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Laundry, Lunches, Trains, Temple and Shopping in Mumbai

Friday, Aug 12th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

My tourist adventures in Mumbai continued on Saturday following the conference. I made plans through the hotel concierge to hire a driver and tour guide for the day. I was initially a bit worried about the weather, since reports (and warnings!) had forecasted rain, but we lucked out. I was picked up from the hotel promptly at 10AM and thus began a wonderful day with my tour guide, Mala Bangera.

I’ll start off by say that Mala was a wonderful guide, one of the best I’ve ever had. She had over 20 years of experience and so was extremely knowledgeable, had lived all over the world (including the US) and had strong relationships with people at all the places we visited. She was able to advise me when I could take pictures, and honestly explain how much and when to tip people we encountered and interacted with throughout our journey (a fellow I got my picture with, a woman whose wares I asked for a photo of, a fellow who watched our shoes at a temple). I had a wonderful day under her guidance, and I’m so glad I worked with her instead of spending the day venturing out on my own!

As for where we went, I largely let her set the agenda when I explained that I just wanted to see some popular tourist sites and temples. It was the right choice. Our first stop was the Dhobi Ghat, a huge open air laundry facility. As I’ve learned some about domestic history, laundry looms large in the list of things that was incredibly laborious and time-consuming until the modern era of washing machines that people like me now have in our homes. Of course the modern washer and dryer I have assume access to a lot of water and electricity, and space, which is not ubiquitous in India. Instead, Mala explained that many people send their clothes out to be washed, dried, pressed and delivered back to their home, and a lot of this work happens at a dhobi ghat.


Dhobi Ghat (laundry)

Our next stop was to see the Dabbawalas. These folks collect your prepared lunch from your house in morning and deliver it to work around lunchtime. That means you get your home-cooked meal at lunch (which is typically a large meal there) and you don’t need to carry it with you when you leave home early in the morning. Doing this in bulk allows for an inexpensive service and a lifelong profession for the Dabbawalas, one fellow my tour guide introduced me to has been doing it for over 25 years. It was a Saturday so the pickup location we visited wasn’t as busy as it was on week days, but it was worth seeing anyway.


Dabbawalas sorting and carrying lunches

From there we went to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), the train station! A Gothic Revival designed by Frederick William Stevens in 1887, the station first caught my eye on the previous Sunday when we drove by it. This time we were able to actually go inside, buy a platform ticket and wander around. I advised against taking pictures inside the station itself, but I did see a whole bunch of trains, from the city commuter trains to the larger long-distance trains. I learned that they have cars reserved exclusively for women, which is understandable given the need to accommodate modest religious faiths on trains that get incredibly packed during weekday commutes (genders were also segregated at most security check points I went through, frequently with women given private screening behind a curtain).


Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus

We then drove over to a highly respected shop in the area where I picked up some little gifts, and a couple not so little things for myself. I had a lovely experience, while shopping for some Indian sapphire jewelry (my birthstone) they brought over some wonderfully spiced Kashmiri Kahwa hot tea, and also gave me some to take home with me as I was checking out.

The next stop was the Babu Amichand Panalal Adishwarji Jain Temple, which is routinely called the most beautiful Jain Temple in Mumbai. As far as temples go, my guide explained that those by the Jains tend to be the most beautiful in India. This temple absolutely lived up to the hype. When you enter you’re instructed to remove your shoes as you walk around. My guide is a friend of the temple and was able to escort me inside and encouraged my photo taking, unaccompanied tourists are asked to remain in the courtyard so it was a real honor to be able to go in.


At the Jain Temple

More photos from the Jain temple here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157669057260703

Our final big stop was the Hanging Gardens of Mumbai. The gardens are perched on a hill that covers a water reservoir. It’s quite pretty, with various flowering plants and bushes, and a collection of animal-shaped topiaries (giraffe! elephant! ox cart!). The garden is also located near the Zoroastrian Tower of Silence, where their dead are exposed for reclamation by nature.

On the drive back to my hotel we passed the Siddhivinayak Temple, dedicated to the Hindu Lord Ganesha. We also stopped to get some fruit-flavored ice cream from Natural Ice Cream, after a few samples, I had the watermelon and jackfruit ice creams, yum! We also passed the Haji Ali Dargah, a mosque and tomb that sits in Worli Bay. A thin strip of land goes out to the mosque, but it’s covered over during high tide, limiting when visits are possible. As a result, when you see it during high tide the building seems to be floating out in the bay. I developed a fascination for this as I was there, passing it a few times during my trip during varying levels of tide. I would love to visit it more closely some day.


Haji Ali Dargah

Saturday evening was spent out to dinner and drinks with some of the SANOG conference folks, where I had a Bira91 White Ale, a wheat beer that is one of the few solid, non-lager beers I’ve encountered in Asia. In addition to enjoying wonderful company and beer at dinner, I had my final trip in an auto rickshaw that night as we wanted to get back to the hotel without getting drenched from the rain. This rickshaw ride was outside of high traffic areas, so it was considerably less nerve-wracking than the ride earlier in the week!


Inside an auto rickshaw earlier in the week, with a cameo from a double-decker bus!

My final day in Mumbai was Sunday, which I spent getting loose ends tied off, visiting with some conference people and then in the evening with my friend Devdas who took me on a train to south Mumbai again. Now, you all know me. I love trains. It was nice to get to take one on a Sunday evening, not too crowded and as a critical piece of infrastructure the trains are kept maintained.


