• Archives

  • Categories:

  • Other profiles

OpenStack Days Mountain West 2016

Tuesday, Dec 27th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

A couple weeks ago I attended my last conference of the year, OpenStack Days Mountain West. After much flight shuffling following a seriously delayed flight, I arrived late on the evening prior to the conference with plenty of time to get settled in and feel refreshed for the conference in the morning.

The event kicked off with a keynote from OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier who spoke on the growth and success of OpenStack. His talk strongly echoed topics he touched upon at the recent OpenStack Summit back in October as he cited several major companies who are successfully using OpenStack in massive, production deployments including Walmart, AT&T and China Mobile. In keeping with the “future” theme of the conference he also talked about organizations who are already pushing the future potential of OpenStack by betting on the technology for projects that will easily exceed the capacity of what OpenStack can handle today.

Also that morning, Lisa-Marie Namphy moderated a panel on the future of OpenStack with John Dickinson, K Rain Leander, Bruce Mathews and Robert Starmer. She dove right in with the tough questions by having panelists speculate as to why the three major cloud providers don’t run OpenStack. There was also discussion about who the actual users of OpenStack were (consensus was: infrastructure operators), which got into the question of whether app developers were OpenStack users today (perhaps not, app developers don’t want a full Linux environment, they want a place for their app to live). They also discussed the expansion of other languages beyond Python in the project.

That afternoon I saw a talk by Mike Wilson of Mirantis on “OpenStack in the post Moore’s Law World” where he reflected on the current status of Moore’s Law and how it relates to cloud technologies, and the projects that are part of OpenStack. He talked about how the major cloud players outside of OpenStack are helping drive innovation for their own platforms by working directly with chip manufacturers to create hardware specifically tuned to their needs. There’s a question of whether anyone in the OpenStack community is doing similar, and it seems that perhaps they should so that OpenStack can have a competitive edge.

My talk was next, speaking on “The OpenStack Project Continuous Integration System” where I gave a tour of our CI system and explained how we’ve been tracking project growth and steps we’ve taken with regard to scaling it to handle it going into the future. Slides from the talk are available here (PDF). At the end of my talk I gave away several copies of Common OpenStack Deployments which I also took the chance to sign. I’m delighted that one of the copies will be going to the San Diego OpenStack Meetup and another to one right there in Salt Lake City.

Later I attended Christopher Aedo’s “Transforming Organizations with OpenStack” where he walked the audience through hands on training his team did about the OpenStack project’s development process and tooling for IBM teams around the world. The lessons learned from working with these teams and getting them to love open processes once they could explain them in person was inspiring. Tassoula Kokkoris wrote a great summary of the talk here: Collaborative Culture Spotlight: OpenStack Days Mountain West. I rounded off the day by going to David Medberry’s “Private Cloud Cattle and Pet Wrangling” talk where he drew experience from the private cloud at Charter Communications to discuss the move from treating servers like pets to treating them like cattle and how that works in a large organization with departments that have varying needs.

The next day began with a talk by OpenStack veteran, and now VP of Solutions at SUSE, Joseph George. He gave a talk on the state of OpenStack, with a strong message about staying on the path we set forth, which he compared to his own personal transformation to lose a significant amount of weight. In this talk, he outlined three main points that we must keep in mind in order to succeed:

  1. Clarity on the Goal and the Motivation
  2. Staying Focused During the “Middle” of the Journey
  3. Constantly Learning and Adapting

He wrote a more extensive blog post about it here which fleshes out how each of these related to himself and how they map to OpenStack: OpenStack, Now and Moving Ahead: Lessons from My Own Personal Transformation.

The next talk was a fun one from Lisa-Marie Namphy and Monty Taylor with the theme of being a naughty or nice list for the OpenStack community. They walked through various decisions, aspects of the project, and more to paint a picture of where the successes and pain points of the project are. They did a great job, managing to pull it off with humor, wit, and charm, all while also being actually informative. The morning concluded with a panel titled “OpenStack: Preferred Platform For PaaS Solutions” which had some interesting views. The panelists brought their expertise to the table to discuss what developers seeking to write to a platform wanted, and where OpenStack was weak and strong. It certainly seems to me that OpenStack is strongest as IaaS rather than PaaS, and it makes sense for OpenStack to continue focusing on being what they’ve called an “integration engine” to tie components together rather than focus on writing a PaaS solution directly. There was some talk about this on the panel, where some stressed that they did want to see OpenStack hooking into existing PaaS software offerings.


Great photo of Lisa and Monty by Gary Kevorkian, source

Lunch followed the morning talks, and I haven’t mentioned it, but the food at this event was quite good. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it was some of the best conference-supplied meals I’ve had. Nice job, folks!

Huge thanks to the OpenStack Days Mountain West crew for putting on the event. Lots of great talks and I enjoyed connecting with folks I knew, as well as meeting members of the community who haven’t managed to make it to one of the global events I’ve attended. It’s inspiring to meet with such passionate members of local groups like I found there.

