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And it’s February on the home side

Tuesday, Feb 4th, 2014 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Work and projects have certainly kept me busy, but I’ve also had time for home, self and family things.

Caligula wasn’t the only one who had some dental work done, both MJ and I had to go in at the end of January. I was reminded the hard way that Novocaine upsets my stomach, but aside from the queasy afternoon everything went well.

In the midst of being so busy lately, I realized I should probably work to get out to socialize more outside of work/conference/event things. I do have friends in the city now, so I really need to do a better job of reaching out to them when I’m feeling lonely.

Last week I finished off the 5th week of Couch-to-5K with a brutal 20 minute run, thankfully for week 6 it was back to a mix of running and walking. It was cool to learn that I could run for a full 20 minutes though, even if it was painful and difficult!

Last week my Aunt Mary and Uncle Joe were in town for a conference and I was able to meet up with them for a couple meals. Early in the week we met up for drinks and then for a great dinner at Zero Zero. On Saturday we met them in the late afternoon for a quick visit to Pier 39 (sea lions! view of Alcatraz!) before we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge for an exceptional dinner at Murray Circle Restaurant at Cavallo Point. Afterwards we spent a bit of time there at Fort Baker soaking in the view of the city and the bridge.

The weekend wrapped up with some work at home. We finally received the last lamp we ordered from the bedroom, and also were able to take time to hang the mirror we bought with the first lamp.

It’s so nice to finally have a mirror over the dresser! And with this completed our bedroom is pretty much done. I think completing the living room will be our next project.

We also have our computer project to complete, getting our media server and storage server online. I was reminded of this even further when I got on my desktop this morning and was confronted with a wall of filesystem errors. I’ve put in an order for a couple new drives, which is not what I had planned on doing this week, but will finally give me the opportunity to set up RAID1 for my desktop so I don’t need to be quite so worried about drive failures (I keep backups, but, you know).

Filed under: family, life

A couple articles, PyCon and a keynote in Croatia

Monday, Feb 3rd, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

It’s hard to believe that January is already over. It was quite the full month with my trip to Perth and then a lot of work and project stuff happening. Looking at my calendar for the year I seem to have a pretty full schedule, during which I’m also dying to squeeze in a visit to my youngest sister and my nephew in Maine (aiming for March).

Last month I was happy to see my Code Review for System Administrators article come out in the January issue of USENIX ;login: logout. It’s an online-only publication but it was great to be able to transform the talk I’ve given on the subject to text, and working with Rikki Endsley is always a pleasure. I was also interviewed several months back my comments made their way into Issue 180 of Linux Format in Jono Bacon’s Equality and open source article.

Apologies for the pay wall for both of these articles, if you’re a USENIX member you can grab the ;login: logout article, and the Linux Format one should be available for general consumption in the next few months.

Logout

In conference news, I’m officially one of the TAs for the Build your own PiDoorbell! Learn Home Automation with Python workshop at PyCon 2014 in Montreal in April. I’ve never attended a PyCon and I’m super excited about meeting up with Akk, Rupa and the other TAs to start learning what we’ll be teaching others. I’m thinking I’ll set up my motion sensor next to Simcoe’s food bowl so I can make sure Caligula doesn’t eat her food. I’ll also be pitching in at the HP booth during the conference days.

PyCon 2014

I also learned on Sunday that not only is HP going to be a sponsor of DORS CLUC 2014, a Linux User Group Convention in Zagreb, Croatia in June but will be giving a keynote! I’ll be there to talk about the fully open source Continuous Integration system that we use for the OpenStack project. Bonus, this will be my opportunity to finally meet Jasna Benčić, a rising tech star who I met through work on several Ubuntu projects a couple years back, including her tireless work on the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter and Ubuntu Learning.

DORS CLUG

I’ve put in a few more talk submissions to other conferences, so it’s shaping up to be a really exciting year.

Filed under: events, tech, travel, work

Ubuntu California planning for the Southern California Linux Expo

Monday, Feb 3rd, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The Ubuntu California team does a lot of small events throughout the year, from release parties and jams to regular Ubuntu Hours all over the state. But our big event of the year is always the Southern California Linux Expo.

We kick off the expo with an Ubucon on SCaLE’s Friday of miniconfs.

Ubucon

I’ve had the pleasure of being invited to speak at this event for the past few years, and this year is no exception! The Ubucon lineup for Friday the 21st is as follows:

My 5 ways to get involved with Ubuntu today talk will cover ways that regular users can get involved with while only having minimal user-level experience with Ubuntu. In preparation, this week I’ll also be launching a series of posts where I’ll be outlining these ways as a bit of a sneak peek as to what to expect during the talk.

