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Texas Linuxfest wrap-up

Sunday, Jun 15th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last week I finally had the opportunity to attend Texas Linuxfest. I first heard about this conference back when it started from some Ubuntu colleagues who were getting involved with it, so it was exciting when my talk on Code Review for Systems Administrators was accepted.

I arrived late on Thursday night, much later than expected after some serious flight delays due to weather (including 3 hours on the tarmac at a completely different airport due to running out of fuel over DFW). But I got in early enough to get rest before the expo hall opened on Friday afternoon where I helped staff the HP booth.

At the HP booth, we were showing off the latest developments in the high density Moonshot system, including the ARM-based processors that are coming out later this year (currently it’s sold with server grade Atom processors). It was cool to be able to see one, learn more about it and chat with some of the developers at HP who are focusing on ARM.


HP Moonshot

That evening I joined others at the Speaker dinner at one of the Austin Java locations in town. Got to meet several cool new people, including another fellow from HP who was giving a talk, an editor from Apress who joined us from England and one of the core developers of BusyBox.

On Saturday the talks portion of the conference began!

The keynote was by Karen Sandler, titled “Identity Crisis: Are we who we say we are? which was a fascinating look at how we all present ourselves in the community. As a lawyer, she gave some great insight into the multiple loyalties that many contributors to Open Source have and explored some of them. This was quite topical for me as I continue to do a considerable amount of volunteer work with Ubuntu and work at HP on the OpenStack project as my paid job. But am I always speaking for HP in my role in OpenStack? I am certainly proud to represent HP’s considerable efforts in the community, but in my day to day work I’m largely passionate about the project and my work on a personal level and my views tend to be my own. During the Q&A there was also interesting discussion about use of email aliases, which got me thinking about my own. I have an Ubuntu address which I pretty strictly use for Ubuntu mailing lists and private Ubuntu-related correspondences, I have an HP address that I pretty much just use for internal HP work and then everything else in my life pretty much goes to my main personal address – including all correspondences on the OpenStack, local Linux and other mailing lists.


Karen Sandler beginning her talk with a “Thank You” to the conference organizers

The next talk I went to was by Corey Quinn on “Selling Yourself: How to handle a technical interview” (slides here). I had a chat with him a couple weeks back about this talk and was able to give some suggestions, so it was nice to see the full talk laid out. His experience comes from work at Taos where he does a lot of interviewing of candidates and was able to make several observations based on how people present themselves. He began by noting that a resume’s only job is to get you an interview, so more time should be spent on actually practicing interviewing rather than strictly focusing on a resume. As the title indicates, the key take away was generally that an interview is the place where you should be selling yourself, no modesty here. He also stressed that it’s a 2 way interview, and the interviewer is very interested in making sure that the person will like the job and that they are actually interested to some degree in the work and the company.

It was then time for my own talk, “Code Review for Systems Administrators,” where I talked about how we do our work on the OpenStack Infrastructure team (slides here). I left a bit of extra time for questions than I usually do since my colleague Khai Do was doing a presentation later that did a deeper dive into our continuous integration system (“Scaling the Openstack Test Environment“). I’m glad I did, there were several questions from the audience about some of our additional systems administration focused tooling and how we determine what we use (why Puppet? why Cacti?) and what our review process for those systems looked like.

Unfortunately this was all I could attend of the conference, as I had a flight to catch in order to make it to Croatia in time for DORS/CLUC 2014 this week. I do hope to make it back to Texas Linuxfest at some point, the event had a great venue and was well-organized with speaker helpers in every room to do introductions, keep things on track (so nice!) and make sure the A/V was working properly. Huge thanks to Nathan Willis and the other organizers for doing such a great job.

Filed under: events, tech, travel, ubuntu planet

Simcoe’s June Checkup

Monday, Jun 9th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On June 7th I brought Simcoe in to the vet for her regular-ish checkup to see how she’s handling her kidney disease. Her last visit was back in January. She wasn’t happy about this visit, with MJ out of town for a week I think she was feeling pretty out of sorts, and the poor thing is always terrified at the vet.