More photos from the event here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157676117696131

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, travel

The Temples and Dinosaurs of SLC

Sunday, Dec 25th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

A few weeks ago I was in Salt Lake City for my last conference of the year. I was only there for a couple days, but I had some flexibility in my schedule. I was able to see most of the conference and still make time to sneak out to see some sights before my flight home at the conclusion of the conference.

The conference was located right near Temple Square. In spite of a couple flurries here and there, and the accompanying cold, I made time to visit out during lunch the first day of the conference. This square is where the most famous temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints resides, the Salt Lake Temple. Since I’d never been to Salt Lake City before, this landmark was the most obvious one to visit, and they had decorated it for Christmas.

While I don’t share their faith, it was worthy of my time. The temple is beautiful, everyone I met was welcoming and friendly, and there is important historical significance to the story of that church.

The really enjoyable time was that evening though. After some time at The Beer Hive I went for a walk with a couple colleagues through the square again, but this time all lit up with the Christmas lights! The lights were everywhere and spectacular.

And I’m sure regardless of the season, the temple itself at night is a sight to behold.

More photos from Temple Square here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157677633463925

The conference continued the next day and I departed in the afternoon to visit the Natural History Museum of Utah. Utah is a big deal when it comes to fossil hunting in the US, so I was eager to visit their dinosaur fossil exhibit. In addition to a variety of crafted scenes, it also features the “world’s largest display of horned dinosaur skulls” (source).

Unfortunately upon arrival I learned that the museum was without power. They were waving people in, but explained that there was only emergency lighting and some of the sections of the museum were completely closed. I sadly missed out on their very cool looking exhibit on poisons, and it was tricky seeing some of the areas that were open with so little light.

But the dinosaurs.

Have you ever seen dinosaur fossils under just emergency lighting? They were considerably more impactful and scary this way. Big fan.

I really enjoyed some of the shadows cast by their horned dinosaur skulls.

More photos from the museum here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157673744906273/

There should totally be an event where the fossils are showcased in this way in a planned manner. Alas, since this was unplanned, the staff decided in the late afternoon to close the museum early. This sent me on my way much earlier than I’d hoped. Still, I was glad I got to spend some time with the dinosaurs and hadn’t wasted much time elsewhere in the museum. If I’m ever in Salt Lake City again I would like to go back though, it was tricky to read the signs in such low light and I would like to have the experience as it was intended. Besides, I’ll rarely pass up the opportunity to see a good dinosaur exhibit. I haven’t been to the Salt Lake City Zoo yet, if it had been warmer I may have considered it – next time!

With that, my trip to Salt Lake City pretty much concluded. I made my way to the airport to head home that evening. This trip rounded almost a full month of being away from home, so I was particularly eager to get home and spend some time with MJ and the kitties.

Filed under: animals, travel

Trains in NYC

Sunday, Dec 11th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’ve wanted to visit the New York Transit Museum ever since I discovered it existed. Housed in the retired Court station in Brooklyn, even the museum venue had “transit geek heaven” written all over it. I figured I’d visit it some day when work brought me to the city, but then I learned about the 15th Annual Holiday Train Show at their Annex and Store at Grand Central going on now. I’d love to see that! I ended up going up to the NYC from Philadelphia with my friend David last Sunday morning and made a day of it. Even better, we parked in New Jersey so had a full on transit experience from there into Manhattan and Brooklyn and back as the day progressed.

Our first stop was Grand Central Station via the 5 subway line. Somehow I’d never been there before. Enjoy the obligatory station selfie.

From there it was straight down to the Annex and Store run by the transit museum. The holiday exhibit had glittering signs hanging from the ceiling of everything from buses to transit cards to subway cars and snowflakes. The big draw though was the massive o-gauge model train setup, as the site explains:

This year’s Holiday Train Show display will feature a 34-foot-long “O gauge” model train layout with Lionel’s model Metro-North, New York Central, and vintage subway trains running on eight separate loops of track, against a backdrop featuring graphics celebrating the Museum’s 40th anniversary by artist Julia Rothman.

It was quite busy there, but folks were very clearly enjoying it. I’m really glad I went, even if the whole thing made me pine for my future home office train set all the more. Some day! It’s also worthy to note that this shop is the one to visit transit-wise. The museum in Brooklyn also had a gift shop but it was smaller and had fewer things, I highly recommend picking things up here, I ended up going back after the transit museum to get something I wanted.

We then hopped on the 4 subway line into Brooklyn to visit the actual transit museum. As advertised, it’s in a retired subway station, so the entrance looks like any other subway entrance and you take stairs underground. You enter and buy your ticket and then are free to explore both levels of the museum. The first had several exhibits that rotate, including one about Coney Island and another providing a history of crises in New York City (including 9/11, hurricane Sandy) and how the transit system and operators responded to them. They also had displays of a variety of turnstiles throughout the years, and exhibits talking about street car (trolley) lines and the introduction of the bus systems.

The exhibits were great, but it was downstairs that things got really fun. They have functioning rails where the subway trains used to run through where they’ve lined up over a dozen cars from throughout transit history in NYC for visitors to explore, inside and out.

