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Adopt a Salamander

Saturday, May 18th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

For each Ubuntu release I spend a little time finding a toy or other representation of the codename animal to use at booths, Ubuntu Hours and other events. I wrote about Quetzals and Pangolins here and you may have seen Raring here.

When the salamander came up I was confident that a toy would be easy to find, and indeed they were! Even better, I found that the World Wildlife Fund offers a $50 Hellbender Salamander Adoption Kit that ships with 2 plush salamanders! Mine arrived yesterday, I’ll be keeping one to use at our events and will find a way to give away the other (perhaps as part of the Ubuntu Women contest we’re planning? Or at some LoCo event?).

Event decoration + helping to save the actual animal, hooray!

Oh, and it is a release late, but while I was in Mérida, Mexico we stopped in to Miniaturas where I picked up some adorable quetzal earrings:

I think I’ll wear them to our San Francisco Ubuntu Hour on June 12th, and bring along the salamander!

Filed under: animals, ubuntu planet

Virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit 1305

Friday, May 17th, 2013 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

Since I left for my wedding and honeymoon a bunch of things happened! Ubuntu 13.04 was released, 13.10 was given the code name “Saucy Salamander” and Debian 7.0 Wheezy came out. Plus lots of exciting OpenStack development discussion that came out following the Summit (I left right after it). When I got back into the country on the 12th I had a lot to catch up on! I did my best to cram before sessions and certainly had to limit involvement to a handful of sessions that I was particularly keen on attending and so could get up to speed with quickly.

This was the first virtual UDS I was able to participate in, so it was all new to me. Essentially the the “fish bowl” (as seen here, I took this photo from my spot in the wider attendee seating) is replaced by a Google Hangout and the “wider attendee seating” is an IRC channel. For the 4 sessions I participated in this worked very well, session leads were pro-active about asking who wished to participate in the Hangout so everyone who wanted to was able to. A great deal of attention in all these sessions was given to the IRC channel, which is a contrast with in person UDS where the channel can sometimes get a bit left behind (even though it’s being projected, it was easy to forget once you get talking). I didn’t use the summit.ubuntu.com page for anything aside reference, preferring to pop out the etherpad and use my standard IRC client, but I appreciated it all being there as a resource (and I’m sure it was super helpful for newcomers to follow along!).


Cheri Francis and others in the Ubuntu Women session

I found the sessions I participated in to be productive and focused and when applicable resulted in a solid list of action items. I hope that the event also lessened the experience gap that was always present for in person vs. remote participants, we all got the same experience. Now I have to admit to not being a fan of using Google Hangouts for this (I like Google, but it is still a proprietary, closed-source tool that we have no control over), but I understand that the ease of use and immediate availability of videos on YouTube makes a compelling case. Perhaps my only other complaint is lack of cohesiveness that comes from an online event, I didn’t watch the introduction or the wrap up. I also didn’t participate in the “beer hangout” – I didn’t even know it was happening, and sitting in front of my computer with a beer in the middle of the day wasn’t particularly interesting to me. I only attended a few specific sessions and there was no “wandering into something that looks interesting” (instead I just went back to work) or the regular social down time we get to relax or sit down to hack on things. I do hope we can find some kind of replacement for the in-person events, it would be great to see something on the LoCo team level at conferences where we seek to have an expanded Ubuntu presence focused on contributors (perhaps an Ubucon with a participant track?).

And the venue… it was at home! In order to participate in the hangout I did feel the need to leverage my multiple monitors.


My desk is a bit chaotic

Now the sessions themselves…

– Planning for Ubuntu Community presence on the Ubuntu Website –

This was not a particularly productive session as far as action items were concerned, but it turns out that while I was gone the removal of the “Community” link from ubuntu.com took on a life of its own (and boy was I surprised to see my name end up in a recent Datamation article about it). Personally I was satisfied with Daniel Holbach’s blog post on the subject a day after the change was made, but it was nice to speak with with some folks from the Design team and allow everyone to confirm that no ill will was intended and that plans for a new and improved community site were moving forward. The session was kept short given the more structured session about the community site specifically planned for the following day.

YouTube video of the session here

– Ubuntu Women UDS-1305 Goals –

Huge thanks to Silvia Bindelli and Cheri Francis for doing all of the leg work for this session while I was gone, I felt very comfortable reviewing their pre-session notes and found a really great, collaborative environment upon joining in. The discussion began talking about an information scavenger-hung competition that the team will be doing in the coming months, seeking volunteers to assist. It then moved into a topic that I was really happy to see on the agenda – a user poll to see how the team could be most effective in serving our audience of women interested in Ubuntu. I find that the project needs a bit of an adjustment every couple of years to refocus on our current targets as Ubuntu and the open source ecosystem evolves, so I’m excited that we’re doing this. Finally, much of the session was spent discussing our intention to further collaborate with other groups seeking to encourage women in open source (and in technology in general).

