Earlier on, I wrote about the workshop on Large-scale Distributed Systems and Middleware (LADiS 2008) that I attended and how much I enjoyed it.

In fact, I’ve joined some esteemed colleagues and co-authored a paper that summarizes the key thoughts and discussion topics that we heard at this event. It has now been published along with the revised version of the material that was originally delivered at LADiS.

The bibtex for the summary paper is as follows:

@inproceedings{1529976,
author = {van Renesse,, Robbert and Rodrigues,, Rodrigo and Spreitzer,, Mike and Stewart,, Christopher and Terry,, Doug and Travostino,, Franco},
title = {Challenges facing tomorrow’s datacenter: summary of the LADiS workshop},
booktitle = {LADIS ‘08: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Large-Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware},
year = {2008},
isbn = {978-1-60558-296-2},
pages = {1–7},
location = {Yorktown Heights, New York},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1529974.1529976},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}

The LADiS workshop has now “graduated” into a recurring event that in 2009 will be jointly held with the 22nd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2009). I’m part of the Technical Program Committee and will be a strong advocate for the event, starting from this blog.

We all speculated that the launch of the Skype application for the iPhone would be hot, but not this hot. The free downloads came in at an average clip of ~6 downloads per second. I give another high five to my Skype colleagues who can proudly add this new mind boggling record to their collection (and to the 1 Billion downloads of the Skype client since inception; some other Skype facts here).

The Skype nation is a fitting product of the new world that we live in. It has taken only 2 years for Facebook to hit the 50M audience mark. Contrast that with Radio and TV hitting the same mark after 38 years and 13 years respectively. I learned about these and other factoids in this cool video:

I will admit that I cherish my 6-character-only Skype ID. It dates me as an early Skype adopter (’twas 2004). Much like my parents were proud owners of a 4 digit phone number easy to operate on the rotary dial. Long life to Skype.

Addendum: Downloads are now (4/7/09) well past 2M. Last update on subject.