On Saturday and Sunday the team will be running an Ubuntu booth in the expo area. Over the years we’ve gotten quite skilled at knowing what we should bring and have used the wiki to list out everything we need to have folks sign up to volunteer and bring things:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CaliforniaTeam/Projects/Scale12x

This year I’m fortunate to have Robert Wall making the trek down to SCaLE by car, so he can bring along all the booth items I signed up for (no stuffing them in my suitcase!) as well as having him on booth duty. Also thanks to Philip Ballew, Stephen Briles, Mickey Lyle, Matt Mootz and José Antonio Rey who have already signed up for booth duty throughout the weekend. We also have System76 to thank for providing us a couple demo laptops for the booth and the rumor is Canonical has loaned us a couple of phones running Ubuntu to show off too.

SCaLE11x booth
Our booth at SCaLE11x in 2013

I’ll be dropping by the booth as time allows, but I learned a couple conferences ago that I don’t have the energy to run a booth all weekend and speak at a conference. My second talk of the weekend will be at the main SCaLE conference on Code Review for Systems Administrators on Saturday at 6pm, where I’ll be talking about the system we use for the Infrastructure team of the OpenStack project (my day job!).

Filed under: events, LoCo, tech, ubuntu planet

Simcoe’s January vet visit and Caligula’s cold

Sunday, Feb 2nd, 2014 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Simcoe’s last vet visiting to do an analysis of her blood levels was back in November. Since we noticed her levels were creeping up at the time, but she also had some sniffles, perhaps that impacted results? We came up a plan with the vet to recheck her in 2 months (rather than 3) and went ahead and scheduled her appointment to coincide with some dental work Caligula was having done.

We dropped Caligula off at the vet the morning of January 25th and commenced worrying about him all day. Unfortunately those sniffles I mentioned Simcoe having back in November were ones that had continued with Caligula over these past couple months with varying severity. We put him on antibiotics in mid January, but they decided to do a sinus x-ray prior to the dental work to figure out what was going on and whether they could go on with the dental work. He was still congested so they decided to give him an antibiotic shot this time and go ahead with the dental work. He came out from the dental work a bit drugged but ok. They followed this up with a culture to see if he had a bacterial infection.

Results from the culture came back Wednesday, he has a strain of Pseudomonas. It’s resistant to both antibiotics he’s already been on so we picked up a third type yesterday and started the treatment last night. Simcoe is sniffling again too, so we my need to put her on it too.

When we went to pick up Caligula following his dental work, we had scheduled a vet visit for Simcoe. Since he had the cat carrier, we put her on a harness and lead to go to the vet, which she really was not at all happy with, she prefers being able to hide in her carrier.

The exam went well, she’s continuing to maintain a health weight, which is always a good sign for a cat with renal failure. Last visit she was 9.5lbs, this time she’s 9.6lbs.

Unfortunately both her BUN and CRE levels have gone up a little, 53 to 57 on BUN and 3.5 to 3.6 on CRE.

BUN: 57 (normal range: 14-36)
CRE: 3.6 (normal range: .6-2.4)

This is something to continue to keep an eye on if the trends continue in this direction.

For now we’re back on the 3 month check in schedule and will handle her sniffles as needed, hopefully this round of antibiotics will do the trick for Caligula.

Filed under: caligula, simcoe

CloudCamp Hackathon and Ubuntu User Days

Sunday, Jan 26th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’ve had a busy weekend! On Friday night I headed over to the San Francisco Hub for a CloudCamp Social Good Hackathon sponsored by HP Cloud (my employer) and Intel.

The event kicked off with an introduction, including words from Dave Nielsen where he spoke about CloudCamps and touched upon how HP Cloud uses OpenStack and works in the OpenStack community. As part of the sponsor team, I wasn’t participating in the hackathon teams, but it was my job for the evening to make sure folks could get signed up for their HP Cloud accounts and use the promo code for the event. It was really cool to see the HP Cloud Horizon interface being used. Hooray Horizon!

It was a great experience for me to get out of my infrastructure and development mindset and see all the work we do with OpenStack paying off in powering the servers that developers are using to build real applications. The Hackathon itself was also inspiring because all of the projects were for social good, from finding mental health resources to helping to solving the pipeline problem related to women in STEM.

Sunday I was able to have some great chats with colleagues and others about how OpenStack cloud platforms could better serve the application developers. It’s clear that some of the terms that systems administrators and infrastructure developers are very different from the world of application development, and some of the concepts can be confusing. I see a fair amount of people using file sharing services to move files where it seems to me a proper object store with an API would be optimal.