But I’m happy to report that it’s now been over 2.5 years since she was diagnosed, and while things aren’t getting better, she’s pretty stable. It was nice to see her weight holding steady at 9.62lbs.

Her BUN and CRE levels have both shifted slightly, from 57 to 51 on BUN and 3.6 to 3.9 on CRE.

BUN: 51 (normal range: 14-36)
CRE: 3.9 (normal range: .6-2.4)

Of course we’re not thrilled to see CRE continue to creep up, it had managed to stick around high normal for quite some time, but neither are near where she was when she was diagnosed back in December of 2011. We’ll continue stick to her care schedule of subcutaneous fluids and Pepcid AC.

Filed under: simcoe

Life, critters and upcoming travel

Sunday, Jun 8th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

MJ has been traveling a fair amount lately, so I’ve been working harder to meet up with friends, which I don’t do nearly enough. I had brunch with a friend just before Memorial day, and ended up at The View for drinks and dessert with a couple who just moved into town last Sunday. This week I was able to meet up with my old friend Mark down in the Mission to chat about life and enjoy some foods that were much too greasy for my own good (and quickly learned I should be avoiding right now, oops!).

Before leaving on his last trip, we were able to meet up with my cousin Melissa who was in town for an event, and my in-town (for now) cousin Brendan who I manage to only meet up with when other relatives are in town. We ate over at Fang before inviting them up to our condo for a bit.

After MJ left on his trip, I was looking to take a walk and decided to head over to the San Francisco Zoo to finally renew my membership and visit some of their new critters. My first stop was Tenzing, their new Red Panda! He popped out for a few minutes and then I had to return after a loop around that part of the zoo to return to him wandering around his enclosure.

From there I went over to visit one of their newest babies – a baby Patas Monkey! They are probably my favorite monkeys at the zoo, so getting to see a baby was pretty awesome, especially once he stopped being latched to his mother and wandered around a bit on his own. So cute.

More photos from my short zoo visit here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157644958797102

I still need to visit the baby peccaries before they get too big and see if I can get a glimpse of the two-toed sloth that’s living in the Lion House.

Work has been busy, but continues to be enjoyable. I mentioned in a previous post that I regretfully had to miss the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta due to being sick, but some of my awesome colleagues sent me a small gift and post card. I also have more travel coming up this week. On Thursday I fly to Austin to speak at the Texas Linux Festival, which I’ve been hearing great things about for years but never had the opportunity to attend until now. From there, I’ll be flying to Zagreb, Croatia to participate in DORS/CLUG 2014 where I will be giving a keynote on the Continuous Integration system for OpenStack developers and also participating in a Women in Tech panel with Ana Mandić, Jasna Benčić and Lucija Pilić.

Other than that, health stuff has taken up much of my time as my abdominal pain continues and I have to avoid alcohol and fatty/fried foods to keep the pain in check. On the bright side, this means I’m now eating healthier! I’ve gone in for 2 major diagnostic tests, both of which came back inconclusive. I’m continuing to work with doctors and will be making an appointment with a surgeon soon to see about my options for removing organs-I-don’t-need-but-may-be-causing-pain. Given my travel schedule this year, I’m terribly stressed about the timing of all this and hope that we find the cause and can solve it quickly and efficiently with limited recovery time, as I’m planning to travel again in July.

Filed under: events, family, health, life

Elasticsearch blog features OpenStack elastic-recheck

Thursday, May 29th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

At the Southern California Linux Expo this year I ran into Leslie Hawthorn of Elasticsearch and I told her a bit about how we’re using Elasticsearch in a newly developed elastic-recheck tool for failed tests unrelated to the code being tested. The result was an invitation to write a guest post on the Elasticsearch blog.

Thanks to Leslie and editors on the OpenStack side the post went live today!

OpenStack elastic-recheck: Powered by the ELK Stack

The post describes how the tool works and is used by developers and features a presentation by Sean Dague from the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta this month.

Filed under: openstack, tech

On college and my father

Monday, May 26th, 2014 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Higher education is a tricky subject for me. I work in an industry where a relatively high percentage of my professional peers are autodidacts who do not have formal higher education (myself included). I live in a world where I see a majority of students leaving their higher education institution burdened with substantial student debt and struggling to launch a career, or even get a job at all that will cover basic needs and school debt.

