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OpenStack Design Summit Day 2

Wednesday, Nov 6th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Day 2 of the OpenStack summit here in Hong Kong began with a series of really great keynotes. First up were three major Chinese companies, iQIYI (online video), Qihoo 360 (Internet platform company) and Ctrip (travel services) about how they all use OpenStack in their companies (video here). We also learned several OpenStack statistics, including that there are more Active Technical Contributors (ATCs) in Beijing than any other city in the world and Shanghai is pretty big too. This introduction also fed a theme of passion for Open Source and OpenStack that was evident throughout the keynotes that followed.

I was then really impressed with the Red Hat keynote, particularly Mark McLoughlin’s segment. Having been actively working on Open Source for over 10 years myself, his words of success we’ve had from Linux to OpenStack really resonated with me. For years all of us passionate Open Source folks have been talking about (and giving presentations) the benefits of open solutions, so seeing the success and growth today really does feel like validation, we had it right, and that feeds us to continue (literally, many of us are getting paid for this now, I love open source and used to do it all for free). He also talked about TripleO, yeah! (video here)

Next up was Monty Taylor’s keynote for HP where he got to announce the formal release of Horizon Dashboard for use with HP Cloud at horizon.hpcloud.com. It was great to hear Monty echo some of the words of Mark when discussing the success of OpenStack and then diving into the hybrid testing infrastructure we now have between the public HP Cloud and Rackspace testing infrastructures and the new “private” TripleO clouds we’re deploying (admittedly, of course I enjoyed this, it’s what I’m working on!). He also discussed much of what customers had been asking for when approaching OpenStack, including questions around openness (is it really open?), maturity, security, complexity and upgrade strategies. (video here)

– Neutron QA and Testing –

Neutron is tested much less than other portions of OpenStack and the team has recognized that this is a problem, so the session began by discussing the current state of testing and the limitations they’ve run into. One of the concerns discussed early in the session was recruiting contributors to work on testing, and then they dove into discussing some of the specific test cases that are failing to find solutions and assign tasks, there was in depth discussion of Tenant Isolation & Parallel Testing, which is one of their major projects. There are also several test concerns that there wasn’t time to address and will have to be tackled in a later meeting, including: Full Tempest Test Runs, Grenade Support, API Tests and Scenario Tests.

Copy of notes from this session available here: icehouse-summit-qa-neutron.txt

It’s interesting to learn in these QA sessions how many companies do their own testing. It seems that this is partially an artifact of Open Source projects historically being poor at public automation testing and largely being beholden to companies to do this behind the scenes and submit bugs and patches. I’m sure there will always be needs internally for companies to run their own testing infrastructures, but I do look forward to a time when more companies become interested in testing the common things in the shared community space.

– Tempest Policy in Icehouse –

Retrospective of successes and failures from work this past cycle. Kicked off by mentioning that they have now documented the Tempest Design Principles so all contributors are on the same page, and a suggestion was made to add time budget and scope of negative tests to the principles. Successes included the large ops and parallel testing, and usage of elastic search to help bug triaging. The weaker parts included use of and follow-up with (or not) blueprints, onboarding new contributors (need more documentation!) and prioritizing reviews (perhaps leverage reviewday more) and in general encouraging all reviewers.

Copy of notes from this session available here: icehouse-summit-qa-tempest-policy.txt

After lunch I did some wandering around the expo hall where I had a wonderful chat with Stephen Spector at the HP booth. I also got to chat with Robbie Williamson of Canonical and totally cheated on my Ubuntu ice cream by just asking him for banana with brownies instead of checking out their juju demo.

– Moving Trove integration tests to Tempest –

Trove is currently being tested independently of the core OpenStack CI system and they’ve been working to bring it in so this session walked through the plans to do this. One step identified was moving the Trove diskimage-elements into a different repo and discussed the pros and cons of adding it to the tripleo-image-elements, pros won. Built images from the job will then be pushed to tarballs.openstack.org for caching and then discussed more of what trove integration testing today does and what needs to be done to update tempest to run the tests on the devstack-gate using said cached instances.

