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33rd Birthday Weekend

Thursday, Oct 2nd, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’m a big fan of trying new things and places, so it came as a surprise that when I decided upon a birthday getaway this past weekend we decided to go back to the Resort at Squaw Creek, where we had been last year. It wasn’t just travel exhaustion that made us choose this one, we knew we wanted to get some work done during the weekend and the suite-style was great for that. Honestly we love everything about this place – beautiful views, amazing pools, good food. The price was also right for a quick getaway.

The drive up was a long one, Friday evening traffic combined with a thunderstorm. We stopped for dinner at Cottonwood Restaurant in Truckee. By the time we arrived at the driveway to the resort the rain had transformed… what is that, slush? By the time we got to the front door it was properly snowing!

Saturday morning we had breakfast brought to our room (heaven!) and enjoyed the stunning view outside our window.

The rain kept us inside for most of the day, which was wonderful. I was able to get some work done on my book (as planned!) and MJ did a bunch of research into our first proper vacation of the year coming up in November. Fireplace, hot chocolate, the man I love, perfect!

As 4PM rolled around the rain tapered off and we went down to the pool. It was 45F degrees out, so not exactly swimming weather, but the pools were heated and the trio of hot tubs were a popular spot for other folks visiting for the weekend. It turned out wonderful, particularly with the standard warm fall we’re having in San Francisco. That evening we had wonderful dinner (and dessert!) at the on site restaurant.

Sunday was even more rainy. We took advantage of their option to pay an extra $85 to get an 8pm checkout, giving us the whole day to enjoy before we had to go home. The rain did end up keeping us from the pool, but I did take a 2 mile walk through the woods with an umbrella after lunch. In spite of the rain, it was a beautiful walk up the sometimes steep and rocky terrain through the woods.

Alas, it had to end. On our way out we stopped at FiftyFifty Brewing Company for a casual dinner. They had the most amazing mussels appetizer, I kind of want to go back to have that again. Dinner wrapped up with some cake!

Fortunately the drive home was quicker (and drier!) than our drive to the mountains had been and we got in shortly before 1AM.

My actual 33rd birthday was on Monday. I ended up making plans with a friend who was in town to celebrate her own birthday the following day. We met up at the San Francisco Zoo around 11AM and I finally got to meet the wolverines! Even better, we caught them as a keeper was putting out some treats, so we got to see them uncharacteristically bounding about their enclosure as they attacked the treat bags that were put out for them. Alas, in spite of staying until the opening of the Lion House, I still managed to miss the sneaky two-toed sloth who decided to hide from me.

We wrapped up the afternoon with lunch over at the Beach Chalet.

It was a great birthday weekend+birthday, aside from the whole turning 33 part. Getting older hasn’t tended to bother me, but time is passing too quickly, much still to do.

Filed under: food, life, travel

PuppetConf 2014

Tuesday, Sep 30th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Wow, so many conferences lately! Fortunately for me, PuppetConf was local so I didn’t need to catch any flights or deal with hotel hassle, it was just a 2 block walk from home each day.

My focus for this conference was learning more about how people are using code-driven infrastructures similar to ours in the OpenStack Infrastructure project and meeting up with some colleagues, several of whom I’ve only communicated with online. I succeeded on both counts and it ended up being a great conference for me.

There was a keynote by Gene Kim, he is one of the authors of the “devops novel” The Phoenix Project, which I first learned about from my colleague Robert Collins. His talk focused around the book, as The Phoenix Project: Lessons Learned. In spite of having read the book, it was great to hear from Kim on the topic more directly as he talked about technical debt and outlined his 4 top lessons learned:

  • The business value of DevOps is higher than we thought.
  • DevOps Is As Good For Dev… …As It Is For Ops
  • The Need For High-Trust Management (can’t bog people down)
  • DevOps is not just for the unicorns… DevOps is for horses, too. (ie – not just for tech stars like Facebook)

Talk slides here.