YouTube video of the session here and I uploaded session notes here

– Revamping ubuntu.com/community –

Picking up from where discussion left off the previous day, this session was a focused on on concrete things that need to be done to get the proposed community website that was under development reviewed and published. I admit that job change + wedding planning had my attention diverted this past cycle so I wasn’t able to contribute to this project, but I made sure to spend time the night before to do a review of the content so I’d be prepared. I was able to go through some of my suggestions during the meeting and took a few action items to continue with a more thorough review and to collect some quotes and photos from the community to make the site more personal and approachable.

YouTube video of the session here and I uploaded session notes here

– Shaping a plan for the future of Ubuntu Documentation Team –

I can’t begin to say how pleased I was to see this session land on the agenda. The Ubuntu Doc team has been a very small team for a long time, and new contributors have struggled to participate as the docs for writing the docs got stale to a point where they were not useful. We’re at a very exciting time now where we have limited support from a couple of the (very busy!) former drivers of this team and at least two strong contributors who have committed to moving the project forward. The first thing on the agenda was addressing the updating of docs so that more contributors can get on-boarded. I was able to pitch in with a couple action items to nudge things along a bit, but I’m hopeful that this is the beginning of an exciting new phase for the team.

YouTube video of the session here and I uploaded session notes here

Slimy Salamander (Plethodon glutinosus)
A Slimy Salamander (wait, you said Saucy?)

– Xubuntu –

Since the event was online, the Xubuntu team took advantage of the flexibility and ended up pulling their sessions from UDS proper and scheduling our sessions for the hour after UDS each day to tackle a series of blueprints designed for the coming months. I was able to use my YouTube account + Hangouts to replicate that portion of what main UDS was doing.

Discussion of most interest to me centered around our testing+release plans (should we do alphas? betas? which ones?) and documentation, but discussion of our limited developer force (want to grow it!), a proposal for a shortcut overlay and default applications also were discussed. A much better summary was posted on the Xubuntu website yesterday: Looking towards Xubuntu 13.10. Pasi Lallinaho also wrote bullet-point style summaries of Night 1 and Night 2 which include links to their respective YouTube videos.

In all, a productive UDS for me, I have a lot of work to do… :)

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet, UDS

Honeymoon week 2

Friday, May 17th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The second half of our honeymoon was full of adventure (and ok, a bit more luxury). We decided to spend 5 days traveling through the Yucatan peninsula visiting Mayan ruins, cenotes and local cities. We wanted our visit to be stress-free so MJ did some research and found William Lawsons Personal Driving Service which would not only take us around the peninsula but our driver would also be a registered tour guide! We met our guide, Angel, at the resort on Tuesday morning to begin our adventure.

Our first visit was to the ruins of Ek’ Balam. This was a really cool site, with multiple structures to climb, including the huge main temple. It wasn’t until I climbed to the top that I fully appreciated how hot it was out (and that I hadn’t brought enough water!).

More photos from Ek’ Balam

I was pretty tired after wandering around those ruins in the heat, so I was delighted when our tour guide was able to find Cenote Hubiku, just north of Valladolid where we were spending the night. A cenote is a “a deep natural pit, or sinkhole, characteristic of Mexico, resulting from the collapse of limestone bedrock that exposes groundwater underneat” (wikipedia). There are thousands in the Yucatan and many that are equipped for people to swim in. Cenote Hubiku had a small admission fee and full, modern facilities for changing before swimming. We caught them at the tail end of their day, but got a good 20 minutes of swimming in the beautiful, cool cenote before being on our way. It was the perfect thing for post ruin exploration.

Photos from Cenote Hubiku.

For dinner we went to Taberna de los Frailes for a delicious dinner that included a grilled watermelon with cheese appetizer (which I wouldn’t have ordered, but the waiter recommended it). We retired for the night at Casa Hamaca Guesthouse which was a cute little inn in the heart of Valladolid. Even better, the proprietor Denis Larsen is a northeast US expat who was exceptionally welcoming and helpful the next morning as we enjoyed banana pancakes and chatted about everything from our shared love of Google Docs for collaboration to tips for the rest of our stay in the Yucatan.