The evolution of seat designs and configurations was interesting to witness and feel, as you could sit on the seats to get the full experience. Each car also had an information sign next to it, so you could learn about the era and the place of that car in it. Transitions between wood to metal, paired (and ..tripled?) cars were showcased, along with a bunch that were stand alone interchangables. I also enjoyed seeing a caboose, though I didn’t quite recognize at first (“is this for someone to live in?”).

A late lunch was due following the transit museum. We ended up at Sottocasa Pizzeria right there in Brooklyn. It got great reviews and I enjoyed it a lot, but was definitely on the fancy pizza side. They also had selection of Italian beers, of which I chose the delicious Nora by Birra Baladin. Don’t worry, next time I’m in New York I’ll go to a great, not fancy, pizza place.

It was then back to Manhattan to spend a bit more time at Grand Central and for an evening walk through the city. We started by going up 5th Avenue to see Rockefeller Square at night during the holidays. I hadn’t been to Manhattan since 2013 when I went with my friend Danita and I’d never seen the square all decked out for the holidays. I didn’t quite think it through though, it’s probably the busiest time of the year there so the whole neighborhood for blocks was insanely crowded. After seeing the skating rink and tree, we escaped northwest and made our way through the crowds up to Central Park. It was cold, but all the walking was fun even with the crowds. For dinner we ended up at Jackson Hole for some delicious burgers. I went with the Guacamole Burger.

The trip back to north Jersey took us through the brand new World Trade Center Transportation Hub to take the PATH. It’s a very unusual space. It’s all bright white with tons of marble shaped in a modern look, and has a shopping mall with a surreal amount of open space. The trip back on the PATH that night was as smooth as expected. In all, a very enjoyable day of public transit stuff!

More photos from Grand Central Station and the Transit Museum here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157677457519215

Epilogue: I received incredibly bad news the day after this visit to NYC. It cast a shadow over it for me. I went back and forth about whether I should write about this visit at all and how I should present it if I did. I decided to present it as it was that day. It was a great day of visiting the city and geeking out over trains, enjoyed with a close friend, and detached from whatever happened later. I only wish I could convince my mind to do the same.

Filed under: travel

UbuCon EU 2016

Sunday, Dec 11th, 2016 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Last month I had the opportunity to travel to Essen, Germany to attend UbuCon EU 2016. Europe has had UbuCons before, but the goal of this one was to make it a truly international event, bringing in speakers like me from all corners of the Ubuntu community to share our experiences with the European Ubuntu community. Getting to catch up with a bunch of my Ubuntu colleagues who I knew would be there and visiting Germany as the holiday season began were also quite compelling reasons for me to attend.

The event formally kicked off Saturday morning with a welcome and introduction by Sujeevan Vijayakumaran, he reported that 170 people registered for the event and shared other statistics about the number of countries attendees were from. He also introduced a member of the UbPorts team, Marius Gripsgård, who announced the USB docking station for Ubuntu Touch devices they were developing, more information in this article on their website: The StationDock.

Following these introductions and announcements, we were joined by Canonical CEO Jane Silber who provided a tour of the Ubuntu ecosystem today. She highlighted the variety of industries where Ubuntu was key, progress with Ubuntu on desktops/laptops, tablets, phones and venturing into the smart Internet of Things (IoT) space. Her focus was around the amount of innovation we’re seeing in the Ubuntu community and from Canonical, and talked about specifics regarding security, updates, the success in the cloud and where Ubuntu Core fits into the future of computing.

I also loved that she talked about the Ubuntu community. The strength of local meetups and events, the free support community that spans a variety of resources, ongoing work by the various Ubuntu flavors. She also spoke to the passion of Ubuntu contributors, citing comics and artwork that community members have made, including the stunning series of release animal artwork by Sylvia Ritter from right there in Germany, visit them here: Ubuntu Animals. I was also super thrilled that she mentioned the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter as a valuable resource for keeping up with the community, a very small group of folks works very hard on it and that kind of validation is key to sustaining motivation.

The next talk I attended was by Fernando Lanero Barbero on Linux is education, Linux is science. Ubuntu to free educational environments. Fernando works at a school district in Spain where he has deployed Ubuntu across hundreds of computers, reaching over 1200 students in the three years he’s been doing the work. The talk outlined the strengths of the approach, explaining that there was cost savings for his school and also how Ubuntu and open source software is more in line with the school values. One of the key takeaways from his experience was one that I know a lot about from our own Linux in schools experiences here in the US at Partimus: focus on the people, not the technologies. We’re technologists who love Linux and want to promote it, but without engagement, understanding and buy-in from teachers, deployments won’t be successful. A lot of time needs to be spent making assessments of their needs, doing roll-outs slowly and methodically so that the change doesn’t happen to abruptly and leave them in a lurch. He also stressed the importance of consistency with the deployments. Don’t get super creative across machines, use the same flavor for everything, even the same icon set. Not everyone is as comfortable with variation as we are, and you want to make the transition as easy as possible across all the systems.