Copy of notes from this session available here: TroveTempestTesting.txt

– Tempest Stress Test – Overview and Outlook –

The overall goals of Tempest stress testing is to find race conditions and simulate real-life load. The session walked through the current status of the tests and began outlining some of the steps to move forward, including the defining and writing of more stress tests. Beyond that, using stress tests in the gate was also reviewed where the time tests take (can valuable tests be done in under 45 minutes?) was considered so some of the pain points timing-wise were noted. There was also discussion around scenario tests and enhancing the documentation to include examples of unit/scenario tests and defining what makes a good test to make development of stress tests more straight forward.

Copy of notes from this session available here: icehouse-summit-qa-stress-tests.txt

– Parallel tempest moving forward –

Parallel testing in Tempest currently exists and speed of testing has greatly improved as a result, hooray! So this session was a review of some of the improvements needed to move forward. Topics included improving reliability, further speed improvements (first step: increase number of test runners. Eliminate setupClass? Distributed testing?) and testr UI vs Tempest UI.

Copy of notes from this session available here: icehouse-summit-qa-parallel.txt

– Zuul job runners and log management –

The first part of this session discussed log management for the logs produced from test runs, continuing an infrastructure mailing list thread from October: [OpenStack-Infra] Log storage/serving.

Next up: We use a limited number of features from Jenkins these days due to our workflow, so there has been discussion about writing a new/different job runner for Zuul that has several requirements:

  • Distributed (no centralized ‘master’ architecture)
  • Secure (should be able to run untrusted jobs)
  • Should be able to publish artifacts appropriate to a job’s security context
  • Lightweight (should do one job and simply)

Copy of notes from this session available here: icehouse-summit-zuul-job-runners-and-log.txt

– More Salt in Infra –

Much of the OpenStack Infrastructure is currently managed by Puppet, but there are some things like event-based dependencies that are not-trivial to do in Puppet but which Salt has built in support for. The primary example that inspired this was manage_projects.py which tends to have race/failure problems due to event dependencies.

Copy of notes from this session available here: icehouse-summit-more-salt-in-infra.txt

My evening wrapped up by heading down to Kowloon to enjoy dinner with several of my Infrastructure colleagues from HP, Wikimedia and the OpenStack Foundation.

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, travel

OpenStack Design Summit Day 1

Tuesday, Nov 5th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Today, Tuesday here in Hong Kong, the OpenStack Summit began!

It kicked off with a beautiful and colorful performance of the Lion dance, followed by some words of welcome from Daniel Lai, CIO of the Hong Kong Office of the Government (video of both here).

Then we had the keynotes. Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, began with an introduction to the event, announcing that there were over 3000 attendees from 50 countries and satisfying the curiosity of attendees by announcing that the next summit would take place in Atlanta, and the one following that in Paris! He then welcomed a series of presenters from Shutterstock, DigitalFilm Tree and Concur to each talk about the way that they use OpenStack components in their companies (video here). These were followed up by a great keynote by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu (video here), and a keynote from IBM (video here).

Directly following the keynotes the Design Summit sessions began. I spent much of my day in TripleO sessions.

– TripleO: Icehouse scaling design & deployment scaling/topologies –

This session included a couple of blueprints, starting off with one discussing the scaling design of the current TripleO. What is not automated (tailing of log files, etc), what is automated but slow (bootstrapping, avoidance of race conditions, etc), where we hit scaling/perf limits (network, disk i/o, database, etc), measuring and tracking tools (measure latency, collectd+graphite on undercloud, logstash+elastic search in undercloud). From there the the second half of the session discussed the needs and possibilities regarding a Heat template repository for Tuskar.

Copy of notes from this session available here: tripleo-icehouse-scaling-design.txt and tripleo-deployment-scaling-topologies.txt

– TripleO: HA/production configuration –

This session provided a venue for reviewing the components of TripleO and determining what needs to be HA, including: rabbit, qpid, db, api instances, glance store, heat-engine, neutron, nova-compute & scheduler & conductor, cinder-volume, horizon. Once defined, attendees were able to discuss the targeted solution for HA for each component which were captured in the session notes.

Copy of notes from this session available here: tripleo-icehouse-ha-production-configuration.txt

– TripleO: stable branch support and updates futures –

The discussion during this session centered around whether the TripleO project should maintain stable branches so TripleO can be deployed using non-trunk OpenStack and what components would need to be attended to to make this happen. Consensus seemed to be that this should be a goal with a support term similar to the rest of OpenStack, but more discussions will come when the project itself has grown up a bit.