We then spent the day exploring the beautiful city of Valladolid. We visited the small San Roque Museum and then spent some time walking around the main square. From there we did some shopping and I picked up a couple of the traditional embroidered blouses that Valladolid is famous for. We also got a couple of brimmed hats for further ruin exploration. Mid-day we met up with Angel who took us to the Convent of San Bernardino de Siena and Cenote Zaci – a cenote right in town! We didn’t swim but it was nice to visit.

Photos from Valladolid

Come late afternoon it was time to start driving toward Mérida to check in to Hacienda Xcanatun boutique hotel for the night. This former hacienda was one of the many in the region that used to be a sisal (fiber) plantation. This was my favorite hotel. The rooms were sprawling and while modernized, still held an architectural feel and basic layout similarities to what I’d expect from and old hacienda. We had dinner at their famous on-site restaurant of the same name.

Photos from Hacienda Xcanatun

The next day was Uxmal! Plus a couple other sites on the Puuc Route. Uxmal was a major city and so touring the ruins takes several hours. We managed to see most of it and had a lot of fun climbing around several of their major structures (only the largest and a few minor sites had climbing prohibited). This site really rivals Chichen Itza in how big and amazing the ruins are, definitely one of my favorites.

More photos from Uxmal

Next on our list to visit for the day was Kabah. Most amazing about this place was its famous “Palace of the Masks” which was a whole building covered on one side with ornate faces of stone. You’re allowed to climb up to and around the palace, making this probably my favorite small site we visited.

More photos from Kabah

The last ruin site we visited was Sayil where we just visited the Palace of Sayil (the site was very spread out, with buildings up to 1 mile apart). Like so many of these palaces, it was an impressive and imposing sight! No climbing up the structure allowed though.

Photos from Sayil

Our final new site of the day was the Ecomuseo del Cacao. Our first hint that this place wasn’t quite up to par with the rest of our day was the clue from Angel that, while a traditional Mayan thing, cacao doesn’t actually grow naturally in the Yucatan because it’s not humid enough. The museum had it’s moments but was a bit too polished and cheesy. It was nice visiting the grove of artificially maintained cocoa trees and the hot chocolate tasting at the end was probably worth the entrance fee.

Photos from Ecomuseo del Cacao

From there we headed back to Uxmal for a sound and light show. I hadn’t read great things about it online, so I was prepped for something really cheesy, but I admit having really enjoyed it. The main track being broadcast is in Spanish, but you can rent headphones in several languages so you can hear the stories going along with the show that paint a picture of what it may have been like in the height of civilization there. It was also then that I noticed how beautifully clear the sky was out there, you could see so many stars.

That night we checked into Hacienda Temozon. It was a beautiful property, advertisements for it are quick to tell you that Bill Clinton stayed there once and the only owned by a major American company. The rooms were large, but it turns out perhaps not the right place to stay during ant season. Staying true to some of the age of the place, it didn’t have glass on the windows so everything was quite open-air and the doors covering the windows didn’t seal (you could put your finger through some of the gaps). I did enjoy a wonderful Mexican omelette in the morning.

Photos from Hacienda Temozon

Angel picked us up in the late morning and, knowing our interest in cenotes, decided to take us to a less touristy one that he knew of, Cenote Kankirixché. It wasn’t a fancy, staffed cenote like the previous ones we’d been to, we had to change in the van and then it was just a hole in the ground and a somewhat questionable wooden staircase taking you down to the water. It was beautiful and refreshing though!

More photos from Cenote Kankirixché

From there we were off to the city of Mérida! First stop was to check in to the stunningly modern Rosas and Xocolate boutique hotel before heading across the street to the Anthropology and History Museum. The museum is located in the former Canton Palace and while all in Spanish the exhibits mostly spoke for themselves. My favorite exhibits were one of one of the earlier expeditions to the Yucatan where many of the Puuc sites we explored, seeing photos from those sites before they were uncovered and restored was really cool. They also had a local embroidery exhibit upstairs which, seeing them in context, made me really happy about my beautiful blouse purchases in Valladolid.

Then it was off to the Grande Plaza district of Merida where we had lunch at Amaro. We did some shopping and were able to visit the Casa de los Montejo and the Palacio de Gobierno with it’s captivating murals by Fernando Castro Pacheco. We enjoyed dinner back at the hotel and in all a relaxing night.

Photos from Mérida

Unfortuantely the adventures had to come to an end at some point, our last day was spent visiting the famous Chichen Itza.

