LOPSA-NJ Announces Speakers and Opens Registration for Professional IT Community Conference

Feb. 24, 2010 - PRLog -- New Brunswick, NJ, February 21, 2010 – The Professional IT Community Conference is a regional event, but that isn't stopping internationally known speakers from appearing and presenting their vision of System Administration. The headliners of this event have varied backgrounds and experiences, but all are looking forward to sharing their thoughts on an array of topics.

Scheduled for May 7th and 8th, the two day event will feature three keynote addresses. Renown speakers and sysadmins David Blank-Edelman and New Jersey-native Thomas A. Limoncelli join IBM research staffer Eben Haber in presenting keynotes to conference attendees.

Opening the conference on Friday will be David Blank-Edelman. Blank-Edelman is the author of “Automating System Administration with Perl”, and has spent the past 25 years as a system/network administrator in large multi-platform environments including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, and the MIT Media Laboratory. He is currently the Director of Technology for Northeastern University CCIS. His keynote will focus on how system administrators are portrayed in popular culture.

Thomas A. Limoncelli is scheduled for the Saturday morning keynote, and will be using material from an unpublished, unannounced fifth book to describe the top techniques for building a smooth operation in terms of infrastructure designs that “route around” problems, as well as building a community of peers for support. Limoncelli is the author of several books on the topic of system administration, and lives in New Jersey while commuting to his employer, Google, in New York City.

The closing keynote address is a special treat!  Eben M. Haber, a staff member at the IBM Research laboratory in Almaden, California, 55 miles southeast of San Francisco. Since 2002, Eben has been part of a group of researching working to learn more about system administration tools and practices. Drawing inspiration from luminaries such as Margaret Mead and Diane Fossey, they observe system administrators in their natural habitat, record their actions using video cameras, and conduct face to face interviews. Haber will be discussing the world of system administration from an outsider's perspective, and highlighting the findings his team discovered. It is sure to be both entertaining and enlightening!

Registration for the conference is now open to the public, with two options available. A full conference and training pass is $474, although an “Early Bird” discount price of $399 is available until March 15th, while a conference-only pass (sans access to the special training track) is $249. In addition, user-group and corporate discounts for groups of 4 or more people receive an additional 10% discount. Considerable discounts are also available for current students in limited quantities.

To register for the 2010 Professional IT Community Conference, go to http://picconf.org and click on Register.

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"LOPSA-NJ is an organization for system administrators in New Jersey formed to facilitate information exchange pertaining to the field of system administration. LOPSA-NJ is not affiliated with a particular hardware or software vendor or company. Everyone is invited!"