Yesterday afternoon, I gave a talk at the University of Waterloo as part of their annual WatItIs technology conference. WatItIs is "WatITis is a one day conference for those involved in IT planning, support and decision making at the University of Waterloo." As such, it tends to cover a lot of ground, when it comes to the technology it explores. I attended talks on video conferencing by Koorus Bookan, and another by Ken Salem who gave an high-level introduction to cloud computing.

My particular talk was titled "Seeding the Clouds", a live demonstration of what’s involved in deploying servers and operating systems in the cloud, and a strangely appropriate followup to Ken’s talk. As part of that demonstration, I deployed an Ubuntu 8.10 64 bit system in Amazon’s EC2 cloud, then logged in. I also created a machine under KVM using virt-manager on Salmar Consulting’s servers. Finally, as a demonstration of a Web OS, I installed eyeOS, then had people create accounts and log in. Live. All in under 40 minutes. While I’m not much of a slide presentation guy (I prefer demonstrating things), I did prepare this somewhat lighthearted introduction to my talk if you’re curious.

My sincere thanks to the University of Waterloo for making me feel welcome and for putting on a great conference. Special thanks to my good friend, Lawrence Folland, for helping me navigate my way through the campus maze. The GPS didn’t help but you did. [ insert appropriate smiley here ]