Chichen Itza is a huge settlement and we spent over 3 hours exploring it. It was more crowded than any of the other sites we went to, but the benefit of going in the hottest part of the year is that it wasn’t overwhelming with people at all. One of the interesting things about it though was while it’s expensive for tourists to enter (up to 5 times as much as other sites), the whole inside was filled with vendors! Angel told us it was because it used to be privately owned and they owner brought in all these vendors, and when it was transferred to more government run thing they kept the vendors. At first it was a little off-putting to have so many vendors throughout the archaeological site, but I came to realize that these vendors were selling on-topic keepsakes that tourists (including myself) were interested in buying, and technically these people are descendants of the Mayans who built this city – this is theirs. It also brought a liveliness to the site that was lacking at the other sites, I appreciated them by the time we were wrapping up our day there. And what a day. You couldn’t climb any of the ruins but it’s probably for the best, even just walking among these giants in the heat was enough to tire me out considerably.

More photos from Chichen Itza

We spent our last night in Mexico in Cancun so we’d have easy access to the airport the following morning. MJ picked a hotel on the beach where we could have a romantic private cabana dinner. Perfect wrap up to our honeymoon :)

Filed under: travel, wedding

Honeymoon week 1

Thursday, May 16th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Tuesday the 30th we flew from Philadelphia to Cancun, Mexico. From there we took a shuttle south for about 40 minutes until we got to the Riviera Maya district and Grand Velas, the all-inclusive resort we had reservations at for the first week of our honeymoon.

We then spent a much-needed week relaxing.

We had a stunning view from our room.

Hours to spend relaxing on the beach, or in one of their several pools where they brought us all the food and beverages we wanted.

Plus, chocolate strawberries.

I read my way through several books that I’d been wanting to read but never could find time for. Pretty much the only decision we needed to make all week was which of the top notch restaurants they had on site for each meal. I quite enjoyed room service for breakfast.

More photos from our stay: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157633490351996/

We did end up making one excursion during the week, and that was to Rio Secreto, a nearby series of underground caves and waterways. I wasn’t sure what to expect since it was quite close to such a touristy area (tourist trap?) but my expectations were surpassed in all ways. We were geared up with water shoes (we opted to buy new ones for $10/pair), helmets and wet suits and we had a great tour guide, but it was far from a risk-free, polished tourist experience. We got a real feel for the natural caves and we had an amazing time swimming through some of the pools we were taken through in our 3 hour tour through 600+ meters of cave.

A photographer came along with to take photos and we paid the charge to download them all royalty-free, I uploaded several of them here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157633479166189/

Alas, the luxurious stay had to come to and end at some point. The following Tuesday we packed up… but not to end our honeymoon! Instead we repacked to spend the next 5 days traveling through the Yucatán visiting Mayan ruins and modern Yucatán cities! But that’s for the next post…

Filed under: travel, wedding

Our wedding!

Wednesday, May 15th, 2013 by pleia2 | 10 Comments

On Sunday April 28th MJ and I were married!

The day began gathering with mothers, my aunt and the bridesmaids in the bridal suite of the Joseph Ambler Inn where we and most of our out of town guests stayed. Inn Manager Keenan Christiansen and Brian Cottman really made us feel welcome throughout our stay and during all the planning.

My maid of honor, Danita Fries, took care of morning makeup and hair preparations, bringing in Daneene Jensen and her team to take care of hair and makeup for all of us. Not being a makeup person, I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of wearing it, but Daneene made me feel comfortable and was great about keeping the makeup light and the look very natural. MJ’s Best Woman even stopped by with refreshments in the late morning so we wouldn’t be without lunch.

We met with our photographer, Melissa Morelli, at 1PM to begin taking photos at the inn. She was the photographer MJ hired for our engagement and a few months back she also did my head shots. We were really happy to have her join us in Pennsylvania for the wedding.

After photos at the inn, we took a small bus chartered by 1st Class Transportation over to the wedding venue, Talamore Country Club.

The weather was beautiful, which was quite fortunate as the wedding was outdoors and Melissa was able to take some great pictures throughout the venue before the ceremony.

Everything began the signing of the Ketubah we selected by Amy Fagan of 20th Century Illuminations and the Badeken.

Then, the ceremony! We went back and forth about having a videographer for our wedding and decided to go with one from the Mixed Media Productions, the firm our DJ, Mike Robertson, runs. In retrospect I’m glad we decided to have one, the photos are great but I was so overwhelmed (happy! excited! nervous!) that I can’t say I actually remember that much of the ceremony :)

It all went very smoothly. My mother and grandfather walked me down the aisle. We were honored to have Rabbi Elliot Holin work with us on the ceremony and finally to officiate.

