Don’t let the theft of the Paternoville sign fool ya’, State College is as safe as ever. That is, until a bunch of Mac guys descend on the Nittany Lion Shrine. Yes, it’s that time of the year again when Mac guys from around the world (and yes, all of the speakers are male) descend upon Pennsylvania State University from throughout the Big 10 and beyond to discuss the Penn State mascot, the Nittany Lion. Actually, it’s a mountain lion, so we can’t discuss it quite yet at that point, but we can talk about a slightly bigger cat: Lion.
Lion deployment, scripted tools, Munki, InstaDMG, Puppet, migrations, “postPC,” PSU Blast, Dual Boot, NetBoot, reboot (just threw that in there because it sounded like it fit, but I’m sure much rebooting will be done anyway) and even iOS. Oh, and don’t forget lecture capture, launchd, monitoring, scripting, Boot Camp via BitTorrent (wait, what?), Damn Logs, Subversion (long live git), IPv6 (long live IPv4), DeployStudio (long live the French), Reposado (long live the mouse), Luggage, Casper (long live Minnesota!), ARD (long live the friggin’ App Store), troubleshooting, FileVault (long live Howard Hughes’ legacy), Tivoli (long live that 1984 video), Munki (crap, I already said that) and even iPad (which runs iOS I think).
Overall, the lineup is superb and looking at it, I am honored to be giving a session on Lion Server amidst all the cool stuff going on around me. I’m very impressed with the number and level of speakers and very excited to be a part of it. I’m also excited to be participating with Allister Banks, a cohort from 318, who will be giving talks on InstaDMG and Munki. Overall, it is sure to be a great conference and I look forward to hopefully seeing you all there if I don’t get arrested at the airport for wearing University of Minnesota socks.
Speaking of the Big 10. Did you know there are 12 teams in the Big 10? Did you know the Big East now has teams in Idaho and California? Did you know that the Big 12 has 10 teams? Did you know that the Pac 12 has 4 teams in 3 states that don’t touch the Pacific ocean? What does all this mean? No, it does not mean that we will discuss basic arithmetic and geography at the conference; however, we might show off some apps that can help the math professors at the member institutions of these higher education conferences teach these basic subjects a bit better. Disclaimer: I went to the University of Georgia and am required by having done so to poke fun at other conferences whenever it is possible. Having said that: how many Georgia programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
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They can’t, it’s a hardware problem! OK, terrible joke. So here’s a picture of the Georgia mascot chomping down on an opposing (Auburn) player.
Seems like I’m going through football season withdrawals all of a sudden… Point of all this, go to the conference. It’s sure to be a hoot, and I’m sure there will be plenty of talk about football, er, I mean Mountain Lions, er, wait, I mean Mac OS X and iOS!