Xubuntu 16.04 ISO testing tips

Sunday, Mar 6th, 2016 by pleia2 | 5 Comments

As we get closer to the 16.04 LTS release, it’s becoming increasingly important for people to be testing the daily ISOs to catch any problems. This past week, we had the landing of GNOME Software to replace the Ubuntu Software Center and this will definitely need folks looking at it and reporting bugs (current ones tracked here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-software)

In light of this, I thought I’d quickly share a few of my own tips and stumbling points. My focus is typically on Xubuntu testing, but things I talk about are applicable to Ubuntu too.

ISO testing on a rainy day

1. Downloading the ISO

Downloading an ISO every day, or even once a week can be tedious. Helpfully, the team provides the images via zsync which will only download the differences in the ISO between days, saving you a lot of time and bandwidth. Always use this option when you’re downloading ISOs, you can even use it the first time you download one, as it will notice that none exists.

The zsync URL is right alongside all the others when you choose “Link to the download information” in the ISO tracker:

You then use a terminal to cd into the directory where you want the ISO to be (or where it already is) and copy the zsync line into the terminal and hit enter. It will begin by examining the current ISO and then give you a progress bar for what it needs to download.

2. Putting the image on a USB stick

I have struggled with this for several releases. At first I was using UNetbootin (unetbootin), then usb-creator (usb-creator-gtk). Then I’d switch off between the two per release when one or the other wasn’t behaving properly. What a mess! How can we expect people to test if they can’t even get the ISO on a USB stick with simple instructions?

The other day flocculant, the Xubuntu QA Lead, clued me into using GNOME Disks to put an ISO on a USB stick for testing. You pop in the USB stick, launch gnome-disks (you’ll need to install the gnome-disk-utility package in Xubuntu), select your USB stick in the list on the left and choose the “Restore Disk Image…” option in the top right to select the ISO image you want to use:

I thought about doing a quick screencast of it, but Paul W. Frields over at Fedora Magazine beat me to it by more than a year: How to make a Live USB stick using GNOME Disks

This has worked beautifully with both the Xubuntu and Ubuntu ISOs.

3. Reporting bugs

The ISO tracker, where you report testing results, is easy enough to log into, but a fair number of people quit the testing process when it gets to actually reporting bugs. How do I report bugs? What package do I report them against? What if I do it wrong?

I’ve been doing ISO testing for several years, and have even run multiple events with a focus on ISO testing, and STILL struggle with this.

How did I get over it?

First, I know it’s a really long page, but this will get you familiar with the basics of reporting a bug using the ubuntu-bug tool: Ubuntu ReportingBugs

Often times being familiar with the basic tooling isn’t enough. It’s pretty common to run into a bug that’s manifesting in the desktop environment rather than in a specific application. A wallpaper is gone, a theme looks wrong, you’re struggling to log in. Where do those get submitted? And Is this bad enough for me to classify it as “Critical” in the ISO Tracker? This is when I ask. For Xubuntu I ask in #xubuntu-devel and for Ubuntu I ask in #ubuntu-quality. Note: people don’t hover over their keyboards on IRC, explain what you’re doing, ask your question and be patient.

This isn’t just for bugs, we want to see more people testing and it’s great when new testers come into our IRC channels to share their experiences and where they’re getting stuck. You’re part of our community :)

Simcoe thinks USB sticks are cat toys

Resources

I hope you’ll join us.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet, xubuntu

OpenStack infra-cloud sprint

Monday, Feb 29th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last week at the HPE offices in Fort Collins, members of the OpenStack Infrastructure team focused on getting an infra-cloud into production met from Monday through Thursday.

The infra-cloud is an important project for our team, so important that it has a Mission!

The infra-cloud’s mission is to turn donated raw hardware resources into expanded capacity for the OpenStack infrastructure nodepool.

This means that in addition companies who Contribute Cloud Test Resources in the form of OpenStack instances, we’ll be running our own OpenStack-driven cloud that will provide additional instances to our pool of servers we run tests on. We’re using the OpenStack Puppet Modules (since the rest of our infra uses Puppet) and bifrost, which is a series of Ansible playbooks that use Ironic to automate the task of deploying a base image onto a set of known hardware.

Our target for infra-cloud was a few racks of HPE hardware provided to the team by HPE that resides in a couple HPE data centers. When the idea for a sprint came together, we thought it might be nice to have the sprint itself hosted at an HPE site where we could meet some of the folks who handle servers. That’s how we ended up in Fort Collins, at an HPE office that had hosted several mid-cycle and sprint events for OpenStack in the past.

Our event kicked off with an overview by Colleen Murphy of work that’s been done to date. The infra-cloud team that Colleen is part of has been architecting and deploying the infra-cloud over the past several months with an eye toward formalizing the process and landing it in our git repositories. Part of the aim of this sprint was to get everyone on the broader OpenStack Infrastructure team up to speed with how everything works so that the infra cores could intelligently review and provide feedback on the patches being deployed. Colleen’s slides (available here) also gave us an overview of the baremetal workflow with bifrost, the characteristics of the controller and compute nodes, networking (and differences found between the US East and US West regions) and her strategy for deploying locally for a development environment (GitHub repo here). She also spent time getting us up to speed with the HPE iLO management interfaces that we’ll have to use if we’re having trouble with provisioning.

This introduction took up our morning. After lunch it was time to talk about our plan for the rest of our time together. We discussed the version of OpenStack we wanted to focus on and broadly how and if we planned to do upgrades, along with goals of this project. Of great importance was also that we built something that could be redeployed if we changed something, we don’t want this infrastructure to bit rot and cause a major hassle if we need to rebuild the cloud for some reason. We then went through the architecture section of the infra-cloud documentation to confirm that the assumptions there continued to be accurate, and made notes accordingly on our etherpad when they were not.

Our discussion then shifted into broad goals for our week, out came the whiteboard! It was decided that we’d focus on getting all the patches landed to support US West so that by the end of the sprint we’d have at least one working cloud. It was during this discussion that we learned how valuable hosting our sprint at an HPE facility was. An attendee at our sprint, Phil Jensen, works in the Fort Collins data center and updated us on the plans for moving systems out of US West. The timeline that he was aware of was considerably closer than we’d been planning on. A call was scheduled for Thursday to sort out those details, and we’re thankful we did since it turns out we had to effectively be ready to shut down the systems by the end of our sprint.

Goals continued for various sub-tasks in what coalesced in the main goal of the sprint: Get a region added to Nodepool so I could run a test on it.

Tuesday morning we began tackling our tasks, and at 11:30 Phil came by to give us a tour of the local data center there in Fort Collins. Now, if we’re honest, there was no technical reason for this tour. All the systems engineers on our team have been in data centers before, most of us have even worked in them. But there’s a reason we got into this: we like computers. Even if we mostly interact with clouds these days, a tour through a data center is always a lot of fun for us. Plus it got us out of the conference room for a half hour, so it was a nice pause in our day. Huge thanks to Phil for showing us around.

The data center also had one of the server types we’re using in infra-cloud, the HP SL390. While we didn’t get to see the exact servers we’re using, it was fun to get to see the size and form factor of the servers in person.

Spencer Krum checks out a rack of HP SL390s

Tuesday was spent heads down, landing patches. People moved around the room as we huddled in groups, and there was some collaborative debugging on the projector as we learned more about the deployment, learned a whole lot more about OpenStack itself and worked through some unfortunate issues with Puppet and Ansible.