Selfie on a train

We got off at the station I had visited the day before and walked down to Leopold Cafe, which was recommended by a friend who visited Mumbai in the recent past. As a landmark and tourist destination, the cafe also made headlines eight years ago as one of the sites of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. I admit that with a flight ahead of me, I just had some pretty basic continental food, though my chicken sandwich still had a nice bite to it. The walk to the restaurant took us into the Colaba Causeway market. I had already done my shopping for the trip, but it was neat to see all of the stuff they had for sale, and to make our way through the crowds of people on the sidewalks and streets.

My evening concluded by skipping the train back due to the long, soggy walk back to the station and my inclination to stay dry before my flight. I instead took a long Uber ride back to the hotel to pick up my luggage. The ride back started out in a downpour, but eventually cleared up. I was able to see the Haji Ali Dargah lit up at night, and all the people hanging out on Marine Drive, with the signature Queen’s Necklace lights along the boulevard. I also enjoyed going over the Sky Link bridge one final time at night when it wasn’t raining.

And with that, my trip concluded! More photos from throughout my adventures in Mumbai here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157671033977871

Filed under: travel

A Gateway, a Synagogue and a Museum in Mumbai

Sunday, Aug 7th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last Saturday I arrived in India for the first time. A conference was on my schedule, but since this was my first time visiting this country I decided to do some touristing around Mumbai. Unfortunately it’s monsoon season, so it’s been an incredibly soggy trip. I joked that coming from drought-ridden California, I was coming to visit in order to get my rain quota met for the year. Mumbai didn’t disappoint.

This first day my plan was to meet up with my friend Nigel Babu, who I met in the Ubuntu community. Our real life paths first met at an Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, and then again a couple years ago when he came to my home of San Francisco for a conference. It was really nice to finally meet in his home territory. He picked me up at my hotel, and we took a drive over the Bandra–Worli Sea Link, a beautiful bridge that links the hotel where I am staying with south Mumbai. Once over the bridge, we stopped briefly to check out the views of the sea, but the rain drove us back into the car pretty quickly. It was then south to the Marine Drive, or Queen’s Necklace. That’s where I got my rainy day picture taken, before we stopped for some snacks and Masala chai at a nearby hotel cafe.

Our journey continued south, where we first walked to the Knesset Eliyahoo Synagogue, the 2nd oldest in the city. I had been clued into the existence of this synagogue by a friend of mine who had visited a few years before, and the description of the place in my tourist book cemented my desire to go. The whole building is turquoise, and that bright color extends to the inside of the building. It was a quiet day there and we were the only visitors, so they welcomed us inside and allowed some picture taking.

The stained class inside was beautiful, but the damp climate definitely was taking a toll on the building. One of the more interesting things to see in this Sephardic synagogue was a marble slab on the wall near the ark that had the 10 commandments, not in Hebrew or a local language, but in English. They had a little gift shop and I picked up a small Haggadah branded with their location as a keepsake of my visit.

More photos from the synagogue here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157671835673625

From there we walked down to the Gateway of India, where we got an all important selfie.

Visiting there also offered a nice look over at the lovely Taj Mahal hotel (not to be confused with the Taj Mahal in Agra). As a tourist attraction, it was worth seeing, but there’s not much to actually do by the gateway, so we quickly were off to our next stop, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, formerly known as the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India.

As my first full day in India, it was nice to visit this museum. I like museums, it gave Nigel and I some time to chat, but also gave me a wonderful view into the local culture from a locally curated collection. Most of the museum was casually air conditioned, so walking through the galleries was not challenging, though I did enjoy the select galleries that had strong air conditioning. The galleries had an interesting mix of very old Indian artifacts, statues, weaving, weapons, as well as some paintings, furniture and more from the colonial periods. I enjoyed the relationship between these galleries in a building that itself was from the colonial period.


Ganesha statue at CSMVS

I bought a photo pass, so lots of photos from the museum are here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157668844045884

By this time evening was creeping up and we had dinner plans. We stopped for some hot chocolate and then got exceptionally lost as we looked for the local friends we were meeting for dinner. We did make it eventually, and had a lovely, if late, seafood dinner at Gajalee. The adventurous day, heat and humidity, and jet lag were eating at my appetite, I tried everything but it wasn’t a big meal for me. Good company though, I got to meet Mehul Ved from Ubuntu India for the first time!

The conference then took over most of the rest of my week, but I was able to sneak out to the Taraporewala Aquarium between amidst the rain storms on Friday. The aquarium was redone in 2015, but it still couldn’t really compare to the world class aquariums I’ve grown accustomed to, both in size and cleanliness. I’m pretty sure most tanks in aquariums are cleaned around the clock to keep them looking spiffy. Still, the building is beautiful and I did enjoy seeing a sea turtle and the sea horses.

The entire week was also accented by amazing food, most of which was unnoticeably and unintentionally (for me) vegetarian. Most mornings I began my day with Masala Dosa with Sambar, except for the last when I went with Poori Bhaji, along with watermelon juice and a cup or two of strong coffee. I got some fruit flavored ice cream (jackfruit and watermelon) and the conference introduced me to the near-candy dessert, Jalebi.

Perhaps the crowning meal of my trip was at a vegetarian Thali place (largest picture below), where we were served endless little cups of food, which when accompanied by various flatbreads was a deceptively large amount of food. Given my love for animals, I rely upon cognitive dissonance to keep me a meat eater, since vegetarianism is still a challenge to pull off in the US and have the satisfying diet I want (a salad is not an acceptable vegetarian option). If I were living here and had the array of amazing food that’s vegetarian it would be a no-brainer. The only challenge for me here was the spice, which my stomach is not at all accustom to. Even ordering everything extremely mild, my antacid bottle was never far away, and I might actually go for some bland foods upon returning home.