I didn’t attend on Saturday due to my previous commitment to host Ubuntu User Days. Over the past several weeks, Jose Antonio Rey and I have searched the community for volunteers to give user-level classes in the Ubuntu Classroom IRC channels for our day of sessions. I was keen to make this event a success after missing one for raring, but we kept the schedule to only 9 full sessions so it was manageable and we maintained the quality we were seeking in instructors and sessions.

I’m happy to report that we didn’t have any last minute cancellations, no shows or timezone mix-ups! The instructors were all talented and professional and made for a series of sessions that we should all be proud of.

Session logs were made available directly following each session:

Huge thanks to all the community members who participated in this event.

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, ubuntu planet

My pink WASD keyboard

Sunday, Jan 26th, 2014 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

I like the color pink. Over the years I’ve collected lots of pink electronics that have measured up to their non-pink counterparts, from pink ethernet cables (hey, that’s my photo on Gizmodo!) to my pink netbook that has traveled the world with me (frequently still seen at Ubuntu Hours, always came along to Ubuntu Developer Summits and recently was at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong).

Keyboards have always been tricky though. Ones that come in pink tend to be princess or Barbie themed for little girls, which means they are either too small or of poor quality. I have found some larger, adult-ish pink keyboards, but they have never been mechanical, which is my strong preference. I’m on my keyboard all day, a good keyboard is important.

Then my friend Karen McLoughlin Largent posted a picture of her custom-colored keyboard from WASD Keyboards. It was pink! And mechanical! Be still my heart!

I went with the WASD V2 104-Key Custom Mechanical Keyboard with Cherry MX Blue switches (though Brown was also a contender), no sound dampeners, and all the keys in pink, with Classic layout and function keys, just like my current IBM keyboard.


I was going to crop my messy desk, but if you look close, I have the following pink items peeking into this photo: pen, mini swiss army knife, earbuds, USB cable, USB stick

Oh, and the final thing that made me spend over $150 on a keyboard? They let you have a custom OS key, and Ubuntu (as well as Linux Tux) were part of their default options.

Even better? I live near where they put them together, so I ordered it Wednesday and with no rush and standard shipping I was plugging it in to my computer on Saturday.

I love it. It’s much more clicky than the Model M successor IBM keyboard that I had previously used, which had dampeners, but after an hour I was quite at home with my noisy new friend. Hooray!

Filed under: pink, ubuntu planet

Much ado about otters and lamps

Monday, Jan 20th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last week I had a cold and was getting over jet lag, just like when I came back from Hong Kong! So this is my second cold of the season. Fortunately, this one seems to be clearing up more quickly than the last but I’m still not thrilled that I’ve been knocked over by colds twice since November. Most of the week I just focused on my work and slept a lot, ignoring everything else.

By Friday morning I was feeling more alive and had a much more productive work day with my head finally clearing. I even managed to get out on my next Couch-to-5K run, even if I was sniffly and more out of breath than usual. It was really good to get out of the house.

Saturday I got around to making Challah french toast for the first time, it was as delicious as everyone told me it would be. Side of turkey bacon too.

The rest of the day was mostly spent catching up on some reading and doing some other “day off” tasks. After sundown we headed down to Colma for some home stuff shopping. Later in the evening I was able to get some of the Partimus accounting stuff behind me, including the year end report for the board, now that I have all the bank stuff from my name change squared away.

Sunday I went out for my run and then hunkered down to get caught up with open source work I had been ignoring all week. I still have a lot on my plate, but I’m happy to say that the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter was in nice shape for release today and our schedule for Ubuntu User Days on Saturday is almost complete.

In the late afternoon we decided to head to Fisherman’s Wharf for some fried seafood. There were too many birds, I was happy when we vacated the bird area and went over to see the sea lions at Pier 39. There are more of them than I’m used to seeing, I’m happy to see that they are almost back up at numbers seen 10 years ago. While we were there we also decided to swing by the Aquarium of the Bay to finally see their Otters: Watershed Ambassadors exhibit, featuring a trio of adorable river otters, Shasta, Tubbs and Wildcat.

But the otters where sleeping in a big pile of otter cuteness while we were there and weren’t up for entertaining us further:

It was nice to see them though, even if it was just in snuggle pile with their heads popping up here and there. The jellyfish were also cool (naturally, I waited for the pink light to take my picture).

Today was a bank holiday here in the US, so I had some shopping lined up. First it was to get new running shoes, we shall see tomorrow if having new shoes prevents ankle soreness. We then we went out to do some bedside lamp shopping, which is pretty much the last piece we needed to complete our bedroom.