When I look at candidates I find myself largely disregarding higher education and focusing on experience (whether that be tinkering with a Raspberry Pi at a Hackerspace or running a large scale infrastructure) and their level of passion for technology. If the passion and personal excitement are there, our team can bring them up to speed with what they need to know. Plus, technology changes so fast that you need people who can keep up and learn new things quickly, not be tied into old technologies or development paradigms.

Now, there are certainly fundamentals in computer science that are valuable as you progress in your career, but today services like Coursera can get a committed professional up to speed on fundamentals online for free (an aside: The Hardware/Software Interface is an great class, I did it last year and it’s starting again on June 30th).

For me, being an autodidact was largely related to my learning disability, one that I share with my father but which we took two very different paths to overcome.

I graduated high school and swore never to back to school. School was hard for me, I had to study a lot to do well. Today I still employ strategies of note-taking and multimedia to grasp concepts. I also learn through immersion and have a much easier time understanding something if I spend a lot of time drilling down to the bottom and work my way up from specific to general. This takes longer and is really hard to do in a school setting where you’re taught pieces, quizzed on them, and then brought to the next part. Over time I have learned that I often have a much greater understanding than my peers at the end, but along the way it certainly doesn’t feel that way, because I struggle a lot more and ask a lot of strange questions.

Overall, my philosophy has been that if I need additional education, there are plenty of opportunities for me to get it. Putting myself into substantial debt (and the stress of a school setting) in the beginning of adulthood when I don’t actually know what I want to do anyway seemed like it would have been a serious waste.

My father graduated high school, and reading letters he sent to my grandfather I learned that he was a dedicated intellectual who also struggled. But college was the Thing To Do if you wanted to have a professional career in late 1960s-early 1970s. It was a sign of prestige and what was expected from an upper middle class family. It seems to me that it was less about “smart not being enough” and more “if you, have the means, you go to college.”

With this in mind, I spent last week going through some of my father’s papers from Bethany College in West Virginia. My father was very proud of the time he spent at Bethany getting his Journalism degree, participating in school publications, a fraternity and a youth conservative/libertarian party.

I received a Super8 from my Aunt Meg where he is walking around the Bethany campus, showing off his dorm room and what looks like the fraternity house.

Of course graduation itself was a big deal for him as well, so I was happy to find photos from that occasion.


Posing with my grandfather

And in the collection of paintings sent to me, his diploma (which I’m shipping off to my youngest sister this week).

A handful of other photos from his graduation here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157644277944608/

I also learned that in 1978 he established the “James W. Carty Jr. Award” presented to “an outstanding student who excels in work with the campus print media.” Going through papers it looks like he got a notification letter as late as 1999 for a student who has received it.

I’m really proud of my father. He never lost his passion for learning in spite of difficulties, and made the step that I couldn’t do in going to and completing college. I’ve also found myself softening on the idea of higher education. There are so many experiences that he and others had in these higher learning institutions and professional networking opportunities that I have simply missed out on.

He also left an inspiring legacy for me that stressed hard work as the route to success and brought me up in a culture that saw exceptional performance as the norm.

Filed under: family

My father traveled

Saturday, May 24th, 2014 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Following the passing of my grandmother this winter my aunts Elaine and Meg sent me a few boxes of my father’s possessions that my grandparents had kept in their care since his passing in 2004.

Going through all of this paperwork has been sad and I’ve learned more about my father than I knew growing up, but one thing I did know was that he traveled a lot in his youth. As a result, I’ve had the travel bug for as long as I can remember, but it’s only in the past few years that I’ve finally had the opportunity to do it. South America and Antarctica are the last two continents I have to cross off my list, plus various specific countries I want to visit.

A few boxes of slides that came along with the paperwork spoke to his travels, showing trips to Spain and a safari in Africa. I had 57 slides in total transferred into digital, which was an expensive endeavor at $2.25 each (need to look into their bulk deal next time!), but I’m really impressed with how clear they came out.