Copy of notes from this session available here: icehouse-updates-stablebranches.txt

– TripleO: CI and CD automation –

This was the last TripleO session I attended. It began with an offer from Red Hat to provide a second physical cluster to complement the current HP rack that we’re using for TripleO testing. Consensus was that this new rack would be identical to the current one in case one of the providers has problems or goes away, and it was noted that having multiple “TripleO Clouds” was essential for gating. Discussion then went into what should be running test-wise and timelines for when we expect each step to be done. Then Robert Collins did a quick walkthrough of tripleo-test-cluster document that steps through our plans for putting TripleO into the Infrastructure CI system. This is my current focus in TripleO and I have a lot of work to do when I get home!

Copy of notes from this session available here: icehouse-tripleo-deployment-ci-and-cd-automation.txt

– Publishing translated documentation –

I headed over to this session due to my curiosity regarding how translations are handled and the OpenStack Infrastructure’s role in making sure the translations teams have the resources they need. The focus of this session was the formalization of getting translations published on official OpenStack docs page and when these should be published (only when translations reach 100%? If so, should a partially translated “in progress” version be published on a dev server?). There were some Infrastructure pain points that Clark Boylan was able to work with them on after the session.

Copy of notes from this session available here: icehouse-doc-translation.txt

– Infrastructure: Storyboard – Basic concepts and next steps –

Thierry Carrez led this session about Storyboard, a bug and task tracking Django application that he created a Proof of Concept for to replace Launchpad.net, which we currently use. He did a thorough review of the current limitations of Launchpad as justification for replacing it, and quickly mentioned the pool of other bug trackers that were reviewed. From there he broke into a workflow discussion in Storyboard and wrapped up the session by outlining some priorities to move it forward. I’m really excited about this project, while it’s quite the cliche to write your own bug and task tracker and I find Launchpad to be a pretty good bug tracker (as these things go), the pain points of slowness and lack of active feature development will only continue to get worse as time goes on and working on a solution now is important.

Copy of notes from this session available here: icehouse-summit-storyboard-basic-concepts-and-next.txt

– Infrastructure: External replications and hooks –

Last session of the day! The point of this session was to discuss our git replication strategy, and specifically our current policy of mirroring our repositories to GitHub. Concerns centered around casual developers getting confused or put off by our mirror there (not realizing that it’s just a mirror, not something you can do pull requests against), the benefits of discoverability and workflow for contributors used to GitHub even if they have to use Gerrit for actual submission of code, the implicit “blessing” of GitHub our repository mirrors there conveys (we don’t mirror to other 3rd party services, is this fair?) and the ingrained use of the GitHub URLs by many projects. The most practical concern with this replication was the amount of work it adds for the Infrastructure team when creating new projects if GitHub is misbehaving.

Consensus was to keep the GitHub mirrors, but to work more to replace references to cloning, etc repos to point to our new (as of August) git://git.openstack.org and https://git.openstack.org/cgit/ addresses.

Copy of notes from this session available here: icehouse-summit-external-replications-and-hooks.txt

And before I wrap up, Etherpad held up today! Clark did work this past month to deploy a new instance that closed several bugs related to our past deployment. Throughout sessions today we kept an eye on how it was doing, the graph from Cacti very clearly showed when sessions were happening (and when we were having lunch!):

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, travel

Tourist in Hong Kong

Tuesday, Nov 5th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This week I’m in Hong Kong! It’s my first time in Asia so I wanted to make sure I got some tourist time in. I arrived via a Singapore airline flight on Sunday and spent the day catching up on some things and attempting to stay awake so I could adjust to the time zone. Sunday evening I met up with some of my colleagues for dinner and we made plans to go down to Kowloon on Monday.

A rainy Monday arrived as I met several colleagues for breakfast before splitting off into groups to head out for the day. I went out with Khai Do, Clark Boylan and Ghe Rivero down to Kowloon to check out their electronics street market.

I didn’t buy anything, but I did learn about the popularity of dashboard mounted cameras here. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen one prominently for sale in the US but they were everywhere we looked in the market. While we were wandering around the street markets I let my travel companions know of my quest for the day: tourist trinkets, post cards and to eat an egg custard (MJ told me I had to try one while I was in Hong Kong!).