We also held our reception at Talamore, starting with a cocktail hour in the garden room (this room was also backup for ceremony had it rained). Then dinner in their main ballroom which was decked out with the amazing flower centerpieces by Moles Flowers.

The rest of the reception was also pretty traditional, short speeches from family and friends, a first dance and cake! We selected a multi-flavor cake from Bredenbecks and I made sure to have a bit of each ;)

And in addition to being able to talk to many of our guests, we even danced a bit! It was an amazing night.

Afterwards we had a bit of an after party back at the Inn, giving us time to kick back and relax for a couple hours with some of our guests.

In all, things went as perfect as I could have imagined thanks to MJ’s attention to detail throughout the process along with some great vendors who were able to work with us on requests.

We’ll be updating our website in the coming weeks with tons more photos and other details of our wedding weekend which included family and wedding party dinners.

Filed under: life, philadelphia, wedding

In Philly for the wedding! Also, books and birds…

Wednesday, Apr 24th, 2013 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Today MJ and I left for Philadelphia to prepare for our wedding on Sunday! We’ve spent months planning for it, I’m sure it’ll be awesome, I’m really excited.

On Tuesday we’re flying to the Yucatan Peninsula to spend 7 days on a beach, and then another 5 days exploring Mayan ruins all over the peninsula. It occured to us while planning for the honeymoon that over the past few years we’ve certainly been doing a lot of traveling, but actual vacations have been few and we both really needed some time away. Regardless of internet access, I’ll be keeping my activities far away from anything Ubuntu or OpenStack, as much as I may be tempted to check in and help out. I really need to take this step back and relax so I can come back refreshed and eager to continue to help taking over the world with my fellow open source colleauges. Must not feel guilty about my inbox getting out of control, it’s as it should be on vacation.

Along with my Nintendo 3DS and games and a pile of science+nature magazines, I brought some books with me Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan and Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts by Emily Anthes. It didn’t occur to me until buying Anthes’ book that this will mean quite the creature-filled reading list! I also picked up a couple fiction paperbacks to zone out to on the beach.

It occurred to me while looking for books to bring that I hadn’t written lately about books I’ve been reading. Prompted by my study into Judaism this past year, I’ve been making an effort to understand religion in general more. My approach historically has been to find the “truth” in a very logical manner, which breaks down quickly when the topic is religion so I just left it alone. “I don’t really do religion” has been my response lately when asked about it. But in these past few years I’ve come to love and respect several religious people so trying to understand how and why the believe and participate has been an interesting path of study. In addition to reading various Jewsish commentaries on God, I picked up Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton. It was a fascinating look into secular reasons why people build, sustain and maintain the traditions and beliefs in their communties. I did find that he touched upon pieces lacking in my own life, including having patterns of observance of special days and events throughtout the year which encourage reflection and thought on specific topics, something I’m really enjoying with my study into Judaism. I also read A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age by Steven Nadler after learning about Spinoza’s “natural world” approach to God in our Intro to Judaism class. I’m no philosopher or religious historian, so having the ideas from the treatise broken down and summarized in modern English to regular people like me was essential to the work being accessible to me. It was an interesting read, putting some of our modern secularism in historical perspective. A friend of mine also told me about The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion by Mordecai M. Kaplan, a co-founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, which I brought along with me on my trip for when I get into a more reflective, contemplative mood during our trip.

Beyond religion, while I was at the Southern California Linux Expo back in February someone mentioned the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. I was skeptical, and understand that his work is a simplification of success, fortune and luck, but it was quite a humbling read. It’s easy to take a lot for granted and be overly proud of the accomplishments we’ve made through what feels like only our own hard work and talent. There’s so much more than that when you start drilling down into the stories behind many of the great capitalist success stories in our society, you have to have the opportunities before you can seize them and often this is out of our control. The person who recommended this book is involved with educating disadvantaged youths in southern California so he certainly has had a first hand view of the advantages some have over others from a very young age.

To shift to the other side of the pen for a moment, I was recently interviewed by a woman doing a story of fear of birds. She emailed me out of the blue and you never know how these things will turn out, but her article did end up getting published: Help! Those Things With Wings Are After Me! It’s funny reading this now, I feel so silly, but I can’t deny any of it. Chickens and vultures are little dinosaurs, it totally makes sense (then again, I’d totally pet a tiger given the chance, natural selection fail).