The next keynote was by Kate Matsudaira of Popforms who gave a talk titled Trust Me. I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one, but I was pleasantly surprised. She covered some of what one may call “soft skills” in the tech industry, including helping others, supporting your colleagues and in general being a resourceful person who people enjoy working with. Over the years I’ve seen far too much of people assuming these skills aren’t valuable, even as people look around and identify folks with these skills as the colleagues they like working with the most. Huge thanks to Kate for bringing attention to these skills. She also talked a lot about building trust within your organization as it can often be hard for managers to do evaluations of employees who have the freedom to work unobstructed (as we want!) and mechanisms to build that trust, including reporting what you do to your boss and team mates. Slides from her talk available here: Keynote: Trust Me slides

After the keynote I headed over to Evan Scheessele’s talk on Infrastructure-as-Code with Puppet Enterprise in the Cloud. He works in HP’s Printing & Personal Systems division and shared the evolution and use of a code-driven infrastructure on HP Cloud along with Puppet Enterprise. The driving vision in his organization was boiled down to a series of points:

  • Infrastructure as “Cattle” not “Pets”
  • Modern configuration-management means: Executable Documentation
  • “Infrastructure as Code”
  • Focus on the production-pattern, and automate it end-to-end
  • Everything is consistently reproducible

He also went application-specific, discussing their use of Jenkins, and hiera and puppetdb in PE. It was a great talk and a pleasure to catch up with him afterwards. Slides available here.


Thanks to Evan Scheessele for the photo

My talk was on How to Open Source Your Puppet Configuration and I brought along Monty Taylor and James E. Blair stick puppets I made to demonstrate the rationale of running our infrastructure as an open source project. I walked the audience through some of the benefits of making Puppet configurations public (or at least public within an organization), the importance of licensing and documentation and some steps for splitting up your configuration so it’s understandable and consumable by others. My slides are here.

On Wednesday I attended Gareth Rushgrove’s talk on Continuous Integration for Infrastructure as Code. He skipped over a lot of the more common individual testing mechanisms (puppet-lint, puppet-syntax, rspec-puppet, beaker) and dove into higher level view things like testing of images and containers and test-driven infrastructure (analogous to test-driven development). Through his talk he gave several examples of how this is accomplished, from use of Serverspec, the need to write tests before infrastructure, writing tests to enforce policy and pulling data from PuppetDB to run tests. Slides here.

After lunch I headed over to Chris Hoge’s talk about Understanding OpenStack Deployments with the Puppet modules available. In spite of all my work with OpenStack, I haven’t had a very close look at these modules, so it was nice meeting up with him and Colleen Murphy from the puppet-openstack team. In his talk he walked the audience through some of the basic design decisions of OpenStack and then pulled in examples of how the Puppet modules for OpenStack are used to bring this all together. Slides here.

Two talks I’ll have to catch once the videos are online, Continuous Infrastructure: Modern Puppet for the Jenkins Project – R.Tyler Croy, Jenkins (slides) and Infrastructure as Software – Dustin J. Mitchell, Mozilla, Inc. (slides). Both of these are open source infrastructures that I mentioned during my own talk! I wish I had taken the opportunity while we were all in one spot to meet together, fortunately I was able to chat with R.Tyler Croy prior to my talk, but his talk conflicted with mine and Dustin’s with the OpenStack talk.

In all, this was a very valuable event. I learned some interesting new things about how others are using code-driven infrastructures and I made some great connections.

More photos from PuppetConf here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157648049231891/

Filed under: events, san francisco, tech

Offline, CLI-based Gerrit code review with Gertty

Wednesday, Sep 17th, 2014 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

This past week I headed to Florida to present at Fossetcon and thought it would be a great opportunity to do a formal review of a new tool recently released by the OpenStack Infrastructure team (well, mostly James E. Blair): Gertty.

The description of this tool is as follows:

As compared to the web interface, the main advantages are:

  • Workflow — the interface is designed to support a workflow similar to reading network news or mail. In particular, it is designed to deal with a large number of review requests across a large number of projects.
  • Offline Use — Gertty syncs information about changes in subscribed projects to a local database and local git repos. All review operations are performed against that database and then synced back to Gerrit.
  • Speed — user actions modify locally cached content and need not wait for server interaction.
  • Convenience — because Gertty downloads all changes to local git repos, a single command instructs it to checkout a change into that repo for detailed examination or testing of larger changes.

For me the two big ones were CLI-based workflow and offline use, I could review patches while on a plane or on terrible hotel wifi!

I highly recommend reading the announcement email to learn more about the features, but to get going here’s a quick rundown for the currently released version 1.0.2:

First, you’ll need to set a password in Gerrit so you can use the REST API. Do that by logging into Gerrit and going to https://review.openstack.org/#/settings/http-password

From there:

pip install gertty

wget https://git.openstack.org/cgit/stackforge/gertty/plain/examples/openstack-gertty.yaml -O ~/.gertty.yaml

Edit ~/.gertty.yaml and update anything that says “CHANGEME”

A couple things worthy of note:

  • Be aware that by default, uses ~/git/ for the git-root, I had to change this in my ~/.gertty.yaml so it didn’t touch my existing ~/git/ directory.
  • You can also run it in a venv, as described on the pypi page.