First up was the egg custard, which didn’t disappoint:

We then hopped back on the subway and headed over to Hong Kong Central for my tourist goodies. While we were there we also found Ice House Street, for which the next OpenStack release is named after. We got the obligatory photo-near-the-sign (thanks to Ghe for taking our photo):

I found my post cards and tourist trinkets there and we spent a lot of time walking around Central (my Fitbit tells me we walked about 5 miles before going back to the hotel) and finally settled on a place to eat. I went with the soy chicken and rice and realized I’m terribly spoiled by boneless meat I usually have in Chinese food at home. Bone in is much trickier to eat! But the meal was enjoyable and really hit the spot after all the walking in the hot, soggy weather.

We wrapped up lunch around 2PM and headed back to the hotel and expo center, arriving just in time for the opening of summit registration at 3PM. I then swung by my room quickly to drop off my conference goodies before taking the train back down to Hong Kong Central for a Women of OpenStack boat tour of the harbor.

Unfortunately the rain had picked up a bit by the evening and we ended up with quite the soggy and choppy boat ride, but the boat was very cool and I had some nice conversations, in spite of my shyness.

The evening wrapped up with all of us heading to a small bar where we enjoyed small plates and drinks before splitting off for the evening. And that wrapped up my day! The rest of this week will be spent on the OpenStack Summit. I then have Saturday and much of Sunday to squeeze some more tourist stuff in before I fly home, I’d love to see the Tian Tan Buddha and if the weather cooperates it’s terribly tempting to go to Disneyland.

Filed under: food, travel

Cinematic Titanic, classes & events and upcoming travel

Thursday, Oct 31st, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

It’s been a busy month. Fortunately in that time my ankle has pretty much healed from the sprain I got last month and I plan on heading back to the gym full force soon.

I realized that I never mentioned it here, but I was interviewed on a podcast earlier in the month about Xubuntu, available here: Frostcast Episode 084. While the 13.10 release for Xubuntu didn’t quite make a big splash feature-wise, it was great talking about some of the work we did this cycle around XMir testing.

On October 19th I had the pleasure of going with my friend Steve (recently imported from Boston) to see a Cinematic Titanic double feature, which was sadly part of their farewell tour. It was a fun night and as Steve and I met in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 chat room years ago so it felt fitting as our first adventure together in this city since his move.

I also began taking an Islam and Judaism Course at the synagogue this month. Unfortunately of the six classes I’ve only been able to attend two so far and will attend the final one in a couple weeks, but it’s still been a fascinating class given my very limited knowledge of Islam. I missed the class that talked about the holy books specifically so I might need to do a bit more reading myself about the Quran (of which I’m now the proud owner of a copy of).

Last week I ended up with a cold that slowed me down for a few days, but after recovering over the weekend I was able to spend this week running around to events in the evenings. Monday it was off to the CNET offices to hear Lavabit’s Ladar Levison talk about the actions by the FBI that led up to him shutting down the Lavabit email service. Story-wise it was very similar to his recounting for NANOG earlier in the month that MJ attended (video here, worth the watch!), but it was good to get out and I had some interesting conversations that night. Tuesday as the Islam & Judaism class and then last night I attended an event put on by Double Union, the new feminist hackerspace opening up here in San Francisco. There were a lot of interesting topics throughout the night, and although I long ago realized that my own feminism is much more passive than that of many of these strong women at these events, I’m always happy to see folks working for equality.

Tonight, on Halloween, I’m staying in. I finished off the 13th episode of the Hammer House of Horror television series that I had expected to really campy, but turned out to actually be quite well-paced and good, particularly for a series produced in 1980. I’ve also spent some time lately going through the classic Doctor Who episodes on Netflix. Like many casual fans my age, I’ve seen all the new episodes, but my classic Doctor Who exposure came from the late night runs on PBS channels, and in my case my father’s interest in the show when I was young (hello Dalek nightmares as a kid!). As such I don’t remember a lot and I lack continuity. It’s been interesting watching the sampling of shows on Netflix in order, and setting me up for exploring beyond their collection in the future.

In free moments I’ve been making time for reading more. Carrying around my NOOK in my purse even when I don’t plan on reading has led to me reading things I want to rather than idlying checking Facebook/Twitter/G+ during spare moments, which has been a healthy change. My stack of magazines has a nice dent in it too, I hope to improve that further on some upcoming flights. I’ve also been watching the fascinating lectures from A Brief History of Humankind by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari. I’ll be loading up the ones I don’t finish onto my tablet to take along on my trip to Hong Kong.