Laura Fautley (Czajkowski) spoke at the next talk I went to, on Supporting Inclusion & Involvement in a Remote Distributed Team. The Ubuntu community itself is distributed across the globe, so drawing experience from her work there and later at several jobs where she’s had to help manage communities, she had a great list of recommendations as you build out such a team. She talked about being sensitive to time zones, acknowledgement that decisions are sometimes made in social situations rather than that you need to somehow document and share these decisions with the broader community. She was also eager to highlight how you need to acknowledge and promote the achievements in your team, both within the team and to the broader organization and project to make sure everyone feels valued and so that everyone knows the great work you’re doing. Finally, it was interesting to hear some thoughts about remote member on-boarding, stressing the need to have a process so that new contributors and team mates can quickly get up to speed and feel included from the beginning.

I went to a few other talks throughout the two day event, but one of the big reasons for me attending was to meet up with some of my long-time friends in the Ubuntu community and finally meet some other folks face to face. We’ve had a number of new contributors join us since we stopped doing Ubuntu Developer Summits and today UbuCons are the only Ubuntu-specific events where we have an opportunity to meet up.


Laura Fautley, Elizabeth K. Joseph, Alan Pope, Michael Hall

Of course I was also there to give a pair of talks. I first spoke on Contributing to Ubuntu on Desktops (slides) which is a complete refresh of a talk I gave a couple of times back in 2014. The point of that talk was to pull people back from the hype-driven focus on phones and clouds for a bit and highlight some of the older projects that still need contributions. I also spoke on Building a career with Ubuntu and FOSS (slides) which was definitely the more popular talk. I’ve given a similar talk for a couple UbuCons in the past, but this one had the benefit of being given while I’m between jobs. This most recent job search as I sought out a new role working directly with open source again gave a new dimension to the talk, and also made for an amusing intro, “I don’t have a job at this very moment …but without a doubt I will soon!” And in fact, I do have something lined up now.


Thanks to Tiago Carrondo for taking this picture during my talk! (source)

The venue for the conference was a kind of artists space, which made it a bit quirky, but I think worked out well. We had a couple social gatherings there at the venue, and buffet lunches were included in our tickets, which meant we didn’t need to go far or wait on food elsewhere.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time for sight-seeing this trip because I had a lot going on stateside (like having just bought a house!) but I did get to enjoy the beautiful Christmas Market in Essen a few of nights while I was there.

For those of you not familiar with German Christmas Markets (I wasn’t), they close roads downtown and pop up streets of wooden shacks that sell everything from Christmas ornaments and cookies to hot drinks, beers and various hot foods. We went the first night I was in town we met up with several fellow conference-goers and got some fries with mayonnaise, grilled mushrooms with Bearnaise sauce, my first taste of German Glühwein (mulled wine) and hot chocolate. The next night we went was a quick walk through the market that landed us at a steakhouse where we had a late dinner and a couple beers.

The final night we didn’t stay out late, but did get some much anticipated Spanish churros, which inexplicably had sugar rather than the cinnamon I’m used to, as well as a couple more servings of Glühwein, this time in commemorative Christmas mugs shaped like boots!


Clockwise from top left: José Antonio Rey, Philip Ballew, Michael Hall, John and Laura Fautley, Elizabeth K. Joseph

The next morning I was up bright and early to catch a 6:45AM train that started me on my three train journey back to Amsterdam to fly back to Philadelphia.

It was a great little conference and a lot of fun. Huge thanks to Sujeevan for being so incredibly welcoming to all of us, and thanks to all the volunteers who worked for months to make the event happen. Also thanks to Ubuntu community members who donate to the community fund since I would have otherwise had to self-fund to attend.

More photos from the event (and the Christmas Market!) here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157676958738915

Filed under: events, LoCo, tech, travel, ubuntu planet

Vacation Home in Pennsylvania

Monday, Dec 5th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This year MJ and I embarked on a secret mission: Buy a vacation home in Pennsylvania.

It was a decision we’d mulled over for a couple years, and the state of the real estate market along with our place in lives, careers and frequent visits back to the Philadelphia area finally made the stars align to make it happen. With the help of family local to the area, including one who is a real estate agent, we spent the past few trips taking time to look at houses and make some decisions. In August we started signing the paperwork to take possession of a new home in November.

With the timing of our selection, we were able to pick out cabinets, counter tops and some of the other non-architectural options in the home. Admittedly none of that is my thing, but it’s still nice that we were able to put our touch on the end result. As we prepared for the purchase, MJ spent a lot of time making plans for taking care of the house and handling things like installations, deliveries and the move of our items from storage into the house.

In October we also bought a car that we’d be keeping at the house in Philadelphia, though we did enjoy it in California for a few weeks.

On November 15th we met at the title company office and signed the final paperwork.

The house was ours!

The next day I flew to Germany for a conference and MJ headed back to San Francisco. I enjoyed the conference and a few days in Germany, but I was eager to get back to the house.

Upon my return we had our first installation. Internet! And backup internet.

MJ came back into town for Thanksgiving which we enjoyed with family. The day after was the big move from storage into the house. Our storage units not only had our own things that we’d left in Pennsylvania, but everything from MJ’s grandparents, which included key contents of their own former vacation home which I never saw. We moved his grandmother into assisted care several years ago and had been keeping their things until we got a larger home in California. With the house here in Pennsylvania we decided to use some of the pieces to furnish the house here. It also meant I have a lot of boxes to go through.