In the collection I found an article about a trip taken in what the photos indicate was 1967, making my father 15 or 16 at the time of the trip. The article describes that they did a touchdown in Lisbon and then spent a day in Madrid and Rome. From the slides from when he was in Spain, I learned that they go to see and go inside Las Ventas Bullring. From the article:

They also saw the bull ring (but no bull fight) and were interested in the fact that on fight days a complete hospital was set up right at the ring with surgeons, nurses, orderlies and everything else – a silent commentary on what a bull fight may be expected to produce.


My father and Uncle Paul outside Las Ventas (and inside too)

They also were able to visit the Royal Palace, where the article writes:

They went to the Royal Palace which they were told has somewhere around 2,800 rooms. “But we only saw about 50 of them” Carl says.

More photos from the trip here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157644678697471/

As a favorite of my father’s, Madrid is still in the top places I’d like to visit some time.

I also had a box of slides labeled “Extra Africa” which were dated 1973 and showed one of my father’s safari trips in Africa, including a rare photo of rhinos that I remember him being quite proud of:

And a hilarious photo of a large sleeping lion:

Now I’ve been to Africa, but never a safari (though feeding monkeys in Ghana was one of the best experiences of my life). Based on his passport stamps, I was able to determine that he went to Kenya and Tanzania during his travels. Doing a proper safari to see big wild animals in Africa is totally still on my list.

More photos from their time in Africa here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157644733378853/

Finally, there was also a post card from when my father visited Hong Kong – somewhere I actually have been!

On the back of the postcard my father writes that they visited Kowloon. Based on passport stamps it looks like he went to Hong Kong in 1973.

My father also had stories about traveling to Egypt that I remember slides from (Cairo is totally on my list once things settle down) and I know there are more Africa slides floating around. I’ll have to follow up with my relatives to see if I can borrow them to be processed to digital.

Filed under: family, travel

Ubuntu 14.04 Presentations at FeltonLUG and BALUG

Wednesday, May 21st, 2014 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

This past week I’ve had the opportunity to join two separate Linux Users Groups (LUGs) to give presentations on the Ubuntu 14.04.

The talks were a full talk version of the mini talk I gave at the release party in San Francisco last month, covering:

  • Unity Desktop
  • Server
  • Phablet
  • Xubuntu

I’m a member of the Xubuntu team and use it primarily myself, which is why that flavor got special treatment ;)

The first talk was on Saturday for FeltonLUG down near Santa Cruz. Since I had a series of laptops already installed and set up from when we did the release party , I packed them up and brought them along with me.

We had a small group, so the meeting was a bit more on the informal side and folks had a lot of great questions and comments throughout the presentation. Given the group size it was also possible to have everyone give my Nexus 7 with Ubuntu on it a try, which folks had a lot of questions about.

Thanks to Bob Lewis and Larry Cafiero for being such great hosts, at their scenic drive recommendation my husband and I had a wonderful trip up route 1 along the coast on our way home.

Last night I joined BALUG here in San Francisco. I brought along my trusty tahr and pile of demo laptops for this presentation as well.

In addition to the great questions about the direction of Ubuntu in general (desktops! servers! clouds! tablets! phones!) I was really happy to have server folks in my audience for this talk who were eager to hear about the changes to virtualization technologies and such on the server side. I even was able to have a chat with a sysadmin who is doing a lot of virtualization and told me that her team is looking at deploying OpenStack in the near future.

Slides from both presentations are available online, the BALUG one includes some screenshots from Xubuntu since I was using a Unity-based laptop to present there:

The .odp versions of these slides are also available, just swap out .pdf for .odp in each url.

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

Back East and Out West

Tuesday, May 20th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

A few weeks ago MJ and I flew to Philadelphia to do some visiting with family and so I could speak at LOPSA-East. The timing worked out well since it was also the week of our first anniversary and we got married in Pennsylvania.

We had a wonderful dinner on our anniversary at the same restaurant that we took our family to prior to the wedding.

Our wedding cake came from Bredenbeck’s Bakery in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia and they offer a free anniversary cake in order to curb the “freeze top of cake” tradition. We picked up ours on Monday afternoon and fortunately we were staying in an Extended Stay hotel for most of our stay so we had a refrigerator (and even a big knife, fork and plates!) so we could enjoy the cake over a few days, yum!