Now it’s time to pack up my netbook and get settled in here at the Inn. Our next several days are pretty packed with errands, family, rehearsal, dinners and more!

Filed under: books, life, philadelphia, wedding

Tiger ears, camera and the 162

Saturday, Apr 20th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Finalizing wedding things has been exhausting, but I have managed to get out of the house some these past few weeks.

MJ was traveling a couple weekends ago and I took the opportunity to head over to the zoo to relax. Fortunately the tiger cub was out playing!

…if you look closely, you can see her ears. Her mother came out just as I was coming in and blocked the view of her little one almost completely. But in person I could see her bouncing around behind mom playing with something.

After visiting the cub I swung by the tail end of the penguin feeding in time to see this guy booking it across the temporary bridge on his way to escape!

Really he just went back to his island after a couple minutes. The day in general was a great one for photos, Slash the cassowary was out, the bobcat and snow leopard were awake, much fun!

More photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157633210801685/

Speaking of photos, I decided to pick up a new camera. My Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS is now 6 years old and starting to feel its age. So last week, in preparation for taking TONS of photos on our honeymoon, MJ did some research and suggested I get the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-RX100. It came in on Friday and so far – nice! I’ll have to try it out a bit more when I go out tomorrow.

I hosted another Ubuntu Hour and Debian dinner last week. Turnout for both was 5-6 people and good conversation all around. It’s looking like Debian is shooting for the release of Squeeze in the first week of May. Eric also made the amusing move of bringing along some Cinnamon Sugar from South Africa in a nod to the upcoming Ubuntu release shipping with the cinnamon desktop environment for the first time.

I’ve also been trying to take it easy a little, taking an hour or two here and there to enjoy San Francisco. The other day I went to the post office after work and spied the 162 street car, a special one! Then it started moving! I took the opportunity to hop aboard and take it all the way down the Embarcadero for no reason other than to enjoy the ride. I swung by the sea lions while I was out as well and then took a leisurely, long walk back home.

Last weekend MJ and I headed over to the bay to enjoy a nice lunch by the Bay Bridge before barreling in on more wedding stuff pretty much all day Sunday, aside from the Intro to Judaism class. Tomorrow we have our last class, allowing us to finish just in time for our wedding next Sunday.

Tomorrow we’re also running around to do some last minute shopping and picking up of wedding items. Also probably will be prepping some stuff to ship out and meet us when we arrive in Philly. We fly out to Philadelphia on Wednesday. Wedding on Sunday the 28th!

Filed under: animals, life

OpenStack Design Summit days 3-4

Friday, Apr 19th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Wednesday morning started off with a Women of OpenStack breakfast where I happened to sit down next to Leslie Hawthorn without realizing it until we introduced ourselves, so that was a pleasant surprise! We’d both been intending to meet for some time. The table we were at also had a couple engineers working on OpenStack at Yahoo! and a UX engineer from Red Hat, a tech reporter and more, so it was quite the interesting mix and we all swapped business cards. It’s been really cool to meet the GNOME Outreach Program for Women interns from this past cycle too, they’ve been doing really impressive work and writing about it in blogs I’ve enjoyed reading. I was also able to work with Anita Kuno directly while she was helping out with the infrastructure (-infra) team.

It was then over to the conference for more inspiring keynotes. The OpenStack Foundation brought in Randall Sobie to talk about clouds in high energy physics, including a 5000 core OpenStack cloud CERN. Predictably dealing with massive amounts of data is one of the challenges of such scientific organizations that collect it to solve some of the most interesting problems of and in the universe.

Next up was a representative from the NSA who, while not able to tell us much at all about their private cloud deployment of OpenStack, did let slip their numbers had reached the 1000s and at a certain point in the process and that their staff was seeking to collaborate with other government organizations to deploy similar infrastructures elsewhere. Again, predictably, an organization like the NSA needs to handle not only big data, but analysis and manipulation of data. Next up was HP’s keynote, where they dove into some of the projects HP supports, including the one I’m employed with them to work on, the continuous integration team! They also talked about OpenStack on Openstack (TripleO), Heat and related tools. It was also interesting to learn that HP ships a Linux server every minute.

Off to sessions! The Adding new integrated projects to Tempest session shared some best practices from longer-term OpenStack projects as the newly integrated Ceilometer and Heat projects are now seeking to be included in Tempest (also check out these slides by Sean Dague) testing. The testr / testtools feedback/next-steps
 session began with a description of exactly what testr and Test Repository are and are for and then beyond that how more tests can migrate to it. Tempest Best Practice Guide where they discussed some ideas for what the QA team should develop in terms of best practices and then steps the team can take to help with organization and productivity of the team, including leveraging milestones, hosting regular bug triage days and improving documentation with regular documentation weeks.