Before MJ left to head back to work in San Francisco we did get a few things unpacked, including Champagne glasses, which meant on Saturday night following the move day we were able to pick up a proper bottle of Champagne and spend the evening together in front of the fireplace to celebrate.

I’d been planning on taking some time off following the layoff from my job as I consider new opportunities in the coming year. It ended up working well since I’ve been able to do that, plus spend the past week here in the Philadelphia house unpacking and getting the house set up. Several of the days I’ve also had to be here at the house to receive deliveries and be present for installs of all kinds to make sure the house is ready and secure (cameras!) for us to properly enjoy as soon as possible. Today is window blinds day. I am getting to enjoy it some too, between all these tasks I’ve spent time with local friends and family, had some time reading in front of the fireplace, have enjoyed a beautiful new Bluetooth speaker playing music all day. The house doesn’t have a television yet, but I have also curled up to watch a few episodes on my tablet here and there in the evenings as well.

There have also been some great sunsets in the neighborhood. I sure missed the Pennsylvania autumn sights and smells.

And not all the unpacking has been laborious. I found MJ’s telescope from years ago in storage and I was able to set that up the other night. Looking forward a clear night to try it out.

Tomorrow I’m flying off yet again for a conference and then to spend at least a week at home back in San Francisco. We’ll be back very soon though, planning on spending at least the eight days of Hanukkah here, and possibly flying in earlier if we can line up some of the other work we need to get done.

Filed under: philadelphia

Breathtaking Barcelona

Saturday, Dec 3rd, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

My father once told me that Madrid was his favorite city and that he generally loved Spain. When my aunt shipped me a series of family slides last year I was delighted to find ones from Madrid in the mix, I uploaded the album: Carl A. Krumbach – Spain 1967. I wish I had asked him why he loved Madrid, but in October I had the opportunity myself to learn why I now love Spain.

I landed in Barcelona the last week of October. First, it was a beautiful time to visit. Nice weather that wasn’t too hot or too cold. It rained over night a couple times and a bit some days, but not enough to deter activities, and I was busy with a conference during most of the days anyway. It was also warm enough to go swimming in the Mediterranean, though I failed to avail myself of this opportunity. The day I got in I met up with a couple friends to go to the aquarium, walk around the coastline and was able to touch the sea for the first time. That evening I also had my first of three seafood paellas that I enjoyed throughout the week. So good.

The night life was totally a thing. Many places would offer tapas along with drinks, so one night a bunch of us went out and just ate and drank our way through the Gothic Quarter. The restaurants also served late, often not even starting dinner service until 8PM. One night at midnight we found ourselves at a steakhouse dining on a giant steak that served the table and drinking a couple bottles of cava. Oh the cava, it was plentiful and inexpensive. As someone who lives in California these days I felt a bit bad by betraying my beloved California wine, but it was really good. I also enjoyed the Sangrias.

A couple mornings after evenings when I didn’t let the drinks get the better of me, I also went out for a run. Running along the beaches in Barcelona was a tiny slice of heaven. It was also wonderful to just go sit by the sea one evening when I needed some time away from conference chaos.


Seafood paella lunch for four! We also had a couple beers.

All of this happened before I even got out to do much tourist stuff. Saturday was my big day for seeing the famous sights. Early in the week I reserved tickets to see the Sagrada Familia Basilica. I like visiting religious buildings when I travel because they tend to be on the extravagant side. Plus, back at the OpenStack Summit in Paris we heard from a current architect of the building and I’ve since seen a documentary about the building and nineteenth century architect Antoni Gaudí. I was eager to see it, but nothing quite prepared me for the experience. I had tickets for 1:30PM and was there right on time.


Sagrada Familia selfie!

It was the most amazing place I’ve ever been.

The architecture sure is unusual but once you let that go and just enjoy it, everything comes together in a calming way that I’ve never quite experienced before. The use of every color through the hundreds of stained glass windows was astonishing.

I didn’t do the tower tour on this trip because once I realized how special this place was I wanted to save something new to do there the next time I visit.

The rest of my day was spent taking one of the tourist buses around town to get a taste of a bunch of the other sights. I got a glimpse of a couple more buildings by Gaudí. In the middle of the afternoon I stopped at a tapas restaurant across from La Monumental, a former bullfighting ring. They outlawed bullfighting several years ago, but the building is still used for other events and is worth seeing for the beautiful tiled exterior, even just on the outside.

I also walked through the Arc de Triomf and made my way over to the Barcelona Cathedral. After the tour bus brought me back to the stop near my hotel I spent the rest of the late afternoon enjoying some time at the beach.

That evening I met up with my friend Clint to do one last wander around the area. We stopped at the beach and had some cava and cheese. From there we went to dinner where we split a final paella and bottle of cava. Dessert was a Catalan cream, which is a lot like a crème brûlée but with cinnamon, yum!

As much as I wanted to stay longer and enjoy the gorgeous weather, the next morning I was scheduled to return home.

I loved Barcelona. It stole my heart like no other European city ever has and it’s now easily one of my favorite cities. I’ll be returning, hopefully sooner than later.