Saturday I hired a guide through the hotel concierge and saw a whole collection of other places, but that’s for another post. More uncategorized photos from my adventures including ones the following weekend that I haven’t written about yet here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157671033977871/

Filed under: food, spirituality, travel

SANOG 28

Saturday, Aug 6th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This week I traveled to Mumbai, India to participate in SANOG 28, (South Asian Network Operators Group). This was an unusual conference for me. My husband is the networking guru and he routinely attends NANOG meetings, for the North American group. I even had dinner here at SANOG with a woman who knows him. The closest I’ve gotten to NANOG is tagging along when the conference brings him to interesting of useful place (San Juan, Philadelphia) and doing some dinners with attendees who I know when I happen to be around. Plus, I usually go to open source or systems operations conferences. This was the first time I’d been to a conference focused on networking operations.

So, what brought me to the other side of the world to this uncharacteristic-for-me conference? I was encouraged to submit a proposal to do an OpenStack tutorial, and it was accepted! I’m really grateful to my friend Devdas Bhagat who encouraged me to submit. He has kept me in the loop all week with social activities and generally being around for me as I started interacting with a community that’s so new to me.

As the conference began, I learned that there have been nine SANOGs in India, and that this was the third time they’ve come to Mumbai. SANOG itself covers Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri-Lanka, but given the venue the first speaker spoke on some of the challenges confronting India specifically.

I enjoyed a keynote by Joe Abley of Dyn, where he spoke on treating your technical teams well and making sure you’re doing everything you can to support them in their work and goals. He also mentioned the splitting of technical from managerial tracks. This is becoming increasingly common in the bay area, they learned some time ago that engineering and manager skills are very different and people should be leveling up on their own tracks. It’s a message that I’m glad is being spread more widely, as an engineer myself I can confidently say that I’ll be a happy person if I can continue moving up in my career to conquer more interesting technical problems, and without ever having to manage other people.

Speaking directly to the technical talks we had Paul Wilson, the director of APNIC, give a keynote on the transition of IANA stewardship from the US Government to ICANN. Speaking as an operations person who is aware of the broader internet governance work because that’s where my servers live, I knew this transition had been in the works for several years but I didn’t know much about the actual plans or status. This presentation was the clearest, most concise summary of the plans, progress and status of the work they had been doing, and how close they are to finishing!

The most surprising part about this conference for me was the status of IPv6 in APAC, a view into which was presented by Byron Ellacott of APNIC. I had been under the naive assumption that given the explosive growth of network infrastructure in the regions over the past several years, it would go without saying that these green fields be IPv6 capable. I was wrong. While IPv6 adoption in the US and a few countries in Europe has continued to grow, it remains very low, to non-existent in most APAC regions. At a speaker dinner later in the week I asked about this, and the consensus was a chicken and egg problem. A considerable amount of content is still IPv4, so until that moves to IPv6, providing capability for it doesn’t make sense. As long as adoption remains low (estimated 6.5% worldwide) and IPv4 is still supported, organizations don’t have incentive to offer their content over IPv6. Instead, they’re taking extensive advantage of NAT and keep trying to find ways to get more IPv4 addresses (even if the math is against them). The whole discussion gave me some pause about the push for IPv6. Having a husband in the industry and working on a team that is eager to see strong IPv6 support in our infrastructure, I was an early adopter (I’ve had a AAAA record for this blog for years!). I thought we were all moving in the direction of adoption, but are we really?

The second day began with a talk about the status of Root DNS anycast in South Asia and how that impacts users by Anurag Bhatia of Hurricane Electric. It continued with an update from Champika Wijayatunga if ICANN on the rotation of and changes to ICANN’s Root Zone Keysigning key (KSK) and related Verisign Zonesigning Key (ZKZ), which I didn’t now a lot about but you can by checking out ICANN’s site on the topic. It definitely was surprising to learn that a rotation plan for the KSK wasn’t previously in place and that it’s remained the same since 2010.

These first morning talks concluded with a pair that were amusingly juxtaposed: The first was by Matthew Jackson on how geo-restrictions in New Zealand lead to the development of technologies to get around the limitations and subsequent policy changes. As a native of the US, I’ve only rarely been impacted by region-blocking, but it has always been troublesome to me. As he said in his talk: “The internet we built wasn’t meant to be geo-restricted.” Indeed. The talk that came after it was about ISP/network-level content filtering technologies. Hah!

As the day wound down, so did the conference. The closing event was held at the nearby Mumbai Cricket Association Indoor Cricket Academy and Recreation Center. It’s the off-season, so no Cricket was happening and the field was dark, but the inside of the building was beautiful. Though I’m not much of a party type, it was nice to meet a few folks and have some snacks before concluding my evening.


Hanging out with Devdas at the closing party!

The week continued with tutorials. On Thursday I presented mine: An Introduction to OpenStack. When my presentation was being evaluated by the committee in early July, I worked with them to tune the description to make an allowance for familiarity with Linux. Following acceptance, they strategically scheduled my tutorial the day after an Introduction to Linux hosted by Devdas.