I went to Devananda van der Veen’s Provisioning Bare Metal with OpenStack talk (slides here). Although I am quite familiar with it now, it’s cool to see it in context and learn about some of the future plans. The Tempest – Gap Analysis – Identify new tests session took a look at some of the gaps in testing that some of the projects have, there are a number of them and they currently lack manpower to write them, a few new blueprints will be created to help track progress.

One of my favorite sessions of the day was Vulnerability management: infra needs, scoring…. The topic was handling of security patches and how our team could facilitate that work — preferably without completely duplicating our entire development infrastructure in private exclusively for the security patches. Ideas tossed around included pointing security testers in the direction of the git repositories for tests we use so they could run them, plus offering to run a stand-alone Gerrit-only server (rather than the full infrastructure so they could use a familiar code review system when handling the changes with key team members. Discussion then moved into vulnerability handling in general and it was really interesting to learn about the teams involved. Final session of the day was Technical Committee membership evolution. Given my work with Ubuntu this governance discussion regarding the mechanisms for handling the growth of the TC was an interesting one, even if they didn’t come to any formal conclusions.

The evening wrapped up for me by heading out for an enjoyable and geeky evening with some of my -infra colleagues. I work with some really fun, open source committed folks and it’s really cool to be able to meet up in person during these summits.

Thursday was the final day of the conference! Moving on from QA, it was a day of -infra discussions. First session of the day was Continuous-deployment for upstream Openstack where the team discussed some of the goals and intentions for such a deployment model (alongside the standard 6 month release cycle) and sought to acknowledge that there were organizations who were doing this already in various ways. Next up was Dependency Management, where most of the discussion centered around discussion of Python modules and that the -infra team now maintains requirements project for the new pipy mirror. The Sorting out test runners, wrappers and venvs session focused on the fact that a lot of people are confused about how to properly run the same tests that are run in the CI infrastructure, so are left puzzled when their commits fail. The last session before lunch was another -infra meeting centered around Failure management in the gate. The concern was the few days in the past cycle where it could take several hours for a change to merge due to a couple of issues with the various moving parts in the gating infrastructure. There was some discussion around how to optimize these jobs (and failures) and also improvements to the notification system for such slowness or failures beyond the IRC bot in the #openstack-infra channel, added this past cycle.

After lunch it was off to the Bare Metal Testing session. We had already talked about the virtualized testing earlier in the week (essentially used to quickly test the logic of the process), so the focus with this session was how to handle bare metal testing on actual bare metal. Some of the challenges and risks encountered with testing on bare metal were identified and the session ended with some action items to put together a document to give to any potential donor of this hardware and data center space to explain the requirements and expectations. OpenStack CI logging Review of non-infra-managed tooling was an interesting session to review the OpenStack core tooling that isn’t yet under control of the -infra team and plans to move that over. I took a couple action items in this session to help draft up some puppet modules to pull some things over. The OpenStack project has had to cease using the code name for the networking project due to a trademark issue (details here) which led to the Projects (re)naming session. It turns out the code names for the project aren’t protected under OpenStack trademarks and it would be very costly to do so, particularly as the project grows, and they feel it would be inevitable for a situation like the networking software’s to arise again. The consensus tended to be to try and reduce the dependence upon code names in official and beyond development public spaces, but it was acknowledged that it’s a hard human problem to get around. The last session I attended of the day was on the Havana release schedule where Thierry Carrez presented the proposed release cycle for the next 6 months and took some feedback about it and then the summit in general.


Thanks to Thierry Carrez for this photo

Right after that last session I headed back to the hotel to grab my suitcase and then it was off on the uneventful train + plane trip home.

Filed under: openstack, tech, travel, work

OpenStack Design Summit days 1-2

Tuesday, Apr 16th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Since my new job is working with the OpenStack infrastructure team, I am able to attend the OpenStack Design Summit this week in Portland, Oregon!

I woke up just before 4AM on Monday to take a 6:15AM flight to Portland, putting me in Portland shortly after 8AM and to the conference center around 9AM, at the start of the event. I learned quickly that the unfortunate part about arriving at that time is the huge registration lines:

ODS is very similar to the UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) that used to be held twice a year by Canonical, indeed it was somewhat modeled after it. It’s nice to have the UDS experience under my belt so everything felt familiar and I was able to dive into sessions without feeling lost. It’s also been delightful to run into a lot of people who I know from the Ubuntu community who are also now working on OpenStack in some capacity.