Not so much glamour, sprints are mostly spent working on our laptops

Wednesday was the big day for us. The morning was spent landing more patches and in the afternoon we added our cloud to the list of clouds in Nodepool. We then eagerly hovered over the Jenkins dashboard and waited for a job to need a trusty node to run a test…

Slave ubuntu-trusty-infracloud-west-8281553 Building swift-coverage-bindep #2

The test ran! And completed successfully! Colleen grabbed a couple screenshots.

We watch on Clark Boylan’s laptop as the test runs

Alas, it was not all roses. Our cloud struggled to obey the deletion command and the test itself ran considerably slower than we would have expected. We spent some quality time looking at disk configurations and settings together to see if we could track down the issue and do some tuning. We still have more work to do here to get everything running well on this hardware once it has moved to the new facility.

Thursday we spent some time getting US East patches to land before the data center moves. We also had a call mid-day to firm up the timing of the move. Our timing for the sprint ended up working out well for the move schedule, we were able to complete a considerable amount of work at the sprint before the machines had to be shut down. The call was also valuable in getting to chat with some of the key parties involved and learn what we needed to hand off to them with regard to our requirements for the new home the servers will have, in an HPE POD (cool!) in Houston. This allowed us to kick off a Network Requirements for Infracloud Relocation Deployment thread and Cody A.W. Somerville captured notes from the rest of the conversation here.

The day concluded with a chat about how the sprint went. The feedback was pretty positive, we all got a lot of work done, Spencer summarized our feedback on list here.

Personally, I liked that the HPE campus in Fort Collins has wild rabbits. Also, it snowed a little and I like snow.

I could have done without the geese.

It was also enjoyable to visit downtown Fort Collins in the evenings and meet up with some of the OpenStack locals. Plus, at Coopersmith’s I got a beer with a hop pillow on top. I love hops.

More photos from the week here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157662730010623/

David F. Flanders also Tweeted some photos: https://twitter.com/dfflanders/status/702603441508487169

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, travel

Simcoe’s January 2016 Checkups

Sunday, Feb 14th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

First up, as I first wrote about back in August, since July Simcoe has been struggling with some sores and scabbing around her eyes and inside her ear. This typically goes away after a few weeks, but it keeps coming back Over the winter holidays she started developing more scabbing, this time in addition to hear eyes and ears, it was showing up near her tail and back legs. She was also grooming excessively What could be going on?

We went through some rounds of antibiotics and then some Neo-Poly-Dex Ophthalmic for treatment of bacterial infections around her eyes throughout the fall. Unfortunately this didn’t help much, so we eventually scheduled an appointment at the beginning of January with a dermatologist at SFVS where she has been mostly transferred to for more specialized care of her renal failure as it progresses. The dermatologist determined that she’s actually suffering from allergies which are causing the breakouts. She’s now on a daily anti-allergy pill, Atopica. The outbreaks haven’t returned, but now she seems to be suffering from increasing constipation, which we’re currently trying to treat by supplementing her diet with pumpkin mixed with renal diet wet food she likes. It’s pretty clear that it’s causing her distress every time it happens. It’s unclear whether they’re related, but I have a call with the dermatologist and possibly the vet this week to find out.

As for her renal failure, we had an appointment on January 16th with the specialist to look at her levels and see how she’s doing. Due to the constipation we’re reluctant to put her on appetite stimulants just yet, but she is continuing to lose weight, which is a real concern. From November she was down from 8.9 to 8.8.

Her BUN and CRE levels also are on the increase, so we’re keeping a close eye on her.

Her next formal appointment is scheduled for April, so we’ll see how things go over the next month and a half. Behavior-wise she’s still the active and happy kitty we’re accustomed to, aside from the constipation.

Still getting into my freshly folded laundry and claiming my suitcases every time I dare bring them out for a trip away from her!

Filed under: simcoe

Highlights from LCA 2016 in Geelong

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

Last week I had the pleasure of attending my second linux.conf.au. This year it took place in Geelong, a port city about an hour train ride southwest of Melbourne. After my Melbourne-area adventures earlier in the week, I made my way to Geelong via train on Sunday afternoon. That evening I met up with a whole bunch of my HPE colleagues for dinner at a restaurant next to my hotel.

Monday morning the conference began! Every day 1km the walk from my hotel to the conference venue at Deakin University’s Waterfront Campus and back was a pleasure as it took me along the shoreline. I passed a beach, a marina and even a Ferris wheel and a carousel.

I didn’t make time to enjoy the beach (complete with part of Geelong’s interesting post-people art installation), but I know many conference attendees did.

With that backdrop, it was time to dive into some Linux! I spent much of Monday in the Open Cloud Symposium miniconf run by my OpenStack Infra colleague over at Rackspace, Joshua Hesketh. I really enjoyed the pair of talks by Casey West, The Twelve-Factor Container (video) and Cloud Anti-Patterns (video). In both talks he gave engaging overviews of best practices and common gotchas with each technology. With containers it’s a temptation during the initial adoption phase to treat them like “tiny VMs” rather than compute-centric, storage free, containers for horizontally-scalable applications. He also stressed the importance of a consolidated code base for development and production and keeping any persistent storage out of containers and more generally the importance of Repeatability, Reliability and Resiliency. The second talk focused on how to bring applications into a cloud-native environment by using the 5-stages of grief repurposed for cloud-native. Key themes in this talk walked you through beginning with a legacy application being crammed into a container and the eventual modernization of that software into a series of microservices, including an automated build pipeline and continuous delivery with automated testing.

Unfortunately I was ill on Tuesday, so my conferencing picked up on Wednesday with a keynote by Catarina Mota who spoke on open hardware and materials, with a strong focus on 3D printing. It’s a topic that I’m already well-versed in, so the talk was mostly review for me, but I did enjoy one of the videos that she shared during her talk: Full Printed by nueveojos.

The day continued with a couple of talks that were some of my favorites of the conference. The first was Going Faster: Continuous Delivery for Firefox by Laura Thomson. Continuous Delivery (CD) has become increasingly popular for server-side applications that are served up to users, but this talk was an interesting take: delivering a client in a CD model. She didn’t offer a full solution for a CD browser, but instead walked through the problem space, design decisions and rationale behind the tooling they are using to get closer to a CD model for client-side software. Firefox is in an interesting space for this, as it already has add-ons that are released outside of the Firefox release model. What they decided to do was leverage this add-on tooling to create system add-ons, which are core to Firefox and to deliver microchanges, improvements and updates to the browser online. They’re also working to separate the browser code itself from the data that ships with it, under the premise that things like policy blacklists, dictionaries and fonts should be able to be updated and shipped independent of a browser version release. Indeed! This data would instead be shipped as downloadable content, and could also be tuned to only ship certain features upon request, like specific language support.

Laura Thomson, Director of Engineering, Cloud Services Engineering and Operations at Mozilla

The next talk that I got a lot out of was Wait, ?tahW: The Twisted Road to Right-to-Left Language Support (video) by Moriel Schottlender. Much like the first accessibility and internationalization talks I attended in the past, this is one of those talks that sticks with me because it opened my eyes to an area I’d never thought much about, as an English-only speaking citizen of the United States. She was also a great speaker who delivered the talk with the humor and intrigue… “can you guess the behavior of this right-to-left feature?” The talk began by making the case for more UIs supporting right to left (RTL) languages, citing that there are 800 million RTL speakers in the world who we should be supporting. She walked us through the concepts of Visual and Logical Rendering, how “obvious” solutions like flipping all content are flawed and considerations with regard to the relationship of content and the interface itself when designing for RTL. She also gave us a glimpse into the behavior of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm and the fascinating ways it behaves when mixing LTR and RTL languages. She concluded by sharing that expectations of RTL language users are pretty low since most software gets it wrong, but this means that there’s a great opportunity for projects that do support it to get it right. Her website on the topic that has everything she covered in her talk, and more, is at http://rtl.wtf.

