X World Sessions

Note that all sessions are subject to change and final confirmation with the presenters. Sessions may be withdrawn or changed without notice. Due to Apple's WorldWide Developers Conference happening in mid-June, some sessions may be added, changed or modified to include updated content.

X World will feature a number of Feature Presentations, Hands-on Workshops and Presentations.

Feature Presentations

WWDC 2009 Update
While the iPhone 3GS was the big launch at WWDC there were many other announcements made that were just as important. This feature presentation will fill you in on all the other stuff from WWDC...
Presentation not available but link to Snow Leopard Server  information.

Building Networks for Flexible Learning Environments
The presentation will cover the challenges and opportunities that building the next generation of infrastructure offers.
Presentation not available.

Services for IT
The power of IT is expressed not only in the management of systems, but in enabling others to do their jobs smoothly and efficiently. The dramatically redesigned Services architecture in Snow Leopard lets you put management tools at the “point-of-need” where staff and managers require them the most. Services are now contextual, convenient, configurable, and customizable, delivering the power of automation to the tip of the mouse cursor.  Join Sal Soghoian as he demonstrates Services integration strategies involving a range of standard computer languages and applications.
Mac OS X Automation Web Site

Hands-On Workshops

Please note that workshop spaces are limited by the number of available computers in each lab. Workshops are filled on a strictly allocated basis. This is to allow everyone the opportunity to attend a workshop.

Radmind, Netrestore, Netboot and more...
Damian O'Brien, Edith Cowan University
This workshop will guide participants through the process of developing a medium to large scale imaging solution for Mac OS based clients using a combination of Radmind, NetRestore, NetBoot and shell/php scripting. Particular attention is paid to complex end-user requirements in an educational setting, especially design and creative enterprises incorporating a wide variety of software types such as digital imaging, digital audio, 3D modelling and animation etc.

Beginning with a process for identification of customer needs and available resources, a project plan is
developed to timetable image creation, testing and deployment.  An introduction to Radmind is delivered followed by a hands on tutorial involving application bundle (transcript) creation and deployment.  Examples of how scripting and environment customization are employed to create a seamless imaging front end.  A discussion takes place concerning the importance of communication with stake holders and pre-deployment testing.
Contact Presenter

Launch into Automation for Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard
Peter Stagg, Monash University
A Cub's guide to the tools and techniques available to automate Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard. Focusing mainly on technologies available on a vanilla system, we look at several methods of creating Macros such as Automator, AppleScript - including GUI Scripting, Shell Script and other Scripting Languages (Perl, PHP, Ruby etc). Then take a look at the various Triggers that can kick off Macros; namely: Automator Workflows, Application Plug-ins, Scripts Menu & Folders, Folder Actions, and launchd (the new cron).
XW09_Automation_Slides.pdf
XW09_Automation_Notes.pdf

Building an SOE/MOE
Adam Reed, ANU
This hands on session will cover numerous aspect of building and maintaining a SOE/MOE including understanding OS X, software packaging, basic scripting and the command line. In addition you will see and use various tools that make managing a SOE easier. Finally you will gain some practical ideas that you can utilise in your environment. This session is a repeat from 2008
XW09_Building_a_SOE.pdf

Using Apple Remote Desktop & Deploy Studio
Jen Wallbank, Apple Australia
Saving time is a daily concern for system administrator, especially with the increase of minor interventions requested by end-users: accidentally modified system preferences, third-party applications instability or misconfigured, wrong access rights, viruses, etc... DeployStudio has emerged as the premiere, free tool for deploying single, dual or triple boot images. It offers excellent tools for building, customizing and deploying images and offers a central repository for hosting workflows, images and settings.
This workshop will cover how to make use of DeployStudio along with integrating with Apple Remote Desktop for a fully automated solution.
Deploy Studio Web Site
Apple Remote Desktop Web Site