We shopped around a bit, and ended up at Lamps Plus where we had a very pleasant shopping experience. The staff was friendly and helpful and we also managed to get an mirror that I’m hoping we can hang soon. Unfortunately most of what we wanted was out of stock, so we had to shift our order a bit to have the rest of it shipped to us. I did get to bring home one bed side lamp though!

Tomorrow I hope to make it out to the BALUG meeting on CiviCRM. We’ve been trying to get CiviCRM going for Partimus, but our lack of people power for maintaining it both software-wise and content-wise has prevented this. I’m hoping a talk about it will inspire me to have another look. This upcoming Friday, part of Saturday and Sunday I’ll be helping out with the Openstack CloudCamp Social Good Hackathon, I’ll be pitching in to make sure folks can get registered with our infrastructure and documenting the fun with my camera.

Filed under: animals, food, life

C25K: Week 4, Day 2

Sunday, Jan 19th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last month I started Couch-to-5K. Except for one week I had to take off due to a cold (this sucked, but I was in bad shape) I’ve managed to stick to the program. I have some observations to share.

It’s hard every time

Every week I look at the proposed schedule and think “Run for $X minutes?! I can’t do that! I will die!” And then I go out and do it anyway, even though it’s really hard. So I am definitely making progress, on the first week it was running for a minute that made me want to die, this week it’s running 5 minutes that kills me and the 3 minute bursts are a nice break from the 5 minute ones.

Next week I have to run for 8 minutes. That will kill me!

I like running after I’ve run

I feel really good after I’ve run (and taken a shower). Much like going to the gym once did, it helps me have more energy for the day and is a net benefit, even if I have to force myself to do it. I don’t think I like the actual deed very much, I swear a lot in my head and want it to be over.

I am exploring new worlds!

The first two things here I could have anticipated, but this one is very interesting to me. I knew getting out and running in a beautiful place here in San Francisco would be great, but I didn’t expect how much greater it would be while traveling. I thought it may have been a mistake to start this right before going on trips to Florida and Perth, but instead it was brilliant. During both of these trips I got much more familiar with the area I was staying in (looking for places I could run) and more in tune with the climate (looking for when I could run, both were hot in the daytime!).

I love numbers

OK, we knew that. I’m using the Active.com C25K running app and it’s been awesome to keep track of stats and have maps of where I ran!

Selfies aren’t part of the app ;) I did that on my own.

Completed run in Hollywood, Florida!

The challenge in Florida was humidity and heat, even in December when the temps were still getting into the mid 80s with humidity during the day. I had to avoid running when the sun was at the highest and humidity was up, so I tended toward late afternoon. Mornings are probably better, but jet lag from California prevented that.

Completed run along the Swan River in Perth, Australia!

I was really worried about Perth. Not only is southwestern Australia hot, it’s summer there and I was in town for a heat wave where daytime temperatures were peaking around 100. Fortunately Perth has this amazing ability to cool off almost immediately once you’re out of the sun. Shade is wonderful and morning and evening times are quite comfortable. I got my running in during the morning before the sun had a chance to cause too much trouble. Jet lag helped me here, waking up at 5AM and going for a run was perfect.

Completed Run along the Embarcadero here at home in San Francisco!

This was my run today! I took a week off last week for my cold and was dreading starting week 4, fearing I’d backslid too much since Perth, but I was fortunate. I started back up on Friday and it wasn’t easy but it never is and I managed to pick up where I left off.

Things hurt

Muscles in my calves are taking the brunt of the soreness from all of this, but it’s a good, exercisey hurt. I’ve had some trouble with my right ankle too, so I’ve iced it after some runs and I now have “buy new running shoes” on my list for this weekend. The sneakers I have now are for running, but they’re old and a bit too worn out.

I run slow and haven’t lost weight

But that’s ok :)

Filed under: health

Tourist in Perth

Saturday, Jan 11th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I wasn’t sure what to expect with Perth. To the best of my knowledge it was that odd city on the wrong side of Australia and I had vaguely heard that it had nice beaches and that it would be very hot.

Now I’m happy to say that Perth is one of my favorite cities. The public transit is clean, the downtown of the city is nice, there is tons of green spaces and in general it felt like home. The heat was indeed bad, as we’re in the middle of summer down here, but the humidity seemed quite low, so even when it got into the 90s there was relief in the shade. With so much mention of the beach, and the realization that it’s beach on the Indian Ocean, which I’d never touched, I had to spend some time at the beach.

I went with my friend and colleague Anita Kuno, and it made for a wonderful relaxing time as I dealt with the cold I managed to pick up while traveling. The water was on the cool side, but still very pleasant to swim in. Plus, it was beautiful.