Moriel Schottlender, Software Engineer at Wikimedia

Wednesday night was the Penguin Dinner, which is the major, all attendees welcome conference dinner of the event. The venue was The Pier, which was a restaurant appropriately perched on the end of a very long pier. It was a bit loud, but I had some interesting discussions with my fellow attendees and there was a lovely patio where we were able to get some fresh air and take pictures of the bay.

On Thursday a whole bunch of us enjoyed a talk about a Linux-driven Microwave (video) by David Tulloh. What I liked most about his talk was that while he definitely was giving a talk about tinkering with a microwave to give it more features and make it more accessible, he was also “encouraging other people to do crazy things.” Hack a microwave, hack all kinds of devices and change the world! Manufacturing one-off costs are coming down…

In the afternoon I gave my own talk, Open Source Tools for Distributed Systems Administration (video, slides). I was a bit worried that attendance wouldn’t be good because of who I was scheduled against, but I was mistaken, the room was quite full! After the talk I was able to chat with some folks who are also working on distributed systems teams, and with someone from another major project who was seeking to put more of their infrastructure work into open source. In all, a very effective gathering. Plus, my colleague Masayuki Igawa took a great photo during the talk!

Photo by Masayuki Igawa (source)

The afternoon continued with a talk by Rikki Endsley on Speaking their language: How to write for technical and non-technical audiences (video). Helpfully, she wrote an article on the topic so I didn’t need to take notes! The talk walked through various audiences, lay, managerial and experts and gave examples of how to craft posting for each. The announcement of a development change, for instance, will look very different when presenting it to existing developers than it may look to newcomers (perhaps “X process changed, here’s how” vs. “dev process made easier for new contributors!”), and completely differently when you’re approaching a media outlet to provide coverage for a change in your project. The article dives deep into her key points, but I will say that she delivered the talk with such humor that it was fun to learn directly from hearing her speak on the topic.

Also got my picture with Rikki! (source)

Thursday night was the Speakers’ dinner, which took place at a lovely little restaurant about 15 minutes from the venue via bus. I’m shy, so it’s always a bit intimidating to rub shoulders with some of the high profile speakers that they have at LCA,. Helpfully, I’m terrible with names, so I managed to chat away with a few people and not realize that they are A Big Deal until later. Hah! So the dinner was nice, but having been a long week I was somewhat thankful when the buses came at 10PM to bring us back.

Friday began with my favorite keynote of the conference! It was by Genevieve Bell (video), an Intel fellow with a background in cultural anthropology. Like all of my favorite talks, hers was full of humor and wit, particularly around the fact that she’s an anthropologist who was hired to work for a major technology company without much idea of what that would mean. In reality, her job turned out to be explaining humans to engineers and technologists, and using their combined insight to explore potential future innovations. Her insights were fascinating! A key point was that traditional “future predictions” tend to be a bit near-sighted and very rooted in problems of the present. In reality our present is “messy and myriad” and that technology and society are complicated topics, particularly when taken together. Her expertise brought insight to human behavior that helps engineers realize that while devices work better when connected, humans work better while disconnected (to the point of seeking “disconnection” from the internet on our vacations and weekends).

Additionally, many devices and technologies aim to provide a “seamless” experience, but that humans actually prefer seamful interactions so we can split up our lives into contexts. Finally, she spent a fair amount of time talking about our lives in the world of Internet of Things, and how some serious rules will need to be put in place to make us feel safe and supported by our devices rather than vulnerable and spied upon. Ultimately, technology has to be designed with the human element in mind, and her plea to us, as the architects of the future, is to be optimistic about the future and make sure we’re getting it right.

After her talk I now believe every technology company should have a staff cultural anthropologist.

Intel Fellow and cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell

My day continued with a talk by Andrew Tridgell on Helicopters and rocket-planes (video), one on Copyleft For the Next Decade: A Comprehensive Plan (video) by Bradley Kuhn, a talk by Matthew Garrett on Troublesome Privacy Measures: using TPMs to protect users (video) and an interesting dive into handling secret data with Tollef Fog Heen’s talk on secretd – another take on securely storing credentials (video).

With that, the conference came to a close with a closing session that included raffle prizes, thanks to everyone and the hand-off to the team running LCA 2017 in Hobart next year.

I went to more talks than highlighted in this post, but with a whole week of conferencing it would have been a lot to cover. I also am typically not the biggest fan of the “hallway track” (introvert, shy) and long breaks, but I knew enough people at this conference to find people to spend time with during breaks and meals. I could also get a bit of work done during the longer breaks without skipping too many sessions and it easy to switch rooms between sessions without disruption. Plus, all the room moderators I saw did an excellent job of keeping things on schedule.

Huge thanks to all the organizers and everyone who made me feel so welcome this year. It was a wonderful experience and I hope to do it again next year!

More photos from the conference and beautiful Geelong here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157664277057411

Filed under: events, tech, travel

Kangaroos, Penguins, a Koala and a Platypus

Wednesday, Feb 10th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On the evening of January 27th I began my journey to visit Australia for the second time in my life. My first visit to the land down under was in 2014 when I spoke at and attended my first linux.conf.au in Perth. Perth was beautiful, in addition to the conference (which I wrote about here, here and here), I took some time to see the beach and visit the zoo during my tourist adventures.

This time I was headed for Melbourne to once again attend and speak at linux.conf.au, this time in the port city of Geelong. I arrived the morning of Friday the 29th to spend a couple days adjusting to the time zone and visiting some animals. However, I was surprised at the unexpected discovery of something else I love in Melbourne: historic street cars. Called trams there, they run a free City Circle Tram that uses the historic cars! There’s even a The Colonial Tramcar Restaurant which allows you to dine inside one as you make your way along the city rails. Unfortunately my trip was not long enough to ride in a tram or enjoy a meal, but this alone puts Melbourne right on my list of cities to visit again.

At the Perth Zoo I got my first glimpse of a wombat (they are BIG!) and enjoyed walking through an enclosure where the kangaroos roamed freely. This time I had some more animals on my checklist, and wanted to get a bit closer to some others. After checking into my hotel in Melbourne, I went straight to the Melbourne Zoo.

I love zoos. I’ve visited zoos in countries all over the world. But there’s something special you should know about the Melbourne Zoo: they have a platypus. Everything I’ve read indicate that they don’t do very well in captivity and captive breeding is very rare. As a result, no zoos outside of Australia have platypuses, so if I wanted to see one it had to be in Australia. I bought my zoo ticket and immediately asked “where can I find the platypus?” With that, I got to see a platypus! They platypus was swimming in it’s enclosure and I wasn’t able to get a photo of it (moving too fast), but I did get a lovely video. They are funny creatures, and very cute!

The rest of the zoo was very nice. I didn’t see everything, but I spent a couple hours visiting the local animals and checking out some of their bigger exhibits. I almost skipped their seals (seals live at home!) and penguins (I’d see wild ones the next day!), but I’m glad I didn’t since it was a very nice setup. Plus, I wasn’t able to take pictures of the wild fairy penguins as to not disturb them in their natural habitat, but the ones at the zoo were fine.

I also got a video of the penguins!

More photos from the Melbourne Zoo here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157664216488166

When I got into a cab to return to my hotel it began to rain. I was able to pick up an early dinner and spend the evening catching up on some work and getting to bed early.

Saturday was animal tour day! I booked a AAT Kings full day Phillip Island – Penguins, Kangaroos & Koalas tour that had a tour bus picking me up right at my hotel. I selected the Viewing Platform Upgrade and it was well worth it.