Which brings me to Hong Kong! I’m leaving for the OpenStack Design Summit tomorrow night. It will be my first time in Asia so I’m really looking forward to it, even if there is some “new place” stress building up. I got a direct San Francisco to Hong Kong flight that will take about 15 hours, putting me in Hong Kong on Sunday morning. I have plans lined up for much of the time prior to the summit, which starts on Tuesday, including a Women of OpenStack boat tour on Monday. Here’s hoping the other-side-of-the-world jet lag doesn’t hit me too hard.

Finally, I’ve also booked my trip to Perth for linux.conf.au in January. In another first, this will be my first time in Australia. I’ll be speaking on Wednesday on Systems Administration in the Open and have also submitted proposals for short talks to two of the miniconfs on Monday and Tuesday so I can make the most of my trip there.

And now, time to finish up laundry and get packing!

Filed under: books, events, life, spirituality, xubuntu

ZHackers in the Ubuntu Software Center

Friday, Oct 25th, 2013 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

Last week I was approached by the author of the ZHackers series, David Jordan, to see if I wanted to review volumes 1 and 2 in preparation for the release of volume 2 in the Ubuntu Software Center. With his promise of “It’s got awesome geeks of both genders as well as downloading the linux kernel for the purpose of surviving the zombie apocalypse” how could I resist? He sent copies my way and I loaded the duo up on my NOOK.

ZHackers

They were both a lot of fun. I was very amused to see that the story takes place on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I just spoke for a conference. It was amusing to watch the characters navigate the reality of a zombie outbreak, as they are all aware of zombie popular culture and made many references to it, particularly during their struggle to convince people that it was real and in making plans (don’t go to the grocery store!). I absolutely did appreciate the geekiness of the volumes too, they’re using Ubuntu and have a very college geek way of handling themselves so I often found myself saying “why on earth would they…? Actually, that’s what I’d expect from college geeks.”

However it’s good to be aware that they aren’t complete stories, volume 1 will leave you wondering what happens next in volume 2 which continues the story, and volume 2 does the same. I did find some minor grammatical issues which made me wish the book had a bug tracker (hey, it’s a .deb!) but reporting directly to the author via email was easy enough. I’d also mention that as a geek I appreciated the technical references, and some were explained, but my average cousin wouldn’t know what to make of the phrase “Daniel logged off of IRC” even though it’s obvious to me.

You can purchase both volumes via the Ubuntu Software Center:

And they are generously licensed Creative Commons – Attribution Share Alike, so you can share with your friends!

It was also cool to see that volume 2 came with some bonus features, including a 3D version of the cover and a short story. It got me thinking a bit more about self-publishing in the Ubuntu Software Center and how it’s been opening doors for niche authors and given opportunity to expand content that’s shipped with an ebook.

Filed under: books, tech, ubuntu planet

A Little San Francisco 13.10 Release Party

Friday, Oct 18th, 2013 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

I was finally in my home city of San Francisco for an Ubuntu release (why are Octobers so crazy?) so I was able to put together a small event for the release of Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander).

The night before I pulled out the nail polish and nail decals from System76 to get into the spirit of things.

At 6:30 I arrived at Panera Bread to get set up.

I brought along my pair of salamanders, one of which would be auctioned off, I also brought along a copy of the Official Ubuntu Book to give away.

In all we had 5 total attendees, which made for the smallest turnout I’ve ever had for a release party, but made for a great number for conversation. I was able to show off the features of the new Smart Scopes in Unity on my laptop and verbally share some updates from the world of Xubuntu. We also got to learn about some of the latest improvements in MoinMoin from a developer who joined us and about some of the other recent projects being worked on by attendees.

Saucy got a birthday cupcake

It was also great to see interest in the Ubuntu Phone from a couple of folks who happened to be having coffee nearby. They asked us about the progress of the Ubuntu Phone codebase (released today!) and we commiserated over the inability of Ubuntu Edge to reach the funding goal.

For 14.04 we hope to do something bigger, we’re seeking to partner with one of the many businesses in the area tat use Ubuntu to do more hands on demos and more formal demonstration of the new features. Stay tuned for updates on that coming in the spring.