Oh, and it was fun to get immediate use out of my linux.conf.au speakers’ towel!

I was able to get some shopping in too, picking up some of the typical tourist goodies (I didn’t have to get an opal though, MJ took care of that one on a trip to Sydney a few years ago). I skipped the didgeridoo and picked up an awesome kangaroo leather hat. Now, I love kangaroos, so getting a hat made of one is still causing me moral conflict. It’s a really nice hat (see above!).

On my last day in Perth I decided I’d go to the zoo. Unfortunately the weather didn’t want to cooperate and the forecast called for 43F (which it got up to, that’s 109F). So I altered my plan some and decided to arrive right when the zoo opened at 9AM and then just stay for an hour or two so I could see the Australian animals. When I asked about buses, the Hilton concierge pointed me to the ferry terminal and recommended that instead – it was the same price ($2) and ferry!

I made the 10 minute walk down to the ferry and was happy to learn that the ride across the river only took a few minutes, but it was a great ride.


I sat in front to pretend I was driving (just kidding (no I’m not))

Once I got off the ferry there were signs pointing to the zoo which I followed and bought my ticket. First stop – Australian walkabout!

That’s where I saw my first live kangaroos in Australia.

It was actually a much cooler experience than I’ve had with kangaroos at other zoos. The area where the kangaroos (and wallabies) live is fenced off but inside the fence where you walk is open so I found myself startled when a kangaroo popped out of the bushes and hopped down the walkway right in front of me. Given the heat (81F when I arrived, up to 91F by the time I left just after 10AM), most of the kangaroos were sleeping (or rolling or relaxing) in the shade.

I also got to see a wombat, which was much bigger than I expected, and caught a glimpse of a little numbat before it hid away. Australia-wise, I was happy to see some Little Penguins.

Before leaving the zoo I also did a loop around their African Savanna, which was thankfully shaded through most of the walk. Even still, I was exhausted and quite hot before I decided to finish up my zoo visit for the day. I took the bus back to my hotel to cool off and finish packing for my evening flight.

More photos from my trip here (I will be adding lots more here when I get home): http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157639640699323/

Filed under: animals, life, travel

Final day at LCA 2014 with more OpenStack

Saturday, Jan 11th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Aww, the last day of Linux.conf.au! My schedule called for camping out in the WEBB lecture hall all day to watch talks by several of my OpenStack and HP colleagues.

Things kicked off with James E. Blair’s talk titled How OpenStack Improves Code Quality with Project Gating and Zuul. He did a quick review of the OpenStack Infrastructure and then did a closer look at how we run tests on every piece of code submitted and then accepted and showed how Zuul manages the queue. He also walked the audience through the YAML config files for how Zuul is configured. Slides here.

Next up was Robert Collins on Diskimage-builder: deep dive into a ‘machine compiler’. While there are other tools in the space of DiB, Robert explained the requirements that this particular tool satisfies, and then went through the internals of the “ubuntu” element as an example of how a specific image element is structured and what it produces in the resulting build.

After lunch Clark Boylan did his talk, Processing Continuous Integration Log Events. The OpenStack CI system produces billions of log events and this talk centered around how they are handled and processed. He began by talking about how we serve up the plain log files to developers (366M worth for each full test run) and how they sought out a system of processing these to make them easier for developers to use. Requirements for it were a friendly UI, REST API, and a decent querying language and the solution ended up being logstash, Elasticsearch and the Kibana dashboard. He then talked about how this has led to elastic-recheck which has helped track down bugs in the infrastructure more efficiently and report the results to developers. The “living document” (kept updated over time) version of the slides are here: here.

Last talk of the day! Most of the talks of the day were OpenStack-related but could easily be used for other projects (indeed, that’s a core reason we’re giving these talks). This last talk actually was OpenStack related though, with Devananda van der Veen giving his Provisioning Bare Metal with OpenStack talk. I saw a version of this talk last year, and it was interesting to see how it’s changed as the Ironic project progresses and he could expand upon how it works. I was also glad to see that the community developing it is diverse in terms of companies contributing.

Finally, it’s awesome to see that most of the talks from LCA are already available for downloading! Kudos to the LCA volunteers who worked on this, so all the talks I’ve mentioned in this post can be downloaded from here: http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2014/Friday

The conference finished with the announcement of LCA 2015 in Auckland and LCA 2016 to be held in Geelong (I had to look that one up). And then a series of lightning talks.

In all, a great conference, I hope I can attend again in the future!

More photos from the conference here (I will be adding more here when I get home): http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157639634280886/

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, travel
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