Philip Island is about two hours from Melbourne, and it’s where the penguins live. They come out onto the beach at sunset and all rush back to their homes. The rest of the tour was a series of activities leading up to this grand event, beginning with a stop at MARU Koala & Animal Park. We were in the bus for nearly two hours to get to the small park, during which the tour guide told us about the history of Melbourne and about the penguins we’d see later in the evening.

The tour included entrance fees, but I paid an extra $20 to pet a koala and get some food for the kangaroos and other animals. First up, koala! The koala I got to pet was an active critter. It sat still during my photo, but between people it could be seen reaching toward the keepers to get back the stem of eucalyptus that it got to munch on during the tourist photos. It was fun to learn that instead of being really soft like they look, their fur feels a lot more like wool.

The rest of my time at the park was spent with the kangaroos. Not only are they just hopping around for everyone to see like in the Perth Zoo, when you have a container of food you get to feed them! And pet them! In case you’re wondering, it’s one of the best things ever. They’re all very used to being around human tourists all day, and when you lay your hand flat as instructed to have them eat from your hand they don’t bite.

I got to feed and pet lots of kangaroos!

The rest of the afternoon was spent visiting a couple scenic outlooks and a beach before stopping for dinner in the town of Cowes on Philip Island where I enjoyed a lovely fish dinner with a stunning view at Harry’s on the Esplanade. The weather was so nice!

Selfies were made for the solo tourist

As we approached the “skinny tip of the island” the tour guide told us a bit about the history of the island and the nature preserve where the penguins live. The area had once been heavily populated with vacation homes, but with the accidental introduction of foxes, which kill penguins, and increased human population, the island quickly saw their penguin (and other local wildlife populations) drop. We learned that a program was put in place to buy back all the private property and turn it into a preserve, and work was also done to rid the island of foxes. The program seems to have worked, the preserve no longer has private homes and we saw dozens of wild wallabies as well as some of the large native geese that were also targets of the foxes. Most exciting for me was that the penguin population was preserved for us to enjoy.

As the bus made its way through the park, we could see little penguin homes throughout the landscape. Some were natural holes built by the penguins, and others were man-made houses put in place when they tore down a private home and discovered penguins had been using it for a burrow and required some kind of replacement. The hills were also covered in deep trails that we learned were little penguin highways, used for centuries (millennia?) for the little penguins to make their way from the ocean where they hunted throughout the day, to their nests where they spend the nights. The bus then stopped at the top of a hill that looked down onto the beach where we’d spend the evening watching the penguins come ashore. I took the picture from inside the bus, but if you look closely at this picture you see the big rows of stadium seating, and then to the left, and closer, there are some benches that are curvy. The stadium like seating was general admission and the curvy ones are the viewing platform upgrade I paid for.

The penguins come ashore when it gets dark (just before 9PM while I was there), so we had about an hour before then to visit the gift shop and get settled in to our seats. I took the opportunity to send post cards to my family, featuring penguins and sent out right there from the island. I also picked up a blanket, because in spite of the warm day and my rain jacket, the wind had picked up to make it a bit chilly and it was threatening rain by the time dusk came around.

It was then time for the penguins. With the viewing platform upgrade the penguins were still a bit far when they came out of the ocean, but we got a nice view of them as they approached up the beach, walking right past our seating area! They come out of the ocean in big clumps of a couple dozen, so each time we saw another grouping the human crowd would pipe up and notice. I think for the general admission it would be a lot harder to see them come up on the beach. The rest of the penguin parade is fun for everyone though, they waddle and scuttle up the island to their little homes, and they pass all the trails, regardless of where you were seated. Along the pathways the penguins get so close to you that you could reach out and touch them (of course, you don’t!). Photos are strictly prohibited since the risk is too high that someone would accidentally use a flash and disturb them, but it was kind of refreshing to just soak in the time with the penguins without a camera/phone. All told, I understand there are nearly 1,500 penguins each night that come out of the ocean at that spot.

The hills then come alive with penguin noises as they enjoy their evenings, chatting away and settling in with their chicks. Apparently this parade lasts well into the night, though most of them do come out of the ocean during the hour or so that I spent there with the tour group. At 10PM it was time to meet back at the bus to take us back to Melbourne. The timing was very good, about 10 minutes after getting in the bus it started raining. We got to watch the film Oddball on our journey home, about another island of penguins in Victoria that was at risk from foxes but were saved.

In all, the day was pretty overwhelming for me. In a good way. Petting some of these incredibly cute Australian animals! Seeing adorable penguins in the wild! A day that I’ll cherish for a lifetime.

More photos from the tour here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157664216521696

The next day it was time to take a train to Geelong for the Linux conference. An event with a whole different type of penguins!

Filed under: animals, travel

SCALE14x

Sunday, Jan 31st, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I have already written about the UbuCon Summit and Ubuntu booth at SCALE14x (14th annual Southern California Linux Expo), but the conference went far beyond Ubuntu for me!

First of all, I love this new venue. SCALE had previously been held at hotels near LAX, with all the ones I’d attended being at the Hilton LAX. It was a fine venue itself, but the conference was clearly outgrowing it even when I last attended in 2014 and there weren’t many food options around, particularly if you wanted a more formal meal. The Pasadena Convention Center was the opposite of this. Lots of space, lots of great food of all kinds and price ranges within walking distance! A whole plaza across from the venue made a quick lunch at a nice place quite doable.

It’s also worth mentioning that with over 3000 attendees this year, the conference has matured well. My first SCALE was 9x back in 2011, and with every year the growth and professionalism has continued, but without losing the feel of a community-run, regional conference that I love so much. Even the expo hall has continued to show a strong contingent of open source project and organization booths among the flashy company-driven booths, but even the company booths weren’t over done. Kudos to the SCALE crew for their work and efforts that make SCALE continue to be one of my favorite open source conferences.

As for the conference itself, MJ and I were both able to attend for work, which was a nice change for us. Plus, given how much conference travel I’ve done on my own, it’s nice to travel and enjoy an event together.

Thursday was taken up pretty much exclusively by the UbuCon Summit, but Friday we started to transition into more general conference activities. The first conference-wide keynote was on Friday morning with Cory Doctorow presenting No Matter Who’s Winning the War on General Purpose Computing, You’re Losing where he explored security and Digital rights management (DRM) in the exploding field of the Internet of Things. His premise was that we did largely win the open source vs. proprietary battle, but now we’re in a whole different space where DRM are now threatening our safety and stifling innovation. Security vulnerabilities in devices are going undisclosed when discovered by third parties under threat of prosecution for violating DRM-focused laws which have popped up worldwide. Depending on the device, this fear of disclosure could actually result in vulnerabilities causing physical harm to someone if compromised in a malicious way. He also dove into more dystopian future where smart devices are given away for free/cheap but then are phoning home and can be controlled remotely by an entity that doesn’t have your personal best interest in mind. The talk certainly gave me a lot to think about. He concluded by presenting the Apollo 1201 Project “a mission to eradicate DRM in our lifetime” that he’s working on at the EFF, article here.

Later that morning I made my way over to the DevOpsDayLA track to present on Open Source tools for distributed systems administration. Unfortunately, the projectors in the room weren’t working. Thankfully my slides were not essential to the talk, so even though I did feel a bit unsettled to present without slides, I made it through. People even said nice things afterwards, so I think it went pretty well in spite of the technology snafu. The slides that should have been seen during the talk are available here (PDF) and since I am always asked, I do maintain a list of other open source infras. Thanks to @scalexphotos for capturing a photo during my talk.