There are a few differences though. First is the attendees, while UDS really was all about people developing the pieces of Ubuntu (software, packaging, documentation, design), ODS is a summit for both developers and users. Then there is the size of the summit. I don’t believe UDS ever broke 1000, but the expanded scope of ODS means that there are a lot more people, I believe the number floating around is somewhere around 2500. The format is also slightly different, instead of every session being workshop-like where you all sit around working on a blueprint for something, there are also presentations. The topics for presentations do range a bit, many being user-focused but also developer-focused ones to entice development and feedback on new initiatives. It has made for a really interesting mix that I’m quite enjoying.

The first two sessions I attended were OpenStack-on-OpenStack Overview (or “TripleO”), which was a workshop session going through some of the general ideas and blueprints for TripleO plans this cycle and sessions at the summit. I was then off to Robert Collins’ standing-room-only presentation of OpenStack on OpenStack: deploying OpenStack via bare-metal.


Robert Collins on TripleO

Now I am quite familiar with the TripleO project, having worked on testing baremetal stuff in their incubator these past several weeks to work out how we’ll be eventually including it in the OpenStack continuous integration testing infrastructure. It was however nice to take a step back and look at the more broadly with the more long-term view.

In the afternoon I attended a couple documentation-related sessions, starting off with Translation management enhancement. The project has translations for documentation that have been chugging along, but it seems like these past several months and into this next cycle they’ll be working to expand upon this and make it more organized and streamlined for contributors. Then there was a session for Documentation for Newly Integrated Projects, where questions around when to integrate were raised (while they are in incubator? after? upon release where they are official?). I was happy to learn from this session that the docs in general were going through a bit of a reorganization that had been discussed early in the day, while I have found the existing ones to be an invaluable resource and am delighted that OpenStack has placed such a commitment on docs from an early point, there is always room for improvement and making things easier for everyone!

Toward the end of the day I got to my first testing-related session (which, strictly-speaking is most applicable to my job as someone on the team who runs the infrastructure for the CI-related testing), Reviewing OpenStack Networking Unit Tests. In this session they reviewed the current tests they are doing with OpenStack Networking, looking over types of tests, their effectiveness and current speed at which they run.

I also made it down to the expo hall. It was full of OpenStack!

It was pretty cool to see all these companies so invested in the project already.

And thanks to Benjamin Kerensa for taking my photo at the Ubuntu booth:

Monday evening I went out with a bunch of my colleagues to Montage for some fun conversation and delicious Louisiana-inspired food (I had spicy, cheesy macaroni with alligator).

Tuesday was a busy day. The opening of the day was an exciting one, Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, gave a talk where he discussed the progress of OpenStack and then introduced three major companies who are all using it in some capacity: Bloomberg, Best Buy and Comcast. It’s always super motivating to see major companies like these making this kind of serious investment in a technology you’re working on.

As far as sessions go, I started off by going to the Heat RefStack – A reference implementation of OpenStack talk by Monty Taylor of HP and Rob Hirschfeld of Dell (amusingly the computer they presented from was a Thinkpad). The core of their talk was really focused around interoperability between the public clouds running OpenStack so customers truly have options when it comes to selecting providers. To meet this they introduced RefStack, a plan for an OpenStack reference implementation.

I was then in testing mode for pretty much the rest of the day! Started off with Strategies for Gating in a growing project as discussions centered around how to best handle the number of tests increasing as more projects are added and existing ones get larger. After lunch it was in to Multi-node Openstack Testing, which began with an Openstack in Openstack (not to be confused with on) presentation by a group who has been working on their own OpenStack running on Openstack implementation for testing and more. Then it was on to discussing how the CI team may be using TripleO style testing for the baremetal testing, and since I’ve been working on this it was a chance for me to take a more active role in participating in a session. I even sat up front. From there it was on to FITS testing of public clouds, where some of the mechanisms and ideas for a testing mechanism for OpenStack deployments could be tested for inclusion of certain features, perhaps even implementing an eventual “certification” type program that tracks public clouds that are using enough OpenStack to be considered OpenStack-powered clouds.

Gating/Validation of OpenStack Deployments was next up. The QA team has many types of tests that they do, and there was some discussion about what should go into the CI infrastructure vs. what should be tested by developers and beyond, not necessarily being things that code commits depend upon. A fair amount of talk was around things like stress testing, which