More photos from my adventures in Barcelona here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157674260004081

Filed under: travel

OpenStack book and Infra team at the Ocata Summit

Friday, Dec 2nd, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

At the end of October I attended the OpenStack Ocata Summit in beautiful Barcelona. My participation in this was a bittersweet one for me. It was the first summit following the release of our Common OpenStack Deployments book and OpenStack Infrastructure tooling was featured in a short keynote on Wednesday morning, making for quite the exciting summit. Unfortunately it also marked my last week with HPE and an uncertain future with regard to my continued full time participation with the OpenStack Infrastructure team. It was also the last OpenStack Summit where the conference and design summit are being hosted together, so the next several months will be worth keeping an eye on community-wise. Still, I largely took the position of assuming I’d continue to be able to work on the team, just with more caution in regards to work I was signing up for.

The first thing that I discovered during this summit was how amazing Barcelona is. The end of October presented us with some amazing weather for walking around and the city doesn’t go to sleep early, so we had plenty of time in the evenings to catch up with each other over drinks and scrumptious tapas. It worked out well since there were fewer sponsored parties in the evenings at this summit and attendance seemed limited at the ones that existed.

The high point for me at the summit was having the OpenStack Infrastructure tooling for handling our fleet of compute instances featured in a keynote! Given my speaking history, I was picked from the team to be up on the big stage with Jonathan Bryce to walk through a demonstration where we removed one of our US cloud providers and added three more in Europe. While the change was landing and tests started queuing up we also took time to talk about how tests are done against OpenStack patch sets across our various cloud providers.


Thanks to Johanna Koester for taking this picture (source)

It wasn’t just me presenting though. Clark Boylan and Jeremy Stanley were sitting in the front row making sure the changes landed and everything went according to plan during the brief window that this demonstration took up during the keynote. I’m thrilled to say that this live demonstration was actually the best run we had of all the testing, seeing all the tests start running on our new providers live on stage in front of such a large audience was pretty exciting. The team has built something really special here, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to help highlight that in the community with a keynote.


Mike Perez and David F. Flanders sitting next to Jeremy and Clark as they monitor demonstration progress. Photo credit for this one goes to Chris Hoge (source)

The full video of the keynote is available here: Demoing the World’s Largest Multi-Cloud CI Application

A couple of conference talks were presented by members of the Infrastructure team as well. On Tuesday Colleen Murphy, Paul Belanger and Ricardo Carrillo Cruz presented on the team’s Infra-Cloud. As I’ve written about before, the team has built a fully open source OpenStack cloud using the community Puppet modules and donated hardware and data center space from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This talk outlined the architecture of that cloud, some of the challenges they’ve encountered, statistics from how it’s doing now and future plans. Video from their talk is here: InfraCloud, a Community Cloud Managed by the Project Infrastructure Team.

James E. Blair also gave a talk during the conference, this time on Zuul version 3. This version of Zuul has been under development for some time, so this was a good opportunity to update the community on the history of the Zuul project in general and why it exists, status of ongoing efforts with an eye on v3 and problems it’s trying to solve. I’m also in love with his slide deck, it was all text-based (including some “animations”!) and all with an Art Deco theme. Video from his talk is here: Zuul v3: OpenStack and Ansible Native CI/CD.

As usual, the Infrastructure team also had a series of sessions related to ongoing work. As a quick rundown, we have Etherpads for all the sessions (read-only links provided):

Friday concluded with a Contributors Meetup for the Infrastructure team in the afternoon where folks split off into small groups to tackle a series of ongoing projects together. I was also able to spend some time with the Internationalization (i18n) team that Friday afternoon. I dragged along Clark so someone else on the team could pick up where I left off in case I have less time in the future. We talked about the pending upgrade of Zanata and plans for a translations checksite, making progress on both fronts, especially when we realized that there’s a chance we could get away with just running a development version of Horizon itself, with a more stable back end.


With the i18n team!

Finally, the book! It was the first time I was able to see Matt Fischer, my contributing author, since the book came out. Catching up with him and signing a book together was fun. Thanks to my publisher I was also thrilled to donate the signed copies I brought along to the Women of OpenStack Speed Mentoring event on Tuesday morning. I wasn’t able to attend the event, but they were given out on my behalf, thanks to Nithya Ruff for handling the giveaway.


Thanks to Nithya Ruff for taking a picture of me with my book at the Women of OpenStack area of the expo hall (source) and Brent Haley for getting the picture of Lisa-Marie and I (source).

I was also invited to sit down with Lisa-Marie Namphy to chat about the book and changes to the OpenStack Infrastructure team in the Newton cycle. The increase in capacity to over 2000 test instances this past cycle was quite the milestone so I enjoyed talking about that. The full video is up on YouTube: OpenStack® Project Infra: Elizabeth K. Joseph shares how test capacity doubled in Newton

In all, it was an interesting summit with a lot of change happening in the community and with partner companies. The people that make the community are still there though and it’s always enjoyable spending time together. My next OpenStack event is coming up quickly, next week I’ll be speaking at OpenStack Days Mountain West on the The OpenStack Project Continuous Integration System. I’ll also have a pile of books to give away at that event!