In the afternoon I spent some time in the expo hall, where I was able to see many more familiar faces! Again, the community booths are the major draw for me, so it was great visiting with participants of projects and groups there. It was nice to swing by the Ubuntu booth to see how polished everything was looking. I also got to see Emma of System76, who I hadn’t seen in quite some time.

Friday evening had a series of Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions. I was able to make my way over to one on OpenStack before wrapping up my evening.

Saturday morning began with a welcome from Pasadena City Council member Andy Wilson who was enthusiastic about SCALE14x coming to Pasadena and quickly dove into his technical projects and the work being done in Pasadena around tech. I love this trend of city officials welcoming open source conferences to their area, it means a lot that the work we’re doing is being taken seriously by the cities we’re in. Then it moved into a keynote by Mark Shuttleworth on Open Source in the World of App Stores which had many similarities to his talk at the UbuCon Summit, but was targeted more generally about how distributions can help keep pace today’s computing that deploys “at the speed of git.”

I then went to Akkana Peck’s talk on Stupid GIMP tricks (and smart ones, too). It was a very visual talk, so I’m struggling to do it justice in written form, but she demonstrated various tools for photo editing in GIMP that I knew nothing about, I learned a lot. She concluded by talking about the features that came out in the 2.8 release and then the features planned and being worked on in the upcoming 2.9 release. Video of the talk here In the afternoon I attended a Kubernetes talk, noting quickly that the containers track was pretty packed throughout the conference.

Akkana Peck on GIMP

Between “hallway track” chats about everything from the Ubuntu project to the OpenStack project infrastructure tooling, Saturday afternoon also gave me the opportunity to do a bit more wandering through the expo hall. I visited my colleagues at the HPE booth and was able to see their cloud in a box. It was amusing to see the suitcase version and the Ubuntu booth with an Orange box. Putting OpenStack clouds in a single demonstration deployment for a conference is a popular thing!

My last talk of the day was by OpenStack Magnum Project Technical Lead Adrian Otto on Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos: Compared. He walked us through some of the basics of Magnum first, then dove into each technology. Docker Swarm is good for simple tooling that you’re comfortable with and doing exactly what you tell it (imperative) and have 100s-1000s machines in the cluster. Kubernetes is more declarative (you tell it what you want, it figures out how to do it) and currently has some scaling concerns that make it better suited for a cluster of up to 200 nodes. Mesos is a more complicated system that he recommended using if you have a dedicated infrastructure team and can effectively scale to over 10k nodes. Video of the talk here

Sunday began with a keynote by Sarah Sharp on Improving Diversity with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. She spoke about diversity across various angles, from income and internet bandwidth restrictions to gender and race, and the intersection of these things. There are many things that open source projects assume: unlimited ability to download software, ability for contributors to have uninterrupted “deep hack mode” time, access to fast systems to do development on. These assumptions fall apart when a contributor is paying for the bandwidth they use, are a caretaker who doesn’t have long periods without interruptions or a new system that they have access to. Additionally, there are opportunities that are simply denied to many genders, as studies have show that mothers and daughters don’t have as many opportunities or as much access to technology as the fathers and sons in their household. She also explored safety in a community, demonstrating how even a single sexist or racist contributor can single-handedly destroy diversity for your project by driving away potential contributors. Having a well-written code of conduct with a clear enforcement plan is also important and cited resources for organizations and people who could help you with that, warning that you shouldn’t roll your own. She concluded by asking audience members to recognize the problem and take action in their communities to help improve diversity. Her excellent slides (with notes) are here and a video of the talk here.

I then made my way to the Sysadmin track to see Jonah Horowitz and Albert Tobey on From Sys Admin to Netflix SRE. First off, their slides were hilarious. Lots of 80s references to things that were out-dated as they made their way through how they’re doing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at Netflix and inside their CORE (Cloud Operations Reliability Engineering) team. In their work, they’ve moved past configuration management, preferring to deploy baked AMIs (essentially, golden images). They also don’t see themselves as “running applications for the developers” and instead empower developers to do their own releases and application-level monitoring. In this new world of managing fleets of servers rather than individual systems, they’ve worked to develop a blameless culture where they do postmortems so that anything that is found to be done manually or otherwise error-prone can be fixed so the issue doesn’t happen again. The also shared the open source tooling that they use to bypass traditional monitoring systems and provide SREs with a high level view of how their system is working, noting that no one in the organization “knows everything” about the infrastructure. This tooling includes Spinnaker, Atlas and Vector, along with their well-known Simian Army which services within Netflix must run (unless they have a good reason not to) to test tolerance of random instance failures. Video of the talk can be found here and slide here.

After lunch I made my way to A fresh look at SELinux… by Daniel Walsh. I’d seen him speak on SELinux before, and found his talk valuable then too. This time I was particularly interested in how it’s progressed in RHEL7/Centos7, like the new rules for a file type, such as knowing what permissions /home/user/.ssh should have and having an semanage command to set those permissions to that default instead of doing it manually. I also learned about semanage -e (equivalency) to copy permissions from one place to another and the new mv -Z which moves things while retaining the SELinux properties. Finally, I somehow didn’t have a good grasp on improvements to the man pages, doing things like `man httpd_selinux` works and is very helpful! I was also amused to learn a bout stopdisablingselinux.com (especially since our team does not turn it off, and that took some work on my part!). In closing, there’s also an SELinux Coloring Book (which I’ve written about before), and though I didn’t get to the session in time to get one, MJ picked me up on in the expo hall. Video of the talk here

With that, we were at the last talk of the conference. I went over to Dustin Kirkland’s talk on “adapt install [anything]” on your Ubuntu LTS server/desktop! Adapt is a wrapper around LXD containers that allows you to locally (unprivileged user) install versions of Ubuntu software from various versions and run it locally on your system. The script handles provisioning the container, many default settings and keeping it updated automatically, so you really can “adapt install” and run a series of adapt commands to interact with it as if it were prepared locally. It all reminded me of the pile of chroot-building scripts I had back when I was doing Debian packaging, but more polished than mine ever were! He wrote a blog post following up his talk here: adapt install [anything] which includes a link to his slides. Video from the talk here (link at 4 hours 42 minutes).

With the conference complete, it was sad to leave, but I had an evening flight out of Burbank. Amusingly, even my flight was full of SCALE folks, so there were some fun chats in the boarding area before our departure.

Huge thanks to everyone who made SCALE possible, I’m looking forward to next year!

More photos from SCALE14x here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157663821501532

Filed under: events, tech, travel

Ubuntu at SCALE14x

Saturday, Jan 30th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I spent a long weekend in Pasadena from January 21-24th to participate in the 14th Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE14x). As I mentioned previously, a major part of my attendance was focused on the Ubuntu-related activities. Wednesday evening I joined a whole crowd of my Ubuntu friends at a pre-UbuCon meet-and-greet at a wine bar (all ages were welcome) near the venue.

It was at this meet-and-greet where I first got to see several folks I hadn’t seen since the last Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) back in Copenhagen in 2012. Others I had seen recently at other open source conferences and still more I was meeting for the first time, amazing contributors to our community who I’d only had the opportunity to get to know online. It was at that event that the excitement and energy I used to get from UDS came rushing back to me. I knew this was going to be a great event.

The official start of this first UbuCon Summit began Thursday morning. I arrived bright and early to say hello to everyone, and finally got to meet Scarlett Clark of the Kubuntu development team. If you aren’t familiar with her blog and are interested in the latest updates to Kubuntu, I highly recommend it. She’s also one of the newly elected members of the Ubuntu Community Council.