Now run gertty from your terminal!

When you first load it up, you get a welcome screen with some hints on how to use it, including the all important “press F1 for help”:

Note: I use xfce4-terminal and F1 is bound to terminal help, see the Xfce FAQ to learn how to disable this so you can actually read the Gertty help and don’t have to ask on IRC how to do simple things like I did ;)

As instructed, from here you hit “L” to list projects, this is the page where you can subscribe to them:

You subscribe to projects by pressing “s” and they will show up as bright white, then you can navigate into them to list open reviews:

Go to a review you want to look at and hit enter, bringing up the review screen. This should look very familiar, just text only. I’ve expanded my standard 80×24 terminal window here so you can get a good look at what the full screen looks like:

Navigate down to < Diff > to see the diff. This is pretty cool, instead of showing it on separate pages like the web UI, it shows you a unified page with all of the file diffs, so you just need to scroll through them to see them all:

Finally, you review! Select < Review > back on the main review page and it will pop up a screen that allows you to select your +2, +1, -1, etc and add a message:

Your reviews are synced along with everything else when Gertty knows it’s online and can pull down review updates and upload your changes. At any time you can look at the top right of your screen to see how many pending sync requests it has.

When you want to quit, CTRL-q

I highly recommend giving it a spin. Feel free to ask questions about usage in #openstack-infra and bugs are tracked in Storyboard here: https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project/698. The code lives in a stackforge repo at: http://git.openstack.org/cgit/stackforge/gertty

Filed under: openstack, tech

Fossetcon 2014

Tuesday, Sep 16th, 2014 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

As I wrote in my last post I attended Fossetcon this past weekend. The core of the event kicked off on Friday with a keynote by Iris Gardner on how Diversity Creates Innovation and the work that the CODE2040 organization is doing to help talented minorities succeed in technology. I first heard about this organization back in 2013 at OSCON, so it was great to hear more about their recent successes with their summer Fellows Program. It was also great to hear that their criteria for talent not only included coding skills, but also sought out a passion for engineering and leadership skills.

After a break, I went to see PJ Hagerty give his talk, Meetup Groups: Act Locally – Think Globally. I’ve been running open source related groups for over a decade, so I’ve been in this space for quite a long time and was hoping to get some new tips, PJ didn’t disappoint! He led off with the need to break out of the small “pizza and a presentation by a regular” grind, which is indeed important to growing a group and making people show up. Some of his suggestions for doing this included:

  • Seek out students to attend and participate in the group, they can be some of your most motivated attendees and will bring friends
  • Seek out experienced programmers (and technologists) not necessarily in your specific field to give more agnostic talks about general programming/tech practices
  • Do cross-technology meetups – a PHP and Ruby night! Maybe Linux and BSD?
  • Bring in guest speakers from out of town (if they’re close enough, many will come for the price of gas and/or train/bus ticket – I would!)
  • Send members to regional conferences… or run your own conference
  • Get kids involved
  • Host an OpenHack event

I’ll have to see what my co-conspiratorsorganizers at some local groups think of these ideas, it certainly would be fun to spice up some of the groups I regularly attend.

From there I went to MySQL Server Performance Tuning 101 by Ligaya Turmelle. Her talk centered around the fact that MySQL tuning is not simple, but went through a variety of mechanisms to tune it in different ways for specific cases you may run into. Perhaps most useful to me were her tips for gathering usage statistics from MySQL, I was unfamiliar with many of the metrics she pulled out. Very cool stuff.

After lunch and some booth duty, I headed over to Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Computing presented by Mark Hinkle. Now, I work on OpenStack (referred to as the “Boy Band” of cloud infrastructures in the talk – hah!), so my view of the cloud world is certainly influenced by that perspective. It was great to see a whirlwind tour of other and related technologies in the open source ecosystem.

The closing keynote for the day was by Deb Nicholson, Style or substance? Free Software is Totally the 80’s. She gave a bit of a history of free software and speculated as to whether our movement would be characterized by a shallow portrayal of “unconferences and penguin swag” (like 80s neon clothes and extravagance) or how free software communities are changing the world (like groups in the 80s who were really seeking social change or the fall of the Berlin wall). Her hope is that by stepping back and taking a look at our community that perhaps we could shape how our movement is remembered and focus on what is important to our future.