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

Code Review for Sysadmins talk at BALUG

Friday, Oct 18th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On the heels of my trip to Illinois to speak at ACM Reflections | Projections on building a career in open source, I had the opportunity on Tuesday to speak at the Bay Area Linux Users Group (BALUG) on the system the OpenStack Infrastructure team uses to do systems administration. It was a happy coincidence to be the presenter on Ada Lovelace Day and gave me a fine opportunity to promote the work of the Ada Initiative.

The talk was an updated version of the one I gave at OSCON in July (video here). I was able to update the talk to include our use of gearman and multiple jenkinses, elasticsearch, the new git.openstack.org and some of the latest things I’ve learned as we continue to refine our infrastructure and ability to share it with other projects and organizations.

It was also great to have an engaging audience and have my comments on the merits of code review changes to the infrastructure echoed by attendees who also have experience with it in their day jobs. There was also discussion about the general lacking of fully public, open source-based software testing in the open source community and people were quite pleased to see OpenStack leading the way here. It’s certainly something I’m proud to be a part of.

Thanks to everyone who came out!

Slides here: Code Review for Systems Administrators

Filed under: events, LUG, openstack, san francisco, tech

ACM Reflections | Projections Conference 2013 wrap-up

Wednesday, Oct 16th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last Thursday I flew out to Urbana-Champaign to speak at a conference put on by the ACM at the University of Illinois, Reflections | Projections.

On Thursday evening and Friday I was able to spend time catching up with my Ubuntu colleagues Nathan Handler, who was staff at the conference, and Paul Tagliamonte who was a fellow speaker. Friday evening wrapped up with a couple of talks.

Saturday was the big day of the conference for talks. The day started out by attending Paul Tagliamonte’s talk: Getting started with Debian development: The missing guide

It was a great exploration of some of the collective knowledge of folks in the Debian community that isn’t always fully communicated to newcomers, including exactly how the internals of uploading a package works with a look at different queues and paths in the system for finally delivering a newly uploaded package to a variety of different users.

Right after Paul’s talk I was up for my talk, A Career in Free and Open Source Software. I’m deeply passionate about open source and being able to do this for a living has made me quite happy, so I was excited about this talk and hope that my enthusiasm was recognized by the audience. Afterwards I had some great chats with attendees. There was also a section of my talk where I spoke about being shy and how important it was to attend and speak at conferences anyway, which I was delighted to hear really resonated with one of my fellow speakers.

Huge thanks to everyone who came out and also to those who asked questions throughout the talk, it’s always a pleasure to have such an engaging audience. Slides from my talk are available as .pdf here: ACM-Career_in_FOSS.pdf

After lunch we met up with a staff member to leave the conference area for a bit and head across town to visit Blue Waters, “the fastest supercomputer on a university campus anywhere in the world.” I love visiting datacenters, and visiting a supercomputer is extra fun. Most of the photos I ended up taking over the weekend were from our trip to this facility.

Meeting Blue Waters!

I was particularly impressed with their raised floor that gave staff a full 6 feet of room to work. It was also super cool to see that they were using Ubuntu in the control center:

I went to a couple more talks later in the afternoon before heading back to the hotel. The thing that really made my weekend was getting to hang out with Paul and Nathan, it was really great to see them both again and geek out over our current projects and work.

Nathan Handler, Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph, Paul Tagliamonte

Sunday morning started off with a speakers brunch before we headed back over to the conference to watch the results of the MechMania coding competition and then a final talk by Peter Norvig on The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data. I didn’t know what to expect from this talk, but was delighted as he dove into how they use data at Google to solve tough problems like identifying things (cats!) and people in photos and putting together “good enough to be very useful” translations and other tools.

As things wrapped up I was fortunate enough to be able to meet up with Wendy Edwards, who I virtually met years ago via Systers and who happens to work as a research programmer at the university. It was great to finally meet her in person and chat about our work and projects over coffee before taking a quick detour to a fantastic used book store on the way to the airport.

More photos from the weekend here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157636561910325/

Thanks again to the organizers of the conference for inviting me and putting on such a great conference.

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

Sharks, Androids and Debian

Thursday, Oct 10th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On October 10th of 2012 I embarked on my journey to Ghana. Today I was at the San Francisco airport for another trip, to Illinois, so I can speak at the ACM Projections | Reflections conference on my career in Free and Open Source. While it may not be as exotic as Africa, I am excited about this conference and my talk on Saturday.