Me and Scarlett Clark

After morning introductions, we filed into the ballroom where the keynote and plenaries would take place. It was the biggest ballroom of the conference venue! The SCALE crew really came through with support of this event, it was quite impressive. Plus, the room was quite full for the opening and Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote, particularly when you consider that it was a Thursday morning. Richard Gaskin and Nathan Haines, familiar names to anyone who has been to previous UbuCon events at SCALE, opened the conference with a welcome and details about how the event had grown this year. Logistics and other details were handled now too, and then they quickly went through how the event would work, with a keynote, series of plenaries and then split User and Developer tracks in the afternoon. They concluded by thanking sponsors and various volunteers and Canonical staff who made the UbuCon Summit a reality.

UbuCon Summit introduction by Richard Gaskin and Nathan Haines

The welcome, Mark’s keynote and the morning plenaries are available on YouTube, starting here and continuing here.

Mark’s keynote began by acknowledging the technical and preference diversity in our community, from desktop environments to devices. He then reflected upon his own history in Linux and open source, starting in university when he first installed Linux from a pile of floppies. It’s been an interesting progression to see where things were twenty years ago, and how many of the major tech headlines today are driven by Linux and Ubuntu, from advancements in cloud technology to self-driving cars. He continued by talking about success on a variety of platforms, from the tiny Raspberry Pi 2 to supercomputers and the cloud, Ubuntu has really made it.

With this success story, he leapt into the theme of the rest of his talk: “Great, let’s change.” He dove into the idea that today’s complex, multi-system infrastructure software is “too big for apt-get” as you consider relationships and dependencies between services. Juju is what he called “apt-get for the cloud/cluster” and explained how LXD, the next evolution of LXC running as a daemon, gives developers the ability to run a series of containers to test deployments of some of these complex systems. This means that just like the developers and systems engineers of the 90s and 00s were able to use open source software to deploy demonstrations of standalone software on our laptops, containers allow the students of today to deploy complex systems locally.

He then talked about Snappy, the new software packaging tooling. His premise was that even a six month release cycle is too long as many people are continuously delivering software from sources like GitHub. Many places have a solid foundation of packages we rely upon and then a handful of newer tools that can be packaged quickly in Snappy rather than going through the traditional Debian Packaging route, which is considerably more complicated. It was interesting to listen to this, as a former Debian package maintainer myself I always wanted to believe that we could teach everyone to do software packaging. However, seeing these efforts play out the community work with app developers it became clear between their reluctance and the backlog felt by the App Review Board, it really wasn’t working. Snappy moves us away from PyPI, PPAs and such into an easier, but still packaged and managed, way to handle software on our systems. It’ll be fascinating to see how this goes.

Mark Shuttleworth on Snappy

He concluded by talking about the popular Internet of Things (IoT) and how Ubuntu Core with Snappy is so important here. DJI, “the market leader in easy-to-fly drones and aerial photography systems,” now offers an Ubuntu-driven drone. The Open Source Robotics Institute uses Ubuntu. GE is designing smart kitchen appliances powered by Ubuntu and many (all?) of the self-driving cars known about use Ubuntu somewhere inside them. There was also a business model here, a company that produces the hardware and a minimal features set that comes with it, also sells a more advanced version, and then industry-expert third parties who further build upon it to sell industry-specific software.

After Mark’s talk there were a series of plenaries that took place in the same room.

First up was Sergio Schvezov who followed on Mark’s keynote nicely as he gave a demo of Snapcraft, the tool used to turn software into a .snap package for Ubuntu Core. Next up was Jorge Castro who gave a great talk about the state of Gaming on Ubuntu, which he said was “Not bad.” Having just had this discussion with my sister, the timing was great for me. On the day of his talk, there were 1,516 games on Steam that would natively run on Linux, a nice selection of which are modern games that are new and exciting across multiple platforms today. He acknowledged the pre-made Steam Boxes but also made the case for homebrewed Steam systems with graphics card recommendations, explaining that Intel did fine, AMD is still lagging behind high performance with their open source drivers and giving several models of NVidia cards today that do very well (from low to high quality, and cost: 750Ti, 950, 960, 970, 980, 980Ti). He also passed around a controller that works with Linux to the audience. He concluded by talking about some issues remaining with Linux Gaming, including regressions in drivers that cause degraded performance, the general performance gap when compared to some other gaming systems and the remaining stigma that there are “no games” on Linux, which talks like this are seeking to reverse. Plenaries continued with Didier Roche introducing Ubuntu Make, a project which makes creating a developer platform out of Ubuntu with several SDKs much easier so that developers reduce the bootstrapping time. His blog has a lot of great posts on the tooling. The last talk of the morning was by Scarlett Clark, who gave us a quick update on Kubuntu Development, explaining that the team had recently joined forces with KDE packagers in Debian to more effectively share resources in their work.

It was then time for group photo! Which included my xerus, and where I had a nice chat (and selfie!) with Carla Sella as we settled in for the picture.

Me and Carla Sella

In the afternoon I attended the User track, starting off with Nathan Haines on The Future of Ubuntu. In this talk he talked about what convergence of devices meant for Ubuntu and warded off concerns that the work on the phone was done in isolation and wouldn’t help the traditional (desktop, server) Ubuntu products. With Ubuntu Core and Snappy, he explained, all the work done on phones is being rolled back into progress made on the other systems, and even IoT devices, that will use them in the future. Following Nathan was the Ubuntu Redux talk by Jono Bacon. His talk could largely be divided into two parts: History of Ubuntu and how we got here, and 5 recommendations for the Ubuntu community. He had lots of great stories and photos, including one of a very young Mark, and moved right along to today with Unity 8 and the convergence story. His 5 recommendations were interesting, so I’ll repeat them here:

Focus on core opportunities. Ubuntu can run anywhere, but should it? We have finite resources, focus efforts accordingly.
Rethink what community in Ubuntu is. We didn’t always have Juju charmers and app developers, but they are now a major part of our community. Understand that our community has changed and adjust our vision as to where we can find new contributors.
Get together more in person. The Ubuntu Online Summit works for technical work, but we’ve missed out on the human component. In person interactions are not just a “nice to have” in communities, they’re essential.
Reduce ambiguity. In a trend that would continue in our leadership panel the next day, some folks (including Jono) argue that there is still ambiguity around Intellectual Propoerty and licensing in the Ubuntu community (Mark disagrees).
Understand people who are not us.

Nathan Haines on The Future of Ubuntu

The next presentation was my own, on Building a career with Ubuntu and FOSS where I drew upon examples in my own career and that of others I’ve worked with in the Ubuntu community to share recommendations for folks looking to contribute to Ubuntu and FOSS as a tool to develop skills and tools for their career. Slides here (PDF). David Planella on The Ubuntu phone and the road to convergence followed my talk. He walked audience members through the launch plan for the phone, going through the device launch with BQ for Ubuntu enthusiasts, the second phase for “innovators and early adopters” where they released the Meizu devices in Europe and China and went on to explain how they’re tackling phase three: general customer availability. He talked about the Ubuntu Phone Insiders group of 30 early access individuals who came from a diverse crowd to provide early feedback and share details (via blog posts, social media) to others. He then gave a tour of the phones themselves, including how scopes (“like mini search engines on your phone”) change how people interact with their device. He concluded with a note about the availability of the SDK for phones available at developer.ubuntu.com, and that they’re working to make it easy for developers to upload and distribute their applications.

Video from the User track can be found here. The Developer track was also happening, video for that can be found here. If you’re scanning through these to find a specific talk, note that each is 1 hour long.

Presentations for the first day concluded with a Q&A with Richard Gaskin and Nathan Haines back in the main ballroom. Then it was off to the Thursday evening drinks and appetizers at Porto Alegre Churrascaria! Once again, a great opportunity to catch up with friends old and new in the community. It was great running into Amber Graner and getting to talk about our respective paid roles these days, and even touched upon key things we worked on in the Ubuntu community that helped us get there.