Saturday I had more booth duty with my colleague Yolanda Robla who came in from Spain to do a talk on Continuous integration automation. We were joined by another colleague from HP, Mark Atwood, who dropped by the conference for his talk How to Get One of These Awesome Open Source Jobs – one of my favorites.

The opening keynote on Saturday was Considering the Future of Copyleft by Bradley Kuhn. I always enjoy going to his talks because I’m considerably more optimistic about the health and future of free software, so his strong copyleft stance makes me stop and consider where I truly stand and what that means. He worries that an ecosystem of permissive licenses (like Apache, MIT, BSD) will lead to companies doing the least possible for free software and keeping all their secret sauces secret, diluting the ecosystem and making it less valuable for future consumers of free software since they’ll need the proprietary components. I’m more hopeful than that, particularly as I see real free software folks starting to get jobs in major companies and staying true to their free software roots. Indeed, these days I spend a vast majority of my time working on Apache-licensed software for a large company who pays me to do the work. Slides from his talk are here, I highly recommend having a browse: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/talks/FOSSETCON-2014/copyleft-future.html

After some more boothing, I headed over to Apache Mesos and Aurora, An Operating System For The Datacenter by David Lester. Again, being on the OpenStack bandwagon these past few years I haven’t had a lot of time to explore the ecosystem elsewhere, and I learned that this is some pretty cool stuff! Lester works for Twitter and talked some about how Twitter and other companies in the community are using both the Mesos and Aurora tools to build their efficient, fault tolerant datacenters and how it’s lead to impressive improvements in the reliability of their infrastructures. He also did a really great job explaining the concepts of both, hooray for diagrams. I kind of want to play with them now.

Introduction to The ELK Stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash & Kibana by Aaron Mildenstein was my next stop. We run an ELK stack in the OpenStack Infrastructure, but I’ve not been very involved in the management of that, instead focusing on how we’re using it in elastic-recheck so I hoped this talk would fill in some of the fundamentals for me. It did do that so I was happy with that, but I have to admit that I was pretty disappointed to see demos of plugins that required a paid license.

As the day wound down, I finally had my talk: Code Review for Systems Administrators.


Code Review for Sysadmins talk, thanks to Yolanda Robla for taking the photo

I love giving this talk. I’m really proud of the infrastructure that has been built for OpenStack and it’s one that I’m happy and excited to work with every day – in part because we do things through code review. Even better, my excitement during this presentation seemed contagious, with an audience that seemed really engaged with the topic and impressed. Huge thanks to everyone who came and particularly to those who asked questions and took time to chat with me after. Slides from my talk are available here: fossetcon-code-review-for-sysadmins/

And then we were at the end! The conference wrapped up with a closing keynote on Open Source Is More than Code by Jordan Sissel. I really loved this talk. I’ve known for some time that the logstash community was one of the friendlier ones, with their mantra of “If a newbie has a bad time, it’s a bug.” This talk dove further into that ethos in their community and how it’s impacted how members of the project handle unhappy users. He also talked about improvements made to documentation (both inline in code and formal documentation) and how they’ve tried to “break away from text” some and put more human interaction in their community so people don’t feel so isolated and dehumanized by a text only environment (though I do find this is where I’m personally most comfortable, not everyone feels that way). I hope more projects will look to the logstash community as a good example of how we all can do better, I know I have some work to do when it comes to support.

Thanks again to conference staff for making this event such a fun one, particularly as it was their first year!

Filed under: events, tech, travel

Ubuntu at Fossetcon 2014

Tuesday, Sep 16th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last week I flew out to the east coast to attend the very first Fossetcon. The conference was on the smaller side, but I had a wonderful time meeting up with some old friends, meeting some new Ubuntu enthusiasts and finally meeting some folks I’ve only communicated with online. The room layout took some getting used to, but the conference staff was quick to put up signs and directing conference attendees in the right direction and in general leading to a pretty smooth conference experience.

On Thursday the conference hosted a “day zero” that had training and an Ubucon. I attended the Ubucon all day, which kicked off with Michael Hall doing an introduction to the Ubuntu on Phones ecosystem, including Mir, Unity8 and the Telephony features that needed to be added to support phones (voice calling, SMS/MMs, Cell data, SIM card management). He also talked about the improved developer portal with more resources aimed at app developers, including the Ubuntu SDK and simplified packaging with click packages.