As I wrote about in this interview, the tutorial was divided up into three parts:

  1. Introduction to some OpenStack deployments
  2. Demonstration
  3. Building your own cloud

Since the audience was very networking focused (less open source, systems), what I sought to communicate was the basic concepts around OpenStack and some of the services it could provide. Then, by giving a demonstration of using different components through a DevStack install, give people a practical view into launching instances, adding block storage, metering and object storage. The talk concluded by doing a section very similar to my CodeConf talk back in June, where I explored the next steps as they begin their journey into OpenStack territory.

The tutorial was 90 minutes long, and I had a few very engaged members of the audience. Afterwards I was able to talk to a couple of folks who previously had trouble separating all the Open* named projects, and were glad to learn more about OpenStack so at least that one stood out. My publisher also gave me some coupons for the digital version of Common OpenStack Deployments so I was able to give those out to three participants, and pre-order discounts for the rest of the audience.

Slides from the here, which include a link out to the DevStack demonstration instructions: sanog_2016_intro_to_openstack.pdf

I think what I enjoyed most about this conference was simply being exposed to a new community, it was a real plasure to be able to sit down at dinner with some of the brilliant people solving problems with these expanding networks. Beyond our discussions about the expansion of (or lack of) IPv6, I was able to chat with a DNS engineer at RIPE about infrastructure they use for the root server they run. I was specifically interested in how much organizational sharing happens between operators of the root DNS servers. His answer? Very little, intentionally. As a champion of open source infrastructures, it took some time for me to come around, but I conceded that in this it does make sense. By using different tooling and methodologies, the heart of the internet is kept safe against inevitable vulnerabilities that arise in one tool or another.

Huge thanks to the organizers of this conference and everyone who made me feel so welcome during my first visit to India. These past few nights I’ve had some great food and very friendly company of some great people from organizations whose work I admire.

More photos from the event here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157671053188251

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, travel

Ubuntu 16.04 Release Party San Francisco Concluded!

Monday, Aug 1st, 2016 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

On the evening of Thursday, July 28th I hosted the Ubuntu 16.04 Release Party in San Francisco. It was a couple months after release, but nicely lined up with the 16.04.1 release, where folks running 14.04 would finally be prompted to upgrade to 16.04. It also ended up being just a week after the release of the 9th edition of The Official Ubuntu Book, so I was able to give away a couple of copies during the party!

The evening was hosted by OpenDNS, who were incredibly welcoming and gracious hosts. Thanks so much, Jennifer Basalone and crew!

The space was excellent, having power strips set up at a pair of tables near the entrance, a whole area of seating for the presentation and an open floor plan that lent itself to casual chats as well as pulling out laptops to swap tips with each other. An Ubuntu Studio install was even started during the event. We did have the unfortunate snafu of a baseball game just down the street messing up nearby traffic a bit, but hopefully that didn’t discourage too many attendees, as public transit to the venue was still pretty easy.

The venue provided drinks and I was able to order salad and a pile of pizzas to make sure everyone was well fed throughout the event.

Like with my past presentations at LUGs in June and July, I brought along my underpowered Lenovo G575, which I had Ubuntu 16.04 running on and my Dell Mini 9 with Xubuntu 16.04. Plus I had my pair of tablets, Nexus 7 and Aquaris M10 with the hot-off-the-download OTA-12.

The tablets definitely got the most attention at this event, and showing off desktop mode (convergence!) by connecting my Lenovo keyboard+mouse combo to the Aquaris M10 was a lot of fun.

I did my release presentation a final time at this event, this time updated with OTA-12 notes. Slides available: sf_release_party_ubuntu_1604.pdf (6.0M), sf_release_party_ubuntu_1604.odp (5.4M), please feel free to use them as you see fit.

A few more photos from the event here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157671609240786

Filed under: events, LoCo, tech, ubuntu planet

The Official Ubuntu Book, 9th Edition released!

Monday, Jul 25th, 2016 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Back in 2014 I had the opportunity to lend my expertise to the 8th edition of The Official Ubuntu Book and began my path into authorship. Since then, I’ve completed the first edition of Common OpenStack Deployments, coming out in September. I was thrilled this year when Matthew Helmke invited me back to work on the 9th edition of The Official Ubuntu Book. We also had José Antonio Rey joining us for this edition as a third co-author.

One of the things we focused on with the 8th edition was, knowing that it would have a shelf life of 2 years, future-proofing. With the 9th edition we continued this focus, but also wanted to add a whole new chapter: Ubuntu, Convergence, and Devices of the Future

Taking a snippet from the book’s sample content, the chapter gives a whirlwind tour of where Ubuntu on desktops, servers and devices is going:

Chapter 10: Ubuntu, Convergence, and Devices of the Future 261

The Convergence Vision 262
Unity 263
Ubuntu Devices 264
The Internet of Things and Beyond 268
The Future of the Ubuntu Desktop 272
Summary 273

The biggest challenge with this chapter was the future-proofing. We’re in an exciting point in the world of Ubuntu and how it’s moved far beyond “Linux for Human Beings” on the desktop and into powering servers, tablets, robots and even refrigerators. With the Snappy and Ubuntu Core technologies both powering much of this progress and changing rapidly, we had to be cautious about how in depth we covered this tooling. With the help of Michael Hall, Nathan Haines and Sergio Schvezov I believe we’ve succeeded in presenting a chapter that gives the reader a firm overview of these new technologies, while being general enough to last us until the 10th edition of this book.

Also thanks to Thomas Mashos of the Mythbuntu team and Paul Mellors who also pitched in with this edition. Finally, as with the last edition, it was a pleasure to work with Matthew and José on this book. I hope you enjoy it!