Podcast Producer 2
Nader Nafissi, Apple Inc
Podcast Producer is a complete, end-to-end solution for encoding, publishing, and distributing high-quality podcasts. Ideal for employee training, university lectures, presentations — or whatever audio or video podcasts your organization requires — Podcast Producer simplifies the process of recording content, encoding, and publishing podcasts for playback in iTunes and on iPod, iPhone, Apple TV or iTunesU.
This workshop will cover whats new in Podcast Producer 2 and coming in Snow Leopard.
XW09_Podcast_Producer_Links.pdf

Final Cut Server
Matt McManus, Apple Australia
Final Cut Server is Apple’s media asset management and workflow automation software designed for the unique needs of film and video professionals. ou can use Final Cut Server to free up more time for creative work. Final Cut Server can automatically manage thousands of assets, execute dozens of routine production tasks, and keep every member of your team in sync. This workshop will cover how to set-up, administer and make use of the unique features of FCS and how to integrate it into iTunesU and other workflow processes
Final Cut Server Web Site

Mac OS X Server Performance Tuning
Andrew Johnson, Apple Australia
This workshop will cover how to make sure your Mac OS X server is operating at its peak in both network, system management and disk usage.
Presentation not available.

Network Troubleshooting
Andrew Johnson, Apple Australia
The network is now the lifeblood of information flowing throughout your campus. When network problems arise it can lead to many unhappy users and diagnosing them can be quite time consuming. In this hands-on workshop you will learn how to start diagnosing and troubleshooting network problems using the built in tools provided by Mac OS X.
Presentation not available.

Introduction to AppleScript
Sal Soghoian, Apple Inc
Using materials from the official Apple Training book, AppleScript 1-2-3, Sal Soghoian will guide you, step-by-step in learning the fundamentals of this powerful automation technology. This class is designed for those new to AppleScript, especially those with little or no programming experience. If your toughest technical accomplishment is calculating a column of numbers in Excel, this class is for you
Mac OS X Automation Web Site

Presentations

These presentations are approx 45 mins each and cover a wide variety of topics of interest. Each presentation is a case study in how a technology is used on a University campus.

Giving it a Bash
Tony Williams, University of Newcastle
This presentations will be looking at the Bash command line and how it can be used in ARD, postflight and login scripts. He will be covering both simple Bash programming and the use of Macintosh specific command line tools. Topics covered will include Active Directory configuration and binding, machine naming, drive mounting and preferences.
XW09_GivingItABash.zip

Modular Imaging using InstaDMG
Andrew Galka, University of Wollongong
Modular disk imaging used in desktop deployment provides a flexible and reliable method of creating a managed operating environment. Instead of a human building a base image and than taking a snapshot of the installation, modular imaging allows images to be built without a person completing each step manually. By taking the human out of the process disk images can be built exactly the same every time, with the flexibility of inserting and removing bits from the image without changes that will occur from a human configuring an additional image. Before making the change from traditional disk imaging there are a number of considerations that need to be examined such as:

• Packaging of applications (briefly touching on the process to repackage installations and create new ones)
• Configuration management (how to perform all of the configuration changes through payload free packages, first run scripts etc)
• Policy management

Deployment Studio: An Implementation Case Study
Jamie Madden, University of Queensland
At the School of ITEE we have some very sophisticated management and monitoring tools for our windows and linux environments. We have had minimal monitoring in our Macintosh environment until very recently. We use a combination of in house tools and Apple Remote Desktop to monitor our Macintosh's. We have requirements for the imaging system that goes beyond what the System Imaging Utility that ships with Leopard provides so we turned to Bombich's NetRestore application. This has been working fine for our needs but in November last year development was discontinued and a recommendation to use a new third party imaging system called Deployment Studio was given. The biggest problem we found with the built in System Imaging Utility was the time it takes to create an image is far greater than the third party tools. We also discovered a bug in the authentication system for Leopard during the initial deployment of our leopard clients which ended with us having to modify Samba to create a work around.
Presentation not available.

Starting from Scratch – the SCU iTunes U project
Luke Haber, Southern Cross University
In the second half of 2008,  Southern Cross University initiated a pilot project to launch a presence on Apple’s iTunes U site.  iTunes U allowed universities to make freely available educational content(podcasts) for students and the general public using the iTunes media playing software to download, subscribe and play digital media files, Video, Audio and PDF.

From SCU’s perspective a key factor in this opportunity to use iTunes U from was that:
a) It was free to setup and use iTunes U
b) It worked cross platform on both PC and Mac
c) It could be made portable for laptops, iPods and PDA/Phones

Southern Cross University is a smaller regionally based University consisting of approx 15,000 students and 900 staff.   The University is the 7th  largest provider of tertiary distance education with multiple campus’s spanning Sydney to the Gold Coast and offshore programs throughout South East Asia.  With a ratio of 50/50% of internal to external students, there were clear benefits offering e-learning opportunities through the use of podcasting technology.

At the time iTunes U was released Southern Cross University did not have a coordinated approach to podcasting lectures and using iTunes U would ensure the use of industry standards and file formats and a quality control mechanism through authentication submission of files.

The project was therefore able to start from scratch and implement podcasting infrastructure that suited our needs to automate the packaging and preparation of the content for iTunes U using Apple’s Podcast Producer.   A strong objective of the project was to train academics and empower them with the necessary skills to create quality-recorded podcasts and assist them in the preparation and structure of digital content.

This presentation outlines the experiences that the project team encountered while undertaking the project and gives an insight into the preparation and planning required for a university who has not yet decided to participate in iTunes U.
Presentation not available.

SpokenMedia Project: Enabling Rich Media Notebooks for Learning and Teaching
John Zornig, University of Queensland
UQ is developing a software application suite/web-based service that automatically creates transcripts from academic-style lectures and provides the basis for a rich media notebook for learning. The system takes lecture media, in standard digital formats such as .mp4 and .mp3, and processes them to produce a searchable archive of digital video-/audio-based learning materials.  The system allows for ad hoc retrieval of the media stream associated with a section of the audio track containing the target words or phrases. The system plays back the media, presenting the transcript of the spoken words synchronized with the speaker’s voice and marked by a cursor that follows along in sync with the lecture audio. The project’s goal is to increase the effectiveness of web-based lecture media by improving the search and discoverability of specific, relevant media segments and enabling users to interact with rich media segments in more educationally relevant ways.
Presentation not available.

The Storage Explosion
Jake Carroll, The Queensland Brain Institute, UQ
Computing has become a colourful place to work in. Much of this colour has come about because of innovation from end users. The tools we now have for multimedia, research, science and everything else in between give us unparalleled ability to entertain, engineer and understand. This ability comes at a price though. Storing all the content that imagination creates is hard. Keeping the data safe is harder still. Understanding the data that you manage is possibly the hardest task of a systems administrator. The Queensland Brain Institute and The Australian Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology have been through a lot, down the murky path of managing big data. We’d like to offer some help and some understanding to others, who have, or will shortly go through the same process.

This year, we’d like to take you on a road trip around managing the ever growing storage nightmare that has become the every day life of many systems administrators. We’ll show you:

* The battlefield - the storage war taking place. Users versus your infrastructure.
* The key sources, factors and contributors lurking under the table that are creating the storage explosion (oftentimes, it’s where you least expect it!).
* Frameworks, methodologies and models for understanding your data.
* Stratification of data - the key to determining a way forward in implementing a good ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) policy.
* How to understand the colour, shape and nature of your data. Data is no longer black and white. It has personality, for the purposes of classification.
* Key technologies in next generation file-systems. How they can do good things for you, and make your life easier. Life isn’t as simple as making file shares and serving files, anymore!

And finally, tying it all together, to make sense of the growing revolution of end users with the power to generate infinite amounts of data.
XW09_Storage_Explosion.pdf