It was pretty cool visiting both Portlands in July, but it sure managed to make my July fly by. I can’t believe it’s August already.
At work I recently published 5 things about FOSS Linux virtualization you may not know following up with a conversation about virtualization tools I had at SCALE back in January. The most interesting bit of feedback I’ve gotten from this article was from a fellow sysadmin who was tired of watching people “fall over themselves over cloud” and he was happy to see an article addressing the kind of bare-metal private clusters that he’s still deploying. I have to admit being in some agreement there, cloud is cool and I’m excited about the developments in open source in this area, but business is still booming in the VMWare world.
I sadly have to admit falling behind on the Cryptography Coursera class, July was too busy and quite honestly I want practical usage and theory of cryptography, not the mathematical and theoretical foundation that will prepare me to write my own ciphers. Instead, at MJ’s recommendation, I’ve started watching the 4 part “Theory and Practice of Cryptography” series of Google Tech Talks from 2007 and they’ve turned out to be much more on target (available here: 1, 2, 3 and 4). I did start another Coursera class, this time Internet History, Technology, and Security. So far it’s been quite enjoyable, the instructor and folks he interview have a very “storytelling” format and I love that it’s filling in the gaps I have in my brain’s Internet History timeline.
The week before last, on Thursday, the alpha3 of Ubuntu was released. Given the limited availability of some of the other key Xubuntu project members, I ended up stepping up for this release with testing and making sure we had everything lined up for the Xubuntu alpha3. It was an interesting experience, and certainly closer than I’d been in the past to the release process. That Friday was System Administrator Appreciation Day and a member of one of the teams who uses a server I manage was generous enough to paypal me some money for flowers as a thank you! They were very nice flowers:
Sysadmin flowers!
Over the weekend one of my cousins was in town for the San Francisco Marathon, which she’d be running with her brother, who’s a local. We ended up meeting up a couple times, Saturday for dinner and then Sunday after the race to head out to the pool for a couple hours. It was really nice to catch up with her, and I really should see about spending more time with my local cousin too!
I spent a considerable amount of time this week catching up on projects and apparently giving myself even more work (todo list hasn’t shrunk!) but I’m feeling good about the progress. I finally got back to my gym routine this week after lots of traveling and being otherwise busy (so I had lots of excuses, bad bad).
On Tuesday evening I went to a Long Now talk by Cory Doctorow on “The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer” (summary and audio download available in that link) which was a really interesting talk. It also started off with the fun San Francisco [TBS@USA 13/13] video from a little drone flying all over San Francisco.
Cory Doctorow and Stewart Brand at Long Now Seminar
As far as upcoming stuff goes, I have plans to do some Partimus work tomorrow as we just received a donation of notebooks! And while on the topic of Partimus, Robert Litt, one of the teachers we work with was recently interviewed for an article: How One Teacher Built a Computer Lab for Free.
Finally, you’re probably all sick of hearing about it, but following the O’Reilly award I was Interviewed by Muktware, an online Open Source magazine and on Thursday my boss issued a press release about it.