Both of my regular readers have pointed out to me that my abysmally low blog posting frequency has recently sagged. That has been somewhat due to the state of my current project, Novell Cloud Security Services (NCSS). NCSS was released last August, and since then we have been working with current and prospective customers to make sure it’s what they need, and to enhance it as usage of the cloud evolves. That has meant a lot of travel and meetings for me — much of which I can’t blog about. However, sometimes I am involved in events that allow said loyal readers to see what I do. One such event was last week.

Last week I attended the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara. As I arrived at the conference about an hour late, I got a message from my colleague Gary Ardito that a camera crew was there waiting to record an interview with me and a demo of NCSS. I assumed he was kidding. He wasn’t.

They were from InformationWeek. The interviewer was Fritz Nelson, with David Berlind and a quietly competent camera guy. As Fritz mentions in the interview, we did have a great time reminiscing about Novell history as I scrambled to set up for the demo. I didn’t get completely set up and there were some errors in the demo. It was a crowded space behind the counter and Fritz kept moving in and I kept moving away. At one point he stepped on my microphone cord and I couldn’t back up any more.

Nevertheless, these guys did a great job with the interview and editing the video. They only had one take on a very noisy, crowded show floor. They were quite kind to me and cut out a spot where I inadvertently showed the demo password screen, and glossed over one part where I couldn’t get the demo to work. The screen zooms they added are really good to show the context of various features. I didn’t know about Fritz’s closing comment about running NLMs at ring 0 until I saw the video. Right on. Writing NDS as an NLM on NetWare, man, that was real code.