Filed under: author, books, tech, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu 16.04 in the SF Bay Area

Thursday, Jul 21st, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Back in June I gave a presentation on the 16.04 release down at FeltonLUG, which I wrote about here.

Making my way closer to home, I continued my tour of Ubuntu 16.04 talks in the San Francisco Bay Area. A couple weeks ago I gave the talk at SVLUG (Silicon Valley Linux Users Group) and on Tuesday I spoke at BALUG (Bay Area Linux Users Group).

I hadn’t been down to an SVLUG meeting in a couple years, so I appreciated the invitation. They have a great space set up for presentations, and the crowd was very friendly. I particularly enjoyed that folks came with a lot of questions, which meant we had an engaging evening and it stretched what is alone a pretty short talk into one that filled the whole presentation time. Slides: svlug_ubuntu_1604.pdf (6.0M), svlug_ubuntu_1604.odp (5.4M)


Presentation, tablets and giveaways at SVLUG

At BALUG this week things were considerably more casual. The venue is a projector-less Chinese restaurant these days and the meetings tend to be on the small side. After family style dinner, attendees gathered around my big laptop running Ubuntu as I walked through my slide deck. It worked better than expected, and the format definitely lent itself to people asking questions and having discussions throughout too. Very similar slides to the ones I had at SVLUG: balug_ubuntu_1604.pdf (6.0M), balug_ubuntu_1604.odp (5.4M)


Setup and giveaways at BALUG

Next week my Ubuntu 16.04 talk adventures culminate in the event I’m most excited about, the San Francisco Ubuntu 16.04 release party at OpenDNS office located at 135 Bluxome St in San Francisco!

The event is on Thursday, July 28th from 6:30 – 8:30PM.

It’s right near the Caltrain station, so where ever you are in the bay it should be easy to get to.

  • Laptops running Ubuntu and Xubuntu 16.04.
  • Tablets running the latest Ubuntu build, including the bq Aquaris M10 that shipped with Ubuntu and demonstrates convergence.
  • Giveaways, including the 9th edition of the Official Ubuntu book (new release!), pens, stickers and more.

I’ll need to plan for food, so I need folks to RSVP. There are a few options for RSVP:

Need more convincing? It’ll be fun! And I’m a volunteer whose systems engineering job is unrelated to the Ubuntu project. In order to continue putting the work into hosting these events, I need the satisfaction of having people come.

Finally, event packs from Canonical are now being shipped out to LoCos! It’s noteworthy that for this release instead of shipping DVDs, which have been in sharp popularity decline over the past couple of years, they are now shipping USB sticks. These are really nice, but the distribution is limited to just 25 USB sticks in the shipment for the team. This is an order of magnitude fewer than we got with DVDs, but they’re also much more expensive.


Event pack from Canonical

Not in the San Francisco Bay Area? If you feel inspired to give an Ubuntu 16.04 presentation, you’re welcome to use my slides, and I’d love to see pictures from your event!

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

CodeConf 2016

Monday, Jul 18th, 2016 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

In the last week of June I had the pleasure of attending CodeConf in sunny Hollywood, Los Angeles. As I wrote in my tourist account of this trip, it was my first visit to Hollywood.

The event commenced on Monday, when they had a series of tutorials and I took the opportunity to pick up my badge and get acquainted with the event staff. In the early evening I went to the venue, AVALON Hollywood to complete my A/V check. My laptop is restricted to display port and VGA and I think they mostly expected Macs, so I had a pile of adapters at my side to figure out which would work best. That’s when I got my first glimpse of the historic venue that the conference was hosted in, it was a beautiful space for a single track conference. Also, there was a really nice ceiling piece.


Performer-eye view of the stage at Avalon Hollywood

That evening I met up with the organizers and my fellow speakers at the EP Lounge. I really enjoyed this gathering, it was small enough that I felt comfortable, everyone was super friendly and eager to include shy, introverted me in their conversations and I met a whole slew of brilliant people. That’s also where they presented speakers with our speaker gift, CodeConf Vans SHOES! I’m still breaking them in, but they fit really well.

Tuesday kicked off the post-tutorials conference. Breakfast was provided via a series of food trucks in an adjacent lot. In spite of the heat, it was a great setup.

Conference-wise, I can’t possibly cover all the talks, but there were several which were notable in that I learned something new or was somehow inspired. Michael Bernstein got us started with a talk about “The Perfect Programming Language” where he told a story about an old notebook that outlined the key features of “the perfect programming language” but taught us that perfect goes beyond the code. Not only does the perfect programming language not exist, it’s also about things that are less glamorous than language mechanics, like documentation, testing, packaging and practical adoption. The perfect programming language, he posits, is the one you’re using now. He also implored the audience to rise above language wars and to instead appreciate the strengths of other languages and adopt from them what they do right.

Mid-day I had the pleasure of listening to E. Dunham talk about the community processes in the Rust community. What I particularly loved about her talk was that she addressed both how the social components of the community and the technical ones create a better atmosphere for contributors. The social components included having a high expectations for the behavior of your community members (including a Code of Conduct), providing simple methods of communications for all contributors and being culturally supportive of showing appreciation for contributions people have made, especially newcomers. On the technical side, she talked a lot about robots! Bots that send a welcome message to new contributors, bots that test the code before it’s merged, pull request templates on GitHub to help guide new contributors and more. There’s no replacing the personal touch, but there’s a lot of routine work that can be done by bots.