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, travel

A Zoo and an Aquarium

Wednesday, Nov 30th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

When I was in Ohio last month for the Ohio LinuxFest I added a day on to my trip to visit the Columbus Zoo. A world-class zoo, it’s one of the few northern state zoos that has manatees and their African savanna exhibit is worth visiting. I went with a couple friends I attended the conference with, one of whom was a local and offered to drive (thanks again Svetlana!).

We arrived mid-day, which was in time to see their cheetah run, where they give one of their cheetahs some exercise by having it run a quick course around what had just been moments before the hyena habitat. I also learned recently via ZooBorns that the Columbus Zoo is one that participates in the cheetah-puppy pairing from a young age. The dogs keep these big cats feeling secure with their calmness in an uncertain world, adorable article from the site here: A Cheetah and His Dog

Much to my delight, they were also selling Cheetah-and-Dog pins after the run to raise money. Yes, please!

As I said, I really enjoyed their African Savanna exhibit. It was big and sprawling and had a nice mixture of animals. The piles of lions they have was also quite the sight to behold.

Their kangaroo enclosure was open to walk through, so you could get quite close to the kangaroos just like I did at the Perth Zoo. There were also a trio of baby tigers and some mountain lions that were adorable. And then there were the manatees. I love manatees!

I’m really glad I took the time to stay longer in Columbus, I’d likely go again if I found myself in the area.

More photos from the zoo, including a tiger napping on his back, and those mountain lions here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157671610835663

Just a couple weeks later I found myself on another continent, and at the Barcelona Aquarium with my friends Julia and Summer. It was a sizable aquarium and really nicely laid out. Their selection of aquatic animals was diverse and interesting. In this aquarium I liked some of the smallest critters the most. Loved their seahorses.

And the axolotls.

There was also an octopus that was awake and wandering around the tank, much to the delight of the crowd.

They also had penguins, a great shark tube and tank with a moving walkway.

More photos from the Barcelona Aquarium: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157675629122655

Barcelona also has a zoo, but in my limited time there in the city I didn’t make it over there. It’s now on my very long list of other things to see the next time I’m in Barcelona, and you bet there will be a next time.

Filed under: animals, travel

Ohio LinuxFest 2016

Wednesday, Nov 30th, 2016 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

Last month I had the pleasure of finally attending an Ohio LinuxFest. The conference has been on my radar for years, but every year I seemed to have some kind of conflict. When my Tour of OpenStack Deployment Scenarios was accepted I was thrilled to finally be able to attend. My employer at the time also pitched in to the conference as a Bronze sponsor and by sending along a banner that showcased my talk, and my OpenStack book!

The event kicked off on Friday and the first talk I attended was by Jeff Gehlbach on What’s Happening with OpenNMS. I’ve been to several OpenNMS talks over the years and played with it some, so I knew the background of the project. This talk covered several of the latest improvements. Of particular note were some of their UI improvements, including both a website refresh and some stunning improvements to the WebUI. It was also interesting to learn about Newts, the time-series data store they’ve been developing to replace RRDtool, which they struggled to scale with their tooling. Newts is decoupled from the visualization tooling so you can hook in your own, like if you wanted to use Grafana instead.

I then went to Rob Kinyon’s Devs are from Mars, Ops are from Venus. He had some great points about communication between ops, dev and QA, starting with being aware and understanding of the fact that you all have different goals, which sometimes conflict. Pausing to make sure you know why different teams behave the way they do and knowing that they aren’t just doing it to make your life difficult, or because they’re incompetent, makes all the difference. He implored the audience to assume that we’re all smart, hard-working people trying to get our jobs done. He also touched upon improvements to communication, making sure you repeat requests in your own words so misunderstandings don’t occur due to differing vocabularies. Finally, he suggested that some cross-training happen between roles. A developer may never be able to take over full time for an operator, or vice versa, but walking a mile in someone else’s shoes helps build the awareness and understanding that he stresses is important.

The afternoon keynote was given by Catherine Devlin on Hacking Bureaucracy with 18F. She works for the government in the 18F digital services agency. Their mandate is to work with other federal agencies to improve their digital content, from websites to data delivery. Modeled after a startup, she explained that they try not to over-plan, like many government organizations do and can lead to failure, they want to fail fast and keep iterating. She also said their team has a focus on hiring good people and understanding the needs of the people they serve, rather than focusing on raw technical talent and the tools. Their practices center around an open by default philosophy (see: 18F: Open source policy), so much of their work is open source and can be adopted by other agencies. They also make sure they understand the culture of organizations they work with so that the tools they develop together will actually be used, as well as respecting the domain knowledge of teams they’re working with. Slides from her talk here, and include lots of great links to agency tooling they’ve worked on: https://github.com/catherinedevlin/olf-2016-keynote


Catherine Devlin on 18F

That evening folks gathered in the expo hall to meet and eat! That’s where I caught up with my friends from Computer Reach. This is the non-profit I went to Ghana with back in 2012 to deploy Ubuntu-based desktops. I spent a couple weeks there with Dave, Beth Lynn and Nancy (alas, unable to come to OLF) so it was great to see them again. I learned more about the work they’re continuing to do, having switched to using mostly Xubuntu on new installs which was written about here. On a personal level it was a lot of fun connecting with them too, we really bonded during our adventures over there.