He also addressed the concern of many about whether Ubuntu could break into the smartphone market at this point, arguing that it’s a rapidly developing and changing market, with every current market leader only having been there for a handful of years, and that new ideas need need to play to win. Canonical feels that convergence between phone and desktop/laptop gives Ubuntu a unique selling point and that users will like it because of intuitive design with lots of swiping and scrolling actions, gives apps the most screen space possible. It was interesting to hear that partners/OEMs can offer operator differentiation as a layer without fragmenting the actual operating system (something that Android struggles with), leaving the core operating system independently maintained.

This was followed up by a more hands on session on Creating your first Ubuntu SDK Application. Attendees downloaded the Ubuntu SDK and Michael walked through the creation of a demo app, using the App Dev School Workshop: Write your first app document.

After lunch, Nicholas Skaggs and I gave a presentation on 10 ways to get involved with Ubuntu today. I had given a “5 ways” talk earlier this year at the SCaLE in Los Angeles, so it was fun to do a longer one with a co-speaker and have his five items added in, along with some other general tips for getting involved with the community. I really love giving this talk, the feedback from attendees throughout the rest of the conference was overwhelmingly positive, and I hope to get some follow-up emails from some new contributors looking to get started. Slides from our presentation are available as pdf here: contributingtoubuntu-fossetcon-2014.pdf


Ubuntu panel, thanks to Chris Crisafulli for the photo

The day wrapped up with an Ubuntu Q&A Panel, which had Michael Hall and Nicholas Skaggs from the Community team at Canonical, Aaron Honeycutt of Kubuntu and myself. Our quartet fielded questions from moderator Alexis Santos of Binpress and the audience, on everything from the Ubuntu phone to challenges of working with such a large community. I ended up drawing from my experience with the Xubuntu community a lot in the panel, especially as we drilled down into discussing how much success we’ve had coordinating the work of the flavors with the rest of Ubuntu.

The next couple days brought Fossetcon proper, with I’ll write about later. The Ubuntu fun continued though! I was able to give away 4 copies of The Official Ubuntu Book, 8th Edition which I signed, and got José Antonio Rey to sign as well since he had joined us for the conference from Peru.

José ended up doing a talk on Automating your service with Juju during the conference, and Michael Hall had the opportunity to a talk on Convergence and the Future of App Development on Ubuntu. The Ubuntu booth also looked great and was one of the most popular of the conference.

I really had a blast talking to Ubuntu community members from Florida, they’re a great and passionate crowd.

Filed under: events, tech, travel, ubuntu planet

Simcoe’s August 2014 Checkup

Sunday, Sep 7th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This upcoming December will mark Simcoe living with the CRF diagnosis for 3 years. We’re happy to say that she continues to do well, with this latest batch of blood work showing more good news about her stable levels.

Unfortunately we brought her in a few weeks early this time following a bloody sneeze. As I’ve written earlier this year, they’ve both been a bit sneezy this year with an as yet undiagnosed issue that has been eluding all tests. Every month or so they switch off who is sneezing, but this was the first time there was any blood.

Simcoe at vet
“I still don’t like vet visits.”

Following the exam, the vet said she wasn’t worried. The bleeding was a one time thing and could have just been caused by rawness brought on by the sneezing and sniffles. Since the appointment on August 26th we haven’t seen any more problems (and the cold seems to have migrated back to Caligula).

As for her levels, it was great to see her weight come up a bit, from 9.62 to 9.94lbs.

Her BUN and CRE levels have both shifted slightly, from 51 to 59 on BUN and 3.9 to 3.8 on CRE.

BUN: 59 (normal range: 14-36)
CRE: 3.8 (normal range: .6-2.4)

Filed under: simcoe

CI, Validation and more at DebConf14

Monday, Sep 1st, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’ve been a Debian user since 2002 and got my first package into Debian in 2006. Though I continued to maintain a couple packages through the years, my open source interests (and career) have expanded significantly so that I now spend much more time with Ubuntu and OpenStack than anything else. Still, I do still host Bay Area Debian events in San Francisco and when I learned that DebConf14 would only be quick plane flight away from home I was eager for the opportunity to attend.

Given my other obligations, I decided to come in halfway through the conference, arriving Wednesday evening. Thursday was particularly interesting to me because they were doing most of the Debian Validation & CI discussions then. Given my day job on the OpenStack Infrastructure team, it seemed to be a great place to meet other folks who are interested in CI and see where our team could support Debian’s initiatives.

First up was the Validation and Continuous Integration BoF led by Neil Williams.