As always, it was really nice to be able to catch up with some family and friends while we were in town. It was quite a busy trip though. I’m hoping we can schedule a proper vacation some time this year instead of only having “short trips attached to a conference.” As fun as they can be, I could really use a beach.

Well, a warm beach. We have beaches in northern California. On Saturday on our way home from FeltonLUG where I gave a presentation on Ubuntu 14.04 we took the long route home and were able to enjoy the scenes of Route 1 up the coast. California is truly my favorite place, it is always nice to take a coastal drive for the beautiful reminder.

Finally, it’s not all been roses over here. I’ve been pretty sick on and off since just prior to my trip to Montreal in April for PyCon. I had to take a couple of days off of work, missed the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta last week after an emergency room visit (thankfully we mostly ruled out appendicitis) and have generally been trying to take it easy. Next Tuesday I go in for more diagnostic tests that will hopefully determine what is causing my abdominal pain. In the meantime, small meals and plenty of liquids are getting me through with minimal pain.

Running has taken a back seat since getting sick, but I’m hoping I can get back to it once I get a diagnosis and work out some kind of treatment plan that can factor in cardio workouts again. Being in constant pain (even dull pain) is also exhausting. Every day I’ve had to carefully plan out my work schedule so I can get a full 8 hours in, be cautious about how much personal work I’m doing and cut back on going out so not to get too exhausted and make things worse. Also, as much as I enjoyed catching up with Once Upon a Time and binge watching the first season of The Paradise, I’m now terribly bored of this whole “taking it easy” thing. There’s a reason I work so much!

Filed under: family, health, life, philadelphia, travel

Open Business Conference 2014

Sunday, May 18th, 2014 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

Back in 2010 I attended the Open Source Business Conference for the first time. It was only a few months after moving to San Francisco, and that and the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit were my first exposure to major companies coming to conferences to get serious about open source adoption. It was a really inspiring event, as a passionate advocate of open source for years, watching it go mainstream has been a big deal for me personally (and, it turns out, my career).

The conference has since been rebranded the Open Business Conference, where they are focusing all all kinds of open, from open infrastructure planning to open data. Even better, I was excited to see that so many major companies are now not only advocating use of open source software, but are now employing programmers and engineers like myself to contribute directly to the open source projects they are using.

It was held at The Palace Hotel, which I can see from my bedroom window. Ostensibly I was attending as a local to help staff the HP booth, where I happily joined Jeanne and another local representative from the printer team at HP. But I was fortunate that the conference closed the booth areas during talks and booth staff were encouraged to attend the keynotes and sessions, hooray!

The first keynote from Matt Asay of MongoDB was slightly more toned down than the “we have made it!” excitement of the event in 2010. His message was that while open source can be called mainstream at this point, we have not yet saturated the industry and there are key spaces where open source still isn’t doing a great job of competing with proprietary vendors in the enterprise.

It was great to hear from Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, Founder, Chairman & CEO and WSO2 about their commitment to open source in their middleware product offerings. I also enjoyed hearing from Dr. Ibrahim Haddad of Samsung that they’ve launched the OSS Group to work toward becoming more of a leader in the open source world. Both of these companies were showing dedication to the open source ecosystem for similar reasons centered around their own products depending upon it, a faster path to innovation (starting from solid, open source core) and that the proverbial writing is on the wall when it comes to companies pushing back against vendor lock in and running vital business functions on too much proprietary code.

There were also a couple OpenStack related keynotes from Alan Clark of the OpenStack Foundation and Bill Hilf of HP Cloud. Clark echoed some of the business reasons for choosing open source covered by others, and specifically cited the success of OpenStack in an ecosystem of multiple vendors collaborating under a foundation, rather than a central company driving development. Hilf of HP focused more on defining hybrid clouds in the complex enterprise networks of today where customers can’t easily fit into defined boxes for solutions.