Since the trip over my birthday weekend I’ve been keeping pretty busy. Last week a lot of Mozilla folks were in town for a Mozilla conference, so I was able to meet up with my friend Nigel Babu and convince him to get the iconic photo-with-cable-car.

I also attended my first NHL hockey game last week, on opening night for the San Jose Sharks! It was a fun evening, even if I was pretty clueless about hockey. Fortunately for me, the rules are pretty simple and the pace of the game keeps things interesting. I’d like to go again some time, but I still prefer baseball.

More photos from the game here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157636193528914/

After the game, we made a short detour to Google so I could see the latest addition to their Android sculpture garden, the Kit Kat!

It’s also been hot. October in San Francisco is pretty much when summer hits with 80 degree weather and all of our homes without air conditioning. It gets pretty hot in our condo on these days and the ceiling fan is of little use. The roof deck has been nice lately though, so I’ve been taking chunks of time between 3PM – 8PM, when it’s the hottest in the condo to head up to the roof and work from there. The view’s nice too.

On Sunday MJ headed off to a conference, so we made the most of the weekend with a couple of nice brunches on Saturday and Sunday and generally keeping things low key. I’ve kept myself busy this week in his absence after work each day by refining my talk for Projections | Reflections, undertaking a massive organization effort in the condo (it looks so much better!) and adding too many things to my todo list (wait, shouldn’t I have been taking them off?). On Wednesday night I also hosted an Ubuntu Hour and a Bay Area Debian Dinner.

And now I’m on my flight connecting in Chicago. I’ll be at this conference through Sunday, coming home pretty late Sunday night. By Tuesday I plan on being recovered enough from the trip to do my Code Review for Systems Administrators talk at BALUG. And then? That’s my last talk until participation at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong in November!

Filed under: life, san francisco

Who is the Ubuntu Community Council?

Friday, Oct 4th, 2013 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

As we come up on just a few more days left to submit nominations for the Ubuntu Community Council, I thought I’d take a few minutes to write about my experiences on the council for the past 4 years (and 2 more if you’ll have me!) and why I highly encourage others to nominate themselves of folks in the community who they feel are qualified.

First up, here’s the call for nominations, for context: Community Council Call for Nominations

For this nominations call I grabbed FAQ I received during the last nomination period 2 years ago and I am hopeful that it does a decent job of setting expectations.

The Ubuntu governance page gives this description of the Community Council:

The social structures and community processes of Ubuntu are supervised by the Ubuntu Community Council. It is the Community Council that handles appointments to and elections for official project boards and councils. The council is also responsible for the Code of Conduct and tasked with ensuring that community members follow its guidelines.

The council is ultimately responsible for dispute resolution, should it be required. For example, in the past, we have helped to resolve conflicts in LoCo teams and in the Ubuntu forums – both very important parts of the community that have their own leadership structures carrying authority delegated by the Community Council.

The Community Council meets every two weeks on Internet relay chat (IRC). You can propose an item for discussion at a council meeting on the Community Council Agenda page on the Ubuntu Wiki.

Golly, impressive! But at the heart of it, we’re just community members who care about Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community and have decided to dedicate time and effort to helping both in our roles as Community Council members and in our projects in the wide Ubuntu community.

Community Council Members
Only one of us has been to space!

We’re a mix of people’s parents, sisters, sons and spouses with jobs and very different lives, but a shared passion for Ubuntu and track record in the community. The diverse perspective of council members allows us to have great discussions (sometimes contentious, but always civil) about the direction of Ubuntu and how we can help and make ourselves available to the community through changes and announcements that come out. Among our ranks have always been a nice mix of Canonical employees and those of us employed elsewhere, members who are development-focused and not so development-focused, contributors to LoCos, marketing, translations and more.

It’s a great opportunity to work closely with these other strong community members and seek wisdom for each other. Our regular sync-ups keep each other up to date with various parts of the project and having Mark available to talk to has led to some great triage work by the council when issues do crop up.

So, want to join us? Nominations details here: Community Council Call for Nominations

Once we have collected all nominations, Mark will review them and set up a poll so all Ubuntu Members can vote.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet
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