E. Dunham on Rust community processes

After lunch Anton McConville presented a talk about natural language processing by using his David Bowie Personas tooling. The heart of the talk was the modern ability to process natural language (say, your tweets) to draw conclusions. He demonstrated this with his Ziggy | Bowie Personas through lyric analysis website which is powered by IBM’s Watson and IBM’s natural language analysis tooling. Through his tooling and website he did an analysis of David Bowie lyrics across albums and decades to track various emotions and map them to the artist’s public personal history. In addition, there’s a feature where you can put your own Twitter handle in to see which David Bowie personal you most closely match with.

Another notable talk was that by Mike McQuaid on The Contributor Funnel. He used the well-known sales tunnel as an analog to present different, fluid groups of people in your community: users, contributors and trusted maintainers. The point of his talk was that efforts should be continually made to “upsell” community members to the next level of contributors. You want your users to become contributors, contributors to become maintainers and maintainers with the mindset to foster an environment where they can continually accept and welcome the newest generation of new maintainers. He suggested not making assumptions about users (like they know how to git/github) and have a new maintainer checklist so you don’t have to remember what resources tooling new folks need to be added to. He also talked about avoiding bikeshedding in communications, having a code of conduct and making constant growth of your community a priority.

I really enjoyed the next trio of talks. First up was Anjuan Simmons about Lending Privilege. What he meant by this was to work not only toward building up diversity in your organization, but also factoring in inclusion. His talk stressed the importance of what people in the majority populations in tech can do to help minorities, including lending them your credibility, helping them with access to the tooling and levels of trust they have, encouraging them in their roles and sharing of expertise. On a personal note, I’ll emphasize that it’s easier to be a mentor to people who you share a background, race and gender with, which results in minorities struggling to find mentors. We must do better than what is easy and work to mentor people who are different than we are.

David Molina then presented what was probably the most inspirational of talks at the conference: What Happens When Military Veterans Learn to Code. Through the organization he founded, Operation Code, he is seeking to put veterans in touch with the resources they need to get into code camps and launch a new career in programming. The organization accomplishes this through scholarships for veterans for code camps, recruitment of industry mentors (like us!), open source projects within the organization where their code camp graduates can publicly demonstrate expertise, and job placement. It was interesting to learn that the GI bill does not support code camps since they aren’t accredited, so in addition to handling the status quo through external scholarships, he’s also working with organizations to get accreditation and petition for modernization of the 1940s-era focused requirements for the GI bill, many of which don’t help veterans get job-ready skills today. I’m incredibly appreciative to David for his own service to our country as a veteran himself, his commitment to his fellow veterans and for bringing this to our attention.


David Molina on Operation Code

The final talk of the day was about the Let’s Encrpyt initiative. I’ve known about this initiative since the beta launch last year but I’ve been cautious about moving from CAcert for my own domains. Speaker and one of the founders, Josh Aas, spoke on the history and rationale of the project, which seeks to enable all sites to have at least the most basic SSL certificate, which they provide free of charge. They also have a goal of making it much easier process-wise, as the current process tends to be very technical and complicated, and varies greatly based on the SSL certificate vendor. I have to say that I’m much more inclined to seriously consider it the next time I renew my certificates after seeing this talk.

Wednesday began with an excellent talk by Nadia Eghbal, on Emerging Models for Open Source Contributions. She walked us through the history of open source with an eye toward leadership models. She covered the following:

  1. Early days (1980s through early 90s) where Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) was common. Leadership was centralized and there were a limited number of contributors and users. This model is simple, but tended to make companies nervous due to control of the project and ability for it to continue should the BDFL cease involvement.
  2. Maturing of open source era (late 1990s through 2010) where meritocracy ruled and commitment to the project was still required. This helped highly competent (though non-diverse) communities grow and started to get companies involved.
  3. Modern open source communities (2010 through today) where many projects have adopted a liberal contributions model. With tooling like GitHub, contributors have a common set of tooling for contributions and one-off contributors are common. Sheu shared that of the largest projects on GitHub, many had a large percentage of contributors who only contributed to the project once. This style of contributions was more difficult in the past when you may have needed to be known by the BDFL or needed merit in the community before your contributions were reviewed and accepted.

I also liked that she didn’t just put all these methods into boxes and say there was a one size fits all model for all projects. While the leadership models have mapped to time and eras in Open Source, it didn’t necessarily mean that the newer models were appropriate everywhere. Instead, each project now has these models to seek ideas from and evaluate for their communities. I found further details about her talk here.

There was then a talk by Mitchell Hashimoto of HashiCorp on The HashiCorp Formula to Open Source. Having produced a series of successful open source projects, of which I’ve used two, Vagrant and Terraform, Mitchell spoke on the formula his company has used to continually produce successful projects. His six-step path for success was the following:

  1. Find a problem and evaluate other solutions on the market
  2. Design a solution with human language (don’t write code yet!)
  3. Build and release the 0.1 version based on a basic reference use case and spend 3-6 months on it (no more, no less)
  4. Write human-centric documentation and a landing page (these are different things!), partially so you can effectively collect and respond to 0.1 feedback
  5. Ship and share (0.2 should come quickly, aim for production-ready 0.3-.0.5 releases and then give talks about it!)

Of course his excellent talk dove into a considerable amount of detail on each, which is worth considering if the video is made available.

My talk was at noon, where I spoke on building an open source cloud (slides, PDF). The focus of my talk was squarely on OpenStack, but my recommendations for use of configuration management for maintainability and expertise you want on your cloud-building team were universal.