Other highlights the first day included a talk by Donnie Berkholz where he talked about the current divide in DevOps between communities that come from an Operations background and those that come from a Development background. Ops folks tend to be focusing on configuration management where devs are more interested in APIs, SDKs and Continuous Integration. Both communities could benefit from working more closely together to merge their efforts and even their conferences to a more solidified DevOps movement. I also enjoyed Svetlana Sicular’s talk on “the Internet of data” where she spoke about some of the current challenges that organizations and our society as a whole have with big data. There is a considerable amount of data out there that could be doing everything from solving small problems to saving lives, if we can just learn how to appropriately (and safely) share and process it all.

It was also great to hear from Intel and Dish Network on the Open Source work they’ve been doing. I also enjoyed much of the talk from Sanjib Sahoo of tradeMONSTER about their use of open source, but was pretty disappointed that they seem to almost actively choose not to contribute features back to the open source projects they use. I find the excuse that “open source development is not our business” to be wearing pretty thin these days when you see companies like Samsung and HP making such major efforts.

After the opening keynotes, I think my favorite presentation was by Dianne Marsh of Netflix talking about the Continuous Delivery system and “monkeys” that they have in production to test the resiliency, conformity and more in their infrastructure and applications. This work is cool enough and made it a valuable session for me, but what made it noteworthy was that key portions of this infrastructure are open source at: netflix.github.io. Awesome!

The last two talks I went to were related once again to OpenStack, first Alex Freedland of Mirantis whose points about the current open source ecosystem were very valuable, most notably that innovation is now happening in the open source space rather than attempting to play catch up by offering open source alternatives to proprietary solutions. The second was by Andrew Clay Shafer whose talk was related to a blog post from last November about some of the weaknesses of OpenStack. While I don’t agree with all of his points, his slides are here and get to his specific critiques around slide 24. He also offered some suggestions on how to improve development, most notably by increasing the focus on OpenStack users, particularly smaller organizations who currently struggle with it.

In all, it’s definitely a more business-centric conference than I’m used to attending (which is by design) but I found a lot of value in many of the sessions even from a technical perspective.

More photos from the conference available here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157644220587259/

Filed under: events, san francisco, tech

Ridgewood Schoolhouse Museum

Thursday, May 15th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Back in February I lost my grandmother. Due to her wishes, timing (middle of a rough winter in New Hampshire) and our family being spread all over the world there wasn’t a service immediately following her passing. So when I learned I’d be in New Jersey in April I made time in my schedule to visit the Schoolhouse Museum, maintained by the Ridgewood Historical Society, where my grandmother volunteered for years.

I have fond memories of the Schoolhouse as a child. When I last went it was still set up as a one room schoolhouse with a desk for the teacher in front, blackboards and desks for students. Displays of historical artifacts lined the edges of the room and I remember stories from my grandfather extolling the benefits of the one room schoolhouse.

Since I had been there last, there were a lot of changes. Instead of being set up like a classroom, it’s now a series of more sparsely spaced exhibits which gives the museum a much brighter feel. And while I do miss the traditional feel of the old place, this new format has allowed them to have more extensive revolving exhibits, which keep the museum relevant to locals and visitors alike.

It was nice to see the back rooms still had some of the artifacts I was familiar with, from uniforms of various soldiers in various wars who called Ridgewood home, to the farm exhibit that spoke to the farming origins of the village.

During our visit they were showcasing a diversity exhibit in the main room, seeking to highlight some of historically less celebrated (and even actively discriminated against) communities that have made up Ridgewood over the years. The beautiful exhibit highlighted artifacts from the Native Americans who first lived on the land, and community members of Jewish, African American, Korean and Irish ancestry.

Perhaps best of all, I was able to meet a couple of the docents who were exceptionally welcoming to us. One of them had worked with my grandmother and they both were able to fill me in on some of the extraordinary work my grandmother did organizing some of their collections. We even had the honor of going upstairs to the attic to browse their storage, walking up that narrow staircase also brought back a flood of memories!

Huge thanks to the docents I met with for making the visit such a pleasure, and to Board of Trustees president Sheila Brogan for making me feel welcome via email prior to our visit!

More photos from our visit are available here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157644219844720/

Filed under: family, travel
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