Tyler Lamb, Dave Sevick, Elizabeth K. Joseph, Beth Lynn Eicher

Saturday morning began with a keynote from Ethan Galstad on Becoming the Next Tech Entrepreneur. Ethan is the founder of Nagios, and in his talk he traced some of the history of his work on getting Nagios off the ground as a proper project and company and his belief in why technologists make good founders. In his work he drew from his industry and market expertise from being a technologist and was able to play to the niche he was focused on. He also suggested that folks look to what other founders have done that has been successful, and recommended some books (notably Founders at Work and Work the System). Finaly, he walked through some of what can be done to get started, including the stages of idea development, basic business plan (don’t go crazy), a rough 1.0 release that you can have some early customers test and get feedback from, and then into marketing, documenting and focused product development. He concluded by stressing that open source project leaders are already entrepreneurs and the free users of your software are your initial market.

Next up was Robert Foreman’s Mixed Metaphors: Using Hiera with Foreman where he sketched out the work they’ve done that preserves usage of Hiera’s key-value store system but leverages Foreman for the actual orchestration. The mixing of provisioning and orchestration technologies is becoming more common, but I hadn’t seen this particular mashup.

My talk was A Tour of OpenStack Deployment Scenarios. This is the same talk I gave at FOSSCON back in August, walking the audience through a series of ways that OpenStack could be configured to provide compute instances, metering and two types of storage. For each I gave a live demo using DevStack. I also talked about several other popular components that could be added to a deployment. Slides from my talk are here (PDF), which also link to a text document with instructions for how to run the DevStack demos yourself.


Thanks to Vitaliy Matiyash for taking a picture during my talk! (source)

At lunch I met up with my Ubuntu friends to catch up. We later met at the booth where they had a few Ubuntu phones and tablets that gained a bunch of attention throughout the event. This event was also my first opportunity to meet Unit193 and Svetlana Belkin in person, both of whom I’ve worked with on Ubuntu for years.


Unit193, Svetlana Belkin, José Antonio Rey, Elizabeth K. Joseph and Nathan Handler

After lunch I went over to see David Griggs of Dell give us “A Look Under the Hood of Ohio Supercomputer Center’s Newest Linux Cluster.” Supercomputers are cool and it was interesting to learn about the system it was replacing, the planning that went into the replacement and workload cut-over and see in-progress photos of the installation. From there I saw Ryan Saunders speak on Automating Monitoring with Puppet and Shinken. I wasn’t super familiar with the Shinken monitoring framework, so this talk was an interesting and very applicable demonstration of the benefits.

The last talk I went to before the closing keynotes was from my Computer Reach friends Dave Sevick and Tyler Lamb. They presented their “Island Server” imaging server that’s now being used to image all of the machines that they re-purpose and deploy around the world. With this new imaging server they’re able to image both Mac and Linux PCs from one Macbook Pro rather than having a different imaging server for each. They were also able to do a live demo of a Mac and Linux PC being imaged from the same Island Server at once.


Tyler and Dave with the Island Server in action

The event concluded with a closing keynote by a father and daughter duo, Joe and Lily Born, on The Democratization of Invention. Joe Born first found fame in the 90s when he invented the SkipDoctor CD repair device, and is now the CEO of Aiwa which produces highly rated Bluetooth speakers. Lily Born invented the tip-proof Kangaroo Cup. The pair reflected on their work and how the idea to product in the hands of customers has changed in the past twenty years. While the path to selling SkipDoctor had a very high barrier to entry, globalization, crowd-funding, 3D printers and internet-driven word of mouth and greater access to the press all played a part in the success of Lily’s Kangaroo cup and the new Aiwa Bluetooth speakers. While I have no plans to invent anything any time soon (so much else to do!) it was inspiring to hear how the barriers have been lowered and inventors today have a lot more options. Also, I just bought an Aiwa Exos-9 Bluetooth Speaker, it’s pretty sweet.

My conference adventures concluded with a dinner with my friends José, Nathan and David, all three of whom I also spent time with at FOSSCON in Philadelphia the month before. It was fun getting together again, and we wandered around downtown Columbus until we found a nice little pizzeria. Good times.

More photos from the Ohio LinuxFest here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157674988712556

Filed under: openstack, tech, travel, ubuntu planet

Holiday cards 2016!

Wednesday, Nov 23rd, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Every year I send out a big batch of winter-themed holiday cards to friends and acquaintances online.

Reading this? That means you! Even if you’re outside the United States!

Send me an email at lyz@princessleia.com with your postal mailing address. Please put “Holiday Card” in the subject so I can filter it appropriately. Please do this even if I’ve sent you a card in the past, I won’t be reusing the list from last year.

Typical disclaimer: My husband is Jewish and we celebrate Hanukkah, but the cards are non-religious, with some variation of “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” on them.

Filed under: holiday cards
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »