the columns in the knave (styled after trees) appear to be made from concrete forms. We saw pieces that, from the external faces, looked like they were solid sandstone, but from the internal faces, could tell they were made from molds—creating the façade of solid sandstone…

But there is a grand plan—and that grand plan has been updated (in fact the grand plan needed to be re-created after Anarchists destroyed Gaudi's original models and drawings during the war). Still, the church continues to be built. Dan and I joked later about the church as metaphor for software… but maybe it is not so much a joke. As we do our daily work, when we ensure that that work is in line with our strategy, we end up, over a very long time, and over multiple iterations of long term plans, with something bigger than the sum of the parts…

Anyway, back to the conference… Later in the day I will be listening to Microsoft IT talking about how they do identity management; Active Directory rights management; SharePoint governance and Vista application compatibility. I am hoping also to have lunch with Dominic Watts from Microsoft (from the Higher Education department).

More later.

Manage Complexity and Achieve Agility with Microsoft System Center

What a mouthful. This is an overview session for the whole of the System Center suite.


Brad Anderson is the General Manager for Microsoft Management (both infrastructure, like Group Policy, and products--the System Center family).

In the enterprise, 70% use SMS, 50% use MOM. "Industry Megatrends" (again):
1. Compliance & Governance
2. Expanding Datacenter
3. Software & Services
4. Extreme Mobility
Not sure that there is a 1-to-1 mapping between these mega-trends and Bob Kelly's.

Microsoft deployed 100 000 servers in Data Centers in the last year. Power and cooling are huge cost--how does virtualization make things easier. 70% of IT budgets are spent on maintaining existing infrastructure.

Infrastructure Optimization Model (Check out through the System Center web site):
Basic - IT is a cost center - $1320/pc
Standardized - IT is an efficient cost center - $ 580/pc
Rationalized - IT is a business enabler - $ 230/pc
Dynamic - IT is a strategic asset

It is going to be worth doing a cost/benefit analysis using these figures to look at the cost of managing the machines we manage.

When application/service is being developed, use DSI on how it is deployed , configured and modelled.

Upgrade to Vista costing $30 per PC using System Center Configuration Manager.

Data Protection Manager--demo. Under the covers, this is VSS with a reasonably usable UI on top. When looking at an exchange server, you pick, not the drive, but the exchange store. With SQL, pick the specific databases; with file servers, pick the drives. In each case, you have a scenario specific to choose.

Systems Center Operations Manager--move from monitoring devices, to monitoring services. SCOM 2007 SP1 RC1 is fully supported. RTM in early February.

To fully manage desktops:
- Vista Enterprise
- Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack
- Forefront Client Security
- System Center

SCCM 2007 allows management (and hence software updates) over the internet.

Announcing System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 (same platform as GP) .

Jeff Wetlauffer demo: desktop and mobile device management space. Demonstrating the task sequencer from SCCM 2007. Again talking about the driver catalog and how only the appropriate drivers are made part of the image. Can make sure that the disk is partitioned in the same way on all machines getting the OS. (e.g. 1 partition that is 4gig and the second one that is 100% of the remainder of the disk space.

Now he's using operations manager monitoring Vista--showing us data on the time it takes for client machines to boot. It is broken up to show different parts of the boot sequence so we can see that there is a perf degradation over time--and we can see what the likely cause is. Seeing root causes like CPU over-utilized; fragmented files and exhausted memory.

This week launching configuration packs for doing desired configuration management. Allowing administrators to check for drift from the standard configurations.

Another demo of Softgrid--now showing us at a more technical level--that running an app through Softgrid actually runs the app on the client machine without touching the client registry--so where there is a need for two different apps to ahve mutually exclusive registry settings, we don't have a problem running both apps on the same machine at the same time.

48% of crit-sits (critical situations) would be avoided using SCOM desktop monitoring and DCM. Interesting way to reduce support burden. Maybe we should be thinking about using SCOM to monitor Vista machines as we roll them out.

Server Management Suite Enterprise --check out the link--might be cost effective:
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/svrmgmtsuites/howtobuy/default.mspx
We would get a combination of management products, and the ability to manage unlimited number of virtualized machines: "Comprehensive solution for end-to-end management of physical and virtual server environments that includes the Enterprise Server management licenses for Operations Manager 2007, Configuration Manager 2007, and Data Protection Manager 2007; the license for Virtual Machine Manager 2007; and, rights to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments on a single server ."

The Microsoft Innovation Machine

Spot the marketing speak...

Second to back row in large auditorium, and everyone has a plastic tube to hit. Fighting has not yet broken out. Six different notes, but no discernable tune. I was expecting "Close Encounters"--very disappointing...

Bob Kelly is going to dialog with us--he's really excited. There are 5200 people at IT Forum this year. He's thanking us again for "dialoging" with us--I wish I was playing bingo. No more industry trends now, we have "megatrends". …Msut remember… he is in marketing.

Hardware perf, web 2.0, software "breakthroughs" and broadband, wireless are the "megatrends".

Dynamic IT; Dynamic Systems Initiative; People_Ready. Bob is telling us about technical underpinnings today, not just marketing speak. Unified and virtualized; process lead, model driven; service enabled; user-focused. Not sure that they can really do more than pay lip-service to that vision right now.

Process-lead, model driven: sounds like the DSI stuff is an investment that MSFT is continuing to make--could be there's value in it someday… "User focused is at the core of our heritage". Good grief! Internally they know that they are not producing much in the way of Task Based UI, so this really is lip-service.

February 27th starts launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. Joint launch wave--although SQL Server 2008 will not ship until towards the end of the first half of next year.

Windows Server 2008: NAP; "read-only DC" in a branch. Interesting. IIS 7. True hypervisor . Announcing: "Microsoft Hyper-V Server" SKU. Hyper-V is the hypervisor in Windows Server 2008. Eight different SKUs… php natively supported on Windows Server 2008.

IIS 7 seems to have a number of new and useful features for building large roust web-sites -- but learning what it does might still be painful--does not seem to be a task-based UI, but MMC 3.0... I need to look at terminal services remote app--ran an app remotely from an externally facing SharePoint site. I wonder if they have a hands-on self-paced lab on TS remote app…?

Virtualization Strategy
1. Presentation Virtulaization (terminal services)
2. Application virtualization (SoftGrid)
3. Server Virtualizations (Virtual Server)
4. Desktop Virtualization (Virtual PC)

System Center -- focusing on building one toolset for managing both… (hmmmm… this must be some kind of change, since there was a separate Virtual Server Manager… wait a minute, there still is).

Integration components for Linux servers to run under Windows Server 2008--can roll-back a service pack without re-booting, through snapshotting. Not clear whether the snap-shot is just the OS and hence state…

So there is System Center virtual machine manager… isn't this a separate tool for doing virtual machine management? MSFT says that a new version of Virtual Machine manager will be able to manage ESX VM images. Moving virtual machines from one machine to another does not happen dynamically, but takes three or four seconds as a result of manual action. So behind VMWare.

Softgrid demo showing four different versions of MSFT Word running on the same machine at the same time in different virtualized environments. Softgrid is being re-named as "Application Virtualization Version 4.5". Being released in the summer. Very cool.

"Microsoft innovation machine." I don't think Bob Kelly can help himself.

Bill Anderson doing demo on Data Protection Manager, and incorporates System Center Configuration Manager Task Sequencer. Using driver catalog, so that all the drivers, for all the different servers and desktops you use have only the drivers they need in the images that are deployed. "Business Desktop Deployment" (BDD) is now called "Microsoft Deployment". Showed how to use Desired Configuration Management to set a configuration baseline.

Intellisense in SQL Server 2008 when writing SQL. New visualizations in SQL Server 2008 Reporting…

---

Windows Home Server introduced--launched last week. Share files across the computers in the home.
Every desktop has a link to the servers that there is a central repository. Network health is monitored. Start daily back-ups every night--waking machines to do the work of back-up before putting them back to sleep.

Can do full system restore from the server--picking any back-up from any date. Can share home-server across the internet--and remote desktop to any PC in the house connected to the Home Server.

Welcome to Barcelona

There seems to be quite a large proportion of delegates here from Lancaster Uni. Or maybe it's just that we've been keen to get down here. We all got our swanky early bird wristbands (think Livestrong in blue) but apparently, that doesn't give us the priviledge of jumping the food queue.

First keynote is not until this afternoon, so I have until then to charge the laptop and flex my fingers... more posts on the way.