Thanks to E. Dunham for snapping a photo during my talk! (source)

After lunch I really enjoyed a talk by Tracy Osborn on Design for Non-designers. I’ll begin by saying that I have the utmost respect for designers who not only have the education background in design, but have design as a career. I have paid web designers before for this very reason. That said, as a systems engineer I can use all the help I can get with design! The talk format was a brief introduction to how design is taught, and how she’s not going into that, and then demonstrating considerable improvements that could be made to a dialog window with the suggestions she outlined. She covered: cutting down on clutter, lining things up, use of color (see pallets like those at ColourLovers.com for inspiration), use of a maximum of two fonts (use TypeWolf to find open source fonts to use), use of white space, use of bright colors for important things on your page and a super quick tutorial in migrating paragraphs to a series of bullet-points. I’m really taking these recommendations to heart, thanks Tracy!

The final two talks that really spoke to me were on public data and a tooling unspecific look at debugging. First up was Tyrone Grandison from from the US Department of Commerce. I’ll start off by saying I love open data talks. They always make me want to learn more programming so I can come up with fun and interesting ways to use data, and this talk was no exception. Tyrone himself is a self-proclaimed data geek, and that showed through, and his relatively new team has been really productive. They’ve been supporting US government organizations releasing their data in a public, usable form and in turn writing tutorials to help organizations use the data effectively. I’m really impressed by their work. A link dump of resources he shared: US Commerce Data Service, US Commerce Data Usability Project and US Commerce Data Service on GitHub, which includes aforementioned tutorials.

The last talk was by Kerri Miller on Crescent Wrenches, Socket Sets, and Other Tools For Debugging. I was somewhat worried this talk would be about specific technical tools (maybe crescent wrenches and socket sets are open source tools I don’t know about?), but I was pleasantly surprised to hear a very humor-filled, entertaining talk instead about a high level view of debugging. By providing a high level talk about debugging, she presented us with a world where you don’t make assumptions, are methodical about finding solutions but still have a lot of room for creativity.

To conclude, I had a wonderful time at this conference. I also want to applaud the CodeConf LA team for presenting such a diverse program of speakers. I have a great appreciation for the variety of perspectives that such a diverse conference speaker lineup includes. It also proved yet again that you don’t need to “lower the bar” to have a diverse lineup. All the speakers were world-class.

More photos from the event here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157667666687824

Filed under: events, tech, travel

Simcoe’s March and June Checkups

Sunday, Jul 3rd, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I missed a checkup post! Looking back to January, she had been prescribed the Atopica for some scabbing that kept occurring around her eyes and she continues to be on that. Since starting that daily pill, she has only had one very mild breakout of scabbing around her eyes, but it cleared up quickly after we bumped up the dose.

We also started giving her an appetite stimulant to get her to eat more and put on some weight. It’s working so far, she still isn’t the biggest eater, so I think the pill bothers her because she has to eat a lot. We’re planning on switching over to a lower dose that she can take a bit more often to even out her eating schedule. She’s also been on Calcitriol, an active form of Vitamin D (info about usage in renal failure cats here). This spring she also suffered a UTI, which is pretty common in renal failure felines, but we’d gotten lucky so far. Thankfully a batch of antibiotics knocked it out without much trouble and it hasn’t returned. Finally, I mentioned in January that she’d been suffering some with constipation. That has continued and the dermatologist assured us it was unrelated to any of her medication. It hasn’t subsided, so we’re now giving both cats a small dollop of wet K/D food every night, and Simcoe’s getting some fiber mixed in. When she’s not stubborn about eating it, it seems to be doing the trick.

Levels! First up, her weight. In January she was at 8.8lbs. In March she dropped to the lowest she’s been, 8.3. By her appointment on June 29th she was up a bit to 8.4. Keeping her at a healthy weight is incredibly important, hopefully the new appetite stimulant regime will continue to help with that.

lbs

Her BUN dipped in March a bit, going from 71 from 85. In June it had risen again, now sitting at 100. As levels go, the vet seems to be less concerned about this and looking more at her CRE levels.

BUN

…which are also continuing to rise. 4.6 in January, 5.1 in March and now at 5.5. As expected, this is simply the renal failure continuing to progress like we always knew it would.

CRE

As always we’re enjoying our time together and making sure she’s continuing to live a healthy, active life. She certainly doesn’t care for all the traveling I do, including during the last vet appointment (MJ ended up taking her). I am home most of the time though since I work from home, so I can keep an eye on her and spend lots of quality time together.

Simcoe with plants
Filed under: simcoe

Tourist in Los Angeles

Sunday, Jul 3rd, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’ve been to Los Angeles several times for the Southern California Linux Expo, but the first few trips only took me to the LAX airport area, and without a car I wasn’t venturing too far beyond the area. This year it wasn’t even in Los Angeles, moving over to nearby Pasadena (good move!).

At CodeConf this past week my experience finally changed! The event took place in the heart of Hollywood, and my nearby hotel was a lovely jumping off point for my Hollywood adventures.

Sunday morning I flew down to Burbank airport on a little regional jet (CJR-200), putting me at my hotel around 10AM. I stashed my suitcase at the hotel and grabbed an Uber over my first tourist stop, the Griffith Observatory. I’ve seen it in movies and shows, most recently as MJ and I made our way through the Star Trek Voyager series, but I didn’t know a whole lot about it as a place. It turns out that it is actually a public observatory, specifically built for the public to use. It was built in the early 20th century at Griffith J. Griffith’s direction after he saw how life-changing seeing the sky through a telescope was and his desire to share this experience with everyone. I really enjoyed the free showing of the observatory’s history in the new Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theater. In the movie you learn that addition to the original structure that we enjoy today, in the early 2000s they shut down the entire observatory to do a multi-billion dollar restoration of the interior and built the underground addition that houses the theater and massive a new exhibit space. It’s pretty astonishing that they were able to do such a change with virtually no change to the original structure or look of the place from the outside.

The observatory also has a planetarium, where during my three hour visit I was able to get in a couple shows, Water is Life and Centered in the Universe, both of which I’d recommend seeing.

The hill the observatory is perched upon also offered great views of the Hollywood sign, so I was able to get my obligatory Hollywood sign photos out of the way early in my adventures. I really missed MJ on this observatory visit, I think it would have been a great place to explore together. I sent him a postcard to help share the experience, even if it was just a little bit.

I swung by my hotel to check into my room, where I snagged corner room that offered views of the Hollywood sign, Capitol Records building and Pantages Theatre. Quite nice! I could also see one of the three Dunkin’ Donuts in California from my room, but I suppose that’s not quite as noteworthy unless you’re me. Yes, I did get some coffee and donuts during my stay. OK, I got more than “some” coffee. I drank more iced coffee this past week than I have in years.

My day continued by going to the TLC Chinese Theatre. I decided to pay for a VIP tour ($15) and also see Independence Day: Resurgence in the classic theater, fitted with the third largest IMAX screen in North America ($22.75). I’ll say right off the bat that the tour isn’t worth it if you’re going to see a movie in that theater anyway. Half the tour was reading labels of clothing displayed in the lobby and continued by walking us through common areas telling us rather droll facts about the theater that are easy to find online. Since I had access to the theater with my movie ticket anyway, it wasn’t a very good use of my time or money.

Seeing a movie in that theater is totally worth doing though. It’s the most famous movie theater in the world, the screen and sound system were great, which I was initially skeptical about given the theater’s age. The curtains that cover the screen are beautiful, faithful reproductions of the long-worn originals and always novel to see in a movie theater. The movie itself? It was pretty silly, but if you’re going to see it the IMAX is the way to get the full level of enjoyment out of it. I joked that I was going to see a ridiculous movie in a ridiculous movie theater. It all felt appropriate.

After the movie I walked down Hollywood Boulevard for about a mile to get back to my hotel. Along the way I walked through some hyper tourist areas with the wax museums, people dressed up as various characters for photos and tourist goodie shops selling t-shirts, magnets and the like. The stars along the sidewalks are worth seeing, but a single walk through the area was plenty for me. There’s also lots of great food around. Los Angeles is famous for fresh sushi, and I managed to get some before I left on Wednesday night.

The conference took up the rest of my week, except that I did have to sneak out on Tuesday evening for an event I’d been waiting months AND pledged on a kickstarter for, the MST3K reunion show! I picked up tickets on Fandango for a theater in downtown LA. It was a shame to go alone, I missed my San Francisco MSTies but I’m glad I was able to make time for it in spite of being away from home, it was a lot of fun.

In all, I enjoyed Los Angeles on this trip. I’m glad I was finally able to make it beyond a conference venue, the city has a lot to offer. Next time I’ll have to check out the zoo.

More pictures from my adventures here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157669821167402/

Filed under: travel

Ubuntu 16.04 at FeltonLUG and the rest of California

Friday, Jul 1st, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Saturday, June 25th my husband and I made our way south to Felton, California so I could give a presentation to the Felton Linux Users Group on Ubuntu 16.04.

I brought along my demo systems:

  • Lenovo G575 running Ubuntu 16.04, which I presented from
  • Dell mini9 running Xubuntu 16.04
  • Nexus 7 2013 running Ubuntu OTA-11
  • bq Aquaris M10 running Ubuntu OTA-11

All these were pristine systems so that I didn’t have any data loaded on them or anything. The Nexus 7 took some prep though. I had to swing by #ubuntu-touch on freenode to get some help with re-flashing it after it got stuck on a version from February and wouldn’t upgrade beyond that in the UI. Thanks to popey for being so responsive there and helping me out.

The presentation was pretty straight forward. I walked attendees through screenshots and basic updates of the flavors, and then dove into a variety of changes in the 16.04 release of Ubuntu itself, including disabling of Amazon search by default, replacement of Ubuntu Software Center by GNOME Software, replacement of Upstart with systemd (new since the last LTS release), ability to move the Unity launcher to the bottom of the screen, inclusion of ZFS and the introduction of Ubuntu Snappy.

Slides from my presentation are available for other folks to use as they see fit (but you probably want to introduce yourself, rather than me!): feltonlug_ubuntu_1604.pdf (3.1M), feltonlug_ubuntu_1604.odp (5.4M). If you’d like a smaller version of this slide deck, drop me a message at lyz@ubuntu.com and I’ll send you one without all the flavor screenshots.

After the presentation portion of the event, I answered questions and gave folks the opportunity to play with the laptops and tablets I brought along. About half the meeting was spent causally chatting with attendees about their experiences and plans to debug and flash the Ubuntu image on supported tablets.

Huge thanks to the group for being the welcoming crowd they always are, and Bob Lewis for inviting me down.

I’ll continue my presentation roadshow through July, presenting on Ubuntu 16.04 at the following Bay Area groups and events where I’m also bringing along Ubuntu pens, stickers and other goodies:

Bonus: At the release party in San Francisco I’ll also have copies of the The Official Book, 9th Edition which I’ll be signing and giving away!

Looking forward to these events, it should be a nice adventure around the bay area.

Filed under: events, LUG, tech, ubuntu planet
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