The UbuCon Summit activities continued after a SCALE keynote with an Ubuntu Leadership panel which I participated in along with Oliver Ries, David Planella, Daniel Holbach, Michael Hall, Nathan Haines and JosÃ© Antonio Rey with Jono Bacon as a moderator. Jono had prepared a great set of questions, exploring the strengths and weaknesses in our community, things we’re excited about and eager to work on and more. We also took questions from the audience. Video for this panel and the plenaries that followed, which I had to miss in order to give a talk elsewhere, are available here. The link takes you to 1hr 50min in, where the Leadership panel begins.

The afternoon took us off into unconference mode, which allowed us to direct our own conference setup. Due to aforementioned talk I was giving elsewhere, I wasn’t able to participate in scheduling, but I did attend a couple sessions in the afternoon. First was proposed by Brendan Perrine where we talked about strategies for keeping the Ubuntu documentation up to date, and also talked about the status of the Community Help wiki, which has been locked down due to spam for nearly a month(!). I then joined cm-t arudy to chat about an idea the French team is floating around to have people quickly share stories and photos about Ubuntu in some kind of community forum. The conversation was a bit tool-heavy, but everyone was also conscious of how it would need to be moderated. I hope I see something come of this, it sounds like a great project.

With the UbuCon Summit coming to a close, the booth was the next great task for the team. I couldn’t make time to participate this year, but the booth featured lots of great goodies and a fleet of contributors working the booth who were doing a fantastic job of talking to people as the crowds continued to flow through each day.

Huge thanks to everyone who spent months preparing for the UbuCon Summit and booth on the SCALE14x expo hall. It was a really amazing event that I was proud to be a part of. I’m already looking forward to the next one!

Finally, I took responsibility for the @ubuntu_us_ca Twitter account throughout the weekend. It was the first time I’ve done such a comprehensive live-tweeting of an event from a team/project account. I recommend a browse through the tweets if you’re interested in hearing more from other great people live-tweeting the event. It was a lot of fun, but also surprisingly exhausting!

More photos from my time at SCALE14x (including lots of Ubuntu ones!) here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157663821501532

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

December events and a pair of tapestries

Tuesday, Jan 19th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

In my last post I talked some about the early December tourist stuff that I did. I also partook in several events that gave me a nice, fun distraction when I was looking for some down time after work and book writing.

It’s no secret that I like good food, so when a spot opened up with some friends to check out Lazy Bear here in San Francisco, I was pretty eager to go. They had two seatings per night and everyone sits together at long tables and was served each course at the same time. We had to skip the pork selections, but I was happy with the substitutions they provided for us. They also gave us pencils and notebooks to take notes about the dishes. An overall excellent dinner.

On December 2nd MJ and I met up with my friend Amanda to see Randall Monroe of XKCD fame talk about his new book, Thing Explainer. In this book he talks about complicated concepts using only the 1000 most common words. He shared stories about the process of writing the book and some things he had a lot of fun with. It was particularly amusing to hear how much he used the word “bag” when explaining the human body. We waited around pretty late for what ended up being some marathon signing, huge thanks to him for staying around so we could get our copy signed!

The very next day I scored a ticket to a local Geek Girl Dinner here in SOMA. I’d only been to one before, and going alone always means I’m a bit on edge nervousness-wise. But it was a Star Wars themed dinner and I do enjoy hearing stories from other women in tech, so I donned my R2-D2 hoodie and made my way over. Turns out, not many people were there to celebrate Star Wars, but they did have R2-D2 cupcakes and some cardboard cutouts of the new characters, so they pulled it off. The highlight of the night for me was a technical career panel of women who were able to talk about their varied entry points into tech. As someone with a non-traditional background myself, it’s always inspiring to hear from other women who made major career changes after being inspired by technology in some way or another.

Twilio tech careers panel

I mentioned in an earlier post that our friend Danita was in town recently. The evening she arrived I was neck deep in book work… and the tail end of the Bring Back MST3K Kickstarter campaign. They hosted five hours of a telethon-style variety show with magicians, musicians, comedians and various cameos by past and future MST3K actors, writers and robots. I’m pretty excited about this reboot, MST3K was an oddly important show when I was a youth. A game based on riffing is what first brought me on to an IRC network and introduced me to a whole host of people who made major impacts in my life. We all loved MST3K. Today I still enjoy Rifftrax (including the live show I went to last week). In spite of technical difficulties it was fun to prop up my tablet while working and watch the stream of their final fundraising push as they broke the record for biggest TV kickstarter campaign ever. Congratulations everyone, I am delighted to have donated to the campaign and look forward to the new episodes!

Hanukkah was also in December. Unfortunately MJ had to be out of town for the first few days, so we did a Google Hangout video call each evening. I set the tablet up on the counter as I lit the lights. I also took pictures each night so I could share the experience further.

At the end of the month MJ had a couple of his cousins in town to visit over the Christmas holiday. I didn’t take much time off, but I did tag along on select adventures, enjoying several great meals together and snapping a bunch of tourist photos of the Golden Gate Bridge (album here). We also made our way to Pier 39 one afternoon to visit sea lions and MJ and I made a detour to the Aquarium of the Bay while the girls did some shopping. The octopus and sea otters were particularly lively that evening (album here) and I snapped a couple videos: Giant Pacific Octopus and River otters going away for the night. Gotta love the winter clothes the human family was wearing in the otter video, we had a brisk December!

To conclude, I’ll leave you with a pair of Peruvian tapestries that we picked up in Cusco in August. Peru was one of my favorite adventures to date, and it’s nice that we were able to bring home some woven keepsakes from the Center for Traditional Textiles. We bundled them together in a carry on to bring them home and then brought them to our local framing shop and art gallery for framing. It took a few months, but I think it was worth it, they did a very nice job.

And now that I’ve taken a breather, it’s time to pack for SCALE14x, which we’re leaving for tomorrow morning. I also need to see if I can tie off some loose ends with this chapter I’m working on before we go.

Filed under: events, life, san francisco

Local tourist: A mansion, some wine and the 49ers

Sunday, Jan 17th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Some will say that there are tourists and there are travelers. The distinction tends to be that tourists visit the common places and take selfies, while travelers wander off the beaten path and take a more peaceful and thoughtful approach to enjoying their chosen destination.

I’m a happy tourist. Even when I’m at home.

Back in December our friend Danita was in town and I took advantage of this fact by going full on Bay Area tourist with her.

Our first adventure was going down to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. Built continuously for decades by the widow Sarah Winchester (of Winchester rifle fame), the house is a maze of uneven floors, staircases that go nowhere and doors that could drop you a story or two if you don’t watch when stepping through them. It’s said that the spiritualist movement heavily influenced Mrs. Winchester’s decisions, from moving to California after her husband’s death to the need to continuously be doing construction. She had a private seance room and after the house survived the 1906 earthquake that destroyed the tower that used to be a key feature in the house, she followed spirit-driven guidance. This caused her to stop work on the main, highly decorated front part of the house and only work on the back half, not even fixing up the sections damaged in the earthquake.