It was interesting to learn the current validation methods being used in Debian, including:

From there talk moved into what kinds of integration tests people wanted, where various ideas were covered, including package sets (collections of related packages) and how to inject “dirty” data into systems to test in more real world like situations. Someone also mentioned doing tests on more real systems rather than in chrooted environments.

Discussion touched upon having a Gerrit-like workflow that had packages submitted for review and testing prior to landing in the archive. This led to my having some interesting conversations with the drivers of Gerrit efforts in Debian after the session (nice to meet you, mika!). There was also discussion about notification to developers when their packages run afoul of the testing infrastructure, either themselves or as part of a dependency chain (who wants notifications? how to make them useful and not overwhelming?).

I’ve uploaded the gobby notes from the session here: validation-bof and the video of the session is available on the meetings-archive.

Next up on the schedule was debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project presented by Antonio Terceiro. He gave a tour of the Debian Continuous Integration system and talked about how packages can take advantage of the system by having their own test suites. He also discussed some about the current architecture for handling tests and optimizations they want to make in the future. Documentation for debci can be found here: ci.debian.net/doc/. Video of the session is also available on the meetings-archive.

The final CI talk I went to of the day was Automated Validation in Debian using LAVA where Neil Williams gave a tour of the expanded LAVA (Linaro Automated Validation Architecture). I heard about it back when it was a more simple ARM-only testing infrastructure, but it’s grown beyond that to now test distribution kernel images, package combinations and installer images and has been encouraging folks to write tests. He also talked about some of the work they’re doing to bring along LAVA demo stations to conferences, nice! Slides from this talk are available on the debconf annex site, here: http://annex.debconf.org/debconf-share/debconf14/slides/lava/

On Friday I also bumped into a testing-related talk by Paul Wise during a series of Live Demos, he showed off check-all-the-things which runs a pile of tools against your project to check… all the things, detecting what it needs to do automatically. Check out the README for rationale, and for a taste of things it checks and future plans, have a peek at some of the data files, like this one.

It’s really exciting to see more effort being spent on testing in Debian, and open source projects in general. This has long been the space of companies doing private, internal testing of open source products they use and reporting results back to projects in the form of patches and bug reports. Having the projects themselves provide QA is a huge step for the maturity of open source, and I believe will lead to even more success for projects as we move into the future.

The rest of DebConf for me was following my more personal interests in Debian. I also have to admit that my lack of involvement lately made me feel like a bit of an outsider and I’m quite shy anyway, so I was thankful to know a few Debian folks who I could hang out with and join for meals.

On Thursday evening I attended A glimpse into a systemd future by Josh Triplett. I haven’t really been keeping up with systemd news or features, so I learned a lot. I have to say, it would be great to see things like session management, screen brightness and other user settings be controlled by something lower level than the desktop environment. Friday I attended Thomas Goirand’s OpenStack update & packaging experience sharing. I’ve been loosely tracking this, but it was good to learn that Jessie will come with Icehouse and that install docs exist for Wheezy (here).

I also attended Outsourcing your webapp maintenance to Debian with Francois Marier. The rationale for his talk was that one should build their application with the mature versions of web frameworks included with Debian in mind, making it so you don’t have the burden of, say, managing Django along with your Django-based app, since Debian handles that. I continue to have mixed feelings when it comes to webapps in the main Debian repository, while some developers who are interested in reducing maintenance burden are ok with using older versions shipped with Debian, most developers I’ve worked with are very much not in this camp and I’m better off trying to support what they want than fighting with them about versions. Then it was off to Docker + Debian = ♥ with Paul Tagliamonte where he talked about some of his best practices for using Docker on Debian and ideas for leveraging it more in development (having multiple versions of services running on one host, exporting docker images to help with replication of tests and development environments).

Friday night Linus Torvalds joined us for a Q&A session. As someone who has put a lot of work into making friendly environments for new open source contributors, I can’t say I’m thrilled with his abrasive conduct in the Linux kernel project. I do worry that he sets a tone that impressionable kernel hackers then go on to emulate, perpetuating the caustic environment that spills out beyond just the kernel, but he has no interest in changing. That aside, it was interesting to hear him talk about other aspects of his work, his thoughts on systemd, a rant about compiling against specific libraries for every distro and versions (companies won’t do it, they’ll just ship their own statically linked ones) and his continued comments in support of Google Chrome.

DebConf wrapped up on Sunday. I spent the morning in one of the HackLabs catching up on some work, and at 1:30 headed up to the Plenary room for the last few talks of the event, starting with a series of lightning talks. A few of the talks stood out for me, including Geoffrey Thomas’ talk on being a bit of an outsider at DebConf and how difficult it is to be running a non-Debian/Linux system at the event. I’ve long been disappointed when people bring along their proprietary OSes to Linux events, but he made good points about people being able to contribute without fully “buying in” to having free software everywhere, including their laptop. He’s right. Margarita Manterola shared some stats from the Mini-DebConf Barcelona which focused on having only female speakers, it was great to hear such positive statistics, particularly since DebConf14 itself had a pretty poor ratio, there were several talks I attended (particularly around CI) where I was the only woman in the room. It was also interesting to learn about safe-rm to save us from ourselves and non-free.org to help make a distinction between what is Debian and what is not.

There was also a great talk by Vagrant Cascadian about his work on packages that he saw needed help but he didn’t necessarily know everything about, and encouraged others to take the same leap to work on things that may be outside their comfort zone. To help he listed several resources people could use to find work in Debian:

Next up for the afternoon was the Bits from the Release Team where they fleshed out what the next few months leading up to the freeze would look like and sharing the Jessie Freeze Policy.

DebConf wrapped up with a thank you to the volunteers (thank you!) and peek at the next DebConf, to be held in Heidelberg, Germany the 15th-22nd of August 2015.

Then it was off to the airport for me!

The rest of my photos from DebConf14 here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157646626186269/

Filed under: events, tech, travel, ubuntu planet

OpenStack Infrastructure August 2014 Bug Day

Tuesday, Aug 26th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The OpenStack Infrastructure team has a pretty big bug collection.

1855 collection
Well, not literal bugs

We’ve slowly been moving new bugs for some projects over to StoryBoard in order to kick the tires on that new system, but today we focused back on our Launchpad Bugs to par down our list.

Interested in running a bug day? The steps we have for running a bug day can be a bit tedious, but it’s not hard, here’s the rundown:

  1. I create our etherpad: cibugreview-august2014 (see etherpad from past bug days on the wiki at: InfraTeam#Bugs)
  2. I run my simple infra_bugday.py script and populate the etherpad.
  3. Grab the bug stats from launchpad and copy them into the pad so we (hopefully) have inspiring statistics at the end of the day.
  4. Then comes the real work. I open up the old etherpad and go through all the bugs, copying over comments from the old etherpad where applicable and making my own comments as necessary about obvious updates I see (and updating my own bugs).
  5. Let the rest of the team dive in on the etherpad and bugs!

Throughout the day we chat in #openstack-infra about bug statuses, whether we should continue pursuing certain strategies outlined in bugs, reaching out to folks who have outstanding bugs in the tracker that we’d like to see movement on but haven’t in a while. Plus, we get to triage a whole pile of New bugs (thanks Clark) and close others we may have lost track of (thanks everyone).

As we wrap up, here are the stats from today:

Starting bug day count: 270

31 New bugs
39 In-progress bugs
6 Critical bugs
15 High importance bugs
8 Incomplete bugs

Ending bug day count: 233

0 New bugs
37 In-progress bugs
3 Critical bugs
10 High importance bugs
14 Incomplete bugs

Full disclosure, 4 of the bugs we “closed” were actually moved to the Zuul project on Launchpad so we can import them into StoryBoard at a later date. The rest were legitimate though!

It was a busy day, thanks to everyone who participated.

Filed under: openstack, tech

Market Street Railway Exploratorium Charter

Sunday, Aug 24th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last month I learned about an Exploratorium Charter being put on by Market Street Railway. I’m a member of the organization and they do charters throughout the year, but my schedule rarely syncs up with when charters or other events are happening, so I was delighted when I firmed up my DebConf schedule and knew I’d be in town for this one!

It was a 2 hour planned charter, which would pick is up at the railway museum near Ferry building and take us down to Muni Metro East, “the current home of the historic streetcar fleet and not usually open to the public.” Sign me up.

The car taking us on our journey was the 1050, which was originally a Philadelphia street car (built in 1948, given No. 2119) which had been painted in Muni livery. MJ’s best friend is in town this weekend, so I had both Matti and MJ to join me on this excursion.

The route began by going down what will become the E line next year, and we stopped at the AT&T ballpark for some photo ops. The conductor (not the driver) of the event posed for photos.

Throughout the ride various volunteers from Market Street Railway passed around photos and historic pieces from street cars to demonstrate how they worked and some of the historic routes where they ran. Of particular interest was learning just how busy Ferry Building was at it’s height in the 1930s, not only serving as a busy passenger ferry port, but also with lots of street cars and other transit stopping at the building pretty much non-stop.

From the E-line there the street car went down Third street through Dogpatch and finally arrived at our first destination, the Muni Metro East Light Rail Vehicle Maintenance & Operations Facility. We all had to bright vests in order to enter the working facility.


Obligatory “Me with streetcar” photo

The facility is a huge warehouse where repairs are done on both the street cars and the Metro coaches. We had quite a bit of time to look around and peek under the cars and see some of the ones that were under repair or getting phased into usage.

I think my favorite part of the visit was getting to go outside and see the several cars outside. Some of them were just coming in for scheduled maintenance, and others like the cream colored 1056 that are going to be sent off for restoration (hooray!).

The tour concluded by taking us back up the Embarcadero and dropping us off at the Exploratorium science museum, skipping a loop around Pier 39 due to being a bit behind schedule. We spent about an hour at the museum, which was a nice visit as MJ and I had just been several months earlier.

Lots more photos from our day here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157646412090817/

Huge thanks to Market Street Railway for putting on such a fun and accessible event!

Filed under: events, san francisco

August 2014 miscellany

Saturday, Aug 23rd, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

It’s been about a month since my surgery. I feel like I’ve taken it easy, but looking at my schedule (which included a conference on the other side of the continent) I think it’s pretty safe to say I’m not very good at that. I’m happy to say I’m pretty much recovered though, so my activities don’t seem to have caused problems.

Although, going to the 4th birthday party for OpenStack just 6 days after my surgery was probably pushing it. I thoroughly rationalized it due to the proximity of the event to my home (a block), but I only lasted about an hour. At least I got a cool t-shirt and got to see the awesome OpenStack ice sculpture. Also, didn’t die, so all is good right?

Fast forward a week and a half and we were wrapping up our quick trip to Philadelphia for Fosscon. We had some time on Sunday so decided to visit the National Museum of American Jewish History right by Independence Mall. In addition to a fun special exhibit about minorities in baseball, the museum boasts 3 floors of permanent exhibits that trace the history of Jews in America from the first settlement until today. We made it through much of the museum before our flight time crept up, and even managed to swing by the gift shop where we found a beautiful glass menorah to bring home.

Safely back in San Francisco, I met up with a few of my local Ubuntu and Debian friends on the 13th for an Ubuntu Hour and a Debian dinner. The Ubuntu Hour was pretty standard, I was able to bring along my Nexus 7 with Ubuntu on it to show off the latest features in the development channel for the tablet version. I also received several copies of The Official Ubuntu Book so I was able to bring one along to give away to an attendee, hooray!

From there, we made it over to 21st Amendment Brewery where we’d be celebrating Debian’s 21st birthday (which was coming up on the 16th). It took some time to get a table, but had lots of time to chat while we were waiting. At the dinner we signed a card to send off to a donation to SPI on behalf of Debian.

In other excitement, our car needed some work last week and MJ has been putting a lot of work into getting a sound system set up to go along with a new TV. Since I’ve been feeling better this week my energy has finally returned and I’ve been able to get caught up on a lot of projects I had pushed aside during my recovery. I also signed up for a new gym this week, it’s not as beautiful as the club I used to go to, but it has comparable facilities (including pool!) and is about half of what I was paying before. I’m thinking as I ease back into a routine I’ll use my time there for swimming and strength exercises. I sure need it, being these past few months really did a number on my fitness.

Today I met up with my friend Steve for Chinese lunch and then a visit over to the Asian Art Museum to see the Gorgeous exhibit. I’m really glad we went, it was an unusual collection that I really enjoyed. While we were there we also browsed the rest of the galleries in the museum, making it the first time that I’d actually walked through the whole museum on an excursion there.

I think the Mythical bird-man was my favorite piece of the exhibit:

And I was greatly amused when Steve used his iPhone to take a picture of the first generation iPhone on exhibit, so I captured the moment.

On Wednesday afternoon I’ll be flying up to Portland, OR to attend my first DebConf! It actually started today, but given my current commitment load I decided that 9 days away from home was a bit much and picked days later in the week where some of the discussions were most interesting to me. I’m really looking forward to seeing some of my long time Debian friends and learning more about work the teams are doing in the Continuous Integration space for Debian.

Filed under: events, life, philadelphia, san francisco
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