A “door to nowhere” in the Winchester House

There certainly are bits about this place that remind me of a tourist trap, including the massive gift shop and ghost stories. But it wasn’t shopping, spiritualism or ghosts that brought me here. As an armchair history and documentary geek, I’ve known about the Winchester House for years. When I moved to the bay area almost six years ago, it immediately went on my “to visit” list. The beautiful Victorian architecture, the oddity that was how she built it and her interest in the latest turn of the 20th century innovations in the house are what interested me. She had three elevators in the house, of varying types as the technology was developed, providing a fascinating snapshot into approximately 20 years of early elevator innovation history. She was an early adopter of electricity, and there were various types of the latest time and energy-saving gadgets and tools that were installed to help her staff get their work done. Plus, in addition to having a car (with a chauffeur, obviously), the garage where it was kept had a car wash apparatus built in! We went on a behind-the-scenes tour to visit many of these things. The estate originally covered many acres, allowing for a large fruit orchard and fruit was actually processed on site, so we got to see the massive on-site evaporator used for preparing the fruit for distribution.

Fruit evaporator at Winchester House

When Mrs. Winchester died, her belongings were carefully distributed among her heirs, but no arrangements were made for the house. Instead, curious neighbors got together and made sure it was saved from demolition, effectively turning it into a tourist attraction just a few years after her passing. Still privately-owned, today it’s listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

Photos weren’t allowed inside the house, but I snapped away outside: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157660011104133

My next round of local touristing took us north, to Sonoma county for some wine tasting! We’re a member of a winery up there, so we had our shipment to pick up too, but it’s also always fun bringing our friends to our favorite stops in wine country. We started at Imagery Winery where we picked up our wine and enjoyed tastings of several of their sweeter wines, including their port. From there we picked up fresh sandwiches at a deli and grocery store before making our way to Benziger Family Winery, where MJ and I got engaged back in 2011.s We ate lunch before the rain began and then went inside to do some more wine tastings. Thankfully, the weather cleared up before our 3PM tour, where we got to see the vinyards, their processing area and inside the wine caves. It was cold though, in the 40s with a stiff breeze throughout the day. Our adventure concluded with a stop at Jacuzzi Family Vineyards where we tasted some olive oils, vinegar and mustard.

More photos from our Sonoma adventure here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157661706977879

In slightly less tourism and more local experience, the last adventure I went on with Danita was a trip down the bay (took Amtrak) to the brand new NFL stadium for the 49ers on Sunday, December 20th. I’m not into football, but going to an NFL game was something I wanted to experience, particularly since this brand new stadium is the one the Super Bowl will be played in a few weeks from now. Nice experience to have! The forecast called for rain, but we lucked out and it was merely cold (40s and 50s), I picked up a winter hat there at the stadium and they appeared to be doing brisk business for us Californians who are not accustomed to the chilly weather. We got to our seats before all the pre-game activities began, of which there are many, I had no idea the kind of pomp that accompanies a football game! We had really nice seats right next to the field, so close that Danita was able to find us upon watching game footage later:

The game itself? I am still no football fan. As someone who doesn’t watch much, I’ll admit that it was a bit hard for me to follow. Thankfully Danita is a big fan so she was able to explain things to me when I had questions. And regardless of the sport, it is fun to be piled into a stadium with fans. Hot dogs and pretzels, cheering and excitement, all good for the human spirit. I also found the cheerleaders to be a lot of fun, for all the stopping and starting the football players did, the cheerleaders were active throughout the game. I also learned that the stadium was near the San Jose airport, I may have taken a lot of pictures of planes flying over the stadium. They also had a halftime break that featured some previous Super Bowl 49ers from the 80s, Joe Montana was among them. Even as someone who doesn’t pay attention to football, I recognized him!

Airplane, cheerleaders and probably some football happening ;)

The Amtrak trip home was also an adventure, but not the good kind. Our train broke down and we had to be rescued by the next train, an hour behind us. There were high spirits among our fellow passengers though… and lots of spirits, the train bar ran out of champagne. It was raining by the time we got on the next train and so we had a bit of a late and soggy trip back. Still, all in all I’m glad I went.

More photos from the game here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157662674446015

Filed under: food, life, san francisco

Color me Ubuntu at UbuCon Summit & SCALE14x

Sunday, Jan 17th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This week I’ll be flying down to Pasadena, California to attend the first UbuCon Summit, which is taking place at the the Fourteenth Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE14x). The UbuCon Summit was the brain child of meetings we had over the summer that expressed concern over the lack of in person collaboration and connection in the Ubuntu community since the last Ubuntu Developer Summit back in 2012. Instead of creating a whole new event, we looked at the community-run UbuCon events around the world and worked with the organizers of the one for SCALE14x to bring in funding and planning help from Canonical, travel assistance to project members and speakers to provide a full two days of conference and unconference event content.

As an attendee of and speaker at these SCALE UbuCons for several years, I’m proud to see the work that Richard Gaskin and Nathan Haines has put into this event over the years turn into something bigger and more broadly supported. The event will feature two tracks on Thursday, one for Users and one for Developers. Friday will begin with a panel and then lead into an unconference all afternoon with attendee-driven content (don’t worry if you’ve never done an unconference before, a full introduction after the panel will be provided on to how to participate).

As we lead up to this the UbuCon Summit (you can still register here, it’s free!) on Thursday and Friday, I keep learning that more people from the Ubuntu community will be attending, several of whom I haven’t seen since that last Developer Summit in 2012. Mark Shuttleworth will be coming in to give a keynote for the event, along with various other speakers. On Thursday at 3PM, I’ll be giving a talk on Building a Career with Ubuntu and FOSS in the User track, and on Friday I’ll be one of several panelists participating in an Ubuntu Leadership Panel at 10:30AM, following the morning SCALE keynote by Cory Doctorow. Check out the full UbuCon schedule here: http://ubucon.org/en/events/ubucon-summit-us/schedule/

Over the past few months I’ve been able to hop on some of the weekly UbuCon Summit planning calls to provide feedback from folks preparing to participate and attend. During one of our calls, Abi Birrell of Canonical held up an origami werewolf that she’d be sending along instructions to make. Turns out, back in October the design team held a competition that included origami instructions and gave an award for creating an origami werewolf. I joked that I didn’t listen to the rest of the call after seeing the origami werewolf, I had already gone into planning mode!

With instructions in hand, I hosted an Ubuntu Hour in San Francisco last week where I brought along the instructions. I figured I’d use the Ubuntu Hour as a testing ground for UbuCon and SCALE14x. Good news: We had a lot of fun, it broke the ice with new attendees and we laughed a lot. Bad news: We’re not very good at origami. There were no completed animals at the end of the Ubuntu Hour!

The xerus helps at werewolf origami

At 40 steps to create the werewolf, one hour and a crowd inexperienced with origami, it was probably not the best activity if we wanted animals at the end, but it did give me a set of expectations. The success of how fun it was to try it (and even fail) did get me thinking though, what other creative things could we do at Ubuntu events? Then I read an article about adult coloring books. That’s it! I shot an email off to Ronnie Tucker, to see if he could come up with a coloring page. Most people in the Ubuntu community know Ronnie as the creator of Full Circle Magazine: the independent magazine for the Ubuntu Linux community, but he’s also a talented artist whose skills were a perfect matched for this task. Lucky for me, it was a stay-home snowy day in Glasgow yesterday and within a couple hours he had a werewolf draft to me. By this morning he had a final version ready for printing in my inbox.

You can download the creative commons licensed original here to print your own. I have printed off several (and ordered some packets of crayons) to bring along to the UbuCon Summit and Ubuntu booth in the SCALE14x expo hall. I’m also bringing along a bunch of origami paper, so people can try their hand at the werewolf… and unicorn too.

Finally, lest we forget that my actual paid job is a systems administrator on the OpenStack Infrastructure team, I’m also doing a talk at DevOpsDayLA on Open Source tools for distributed systems administration. If you think I geek out about Ubuntu and coloring werewolves, you should see how I act when I’m talking about the awesome systems work I get to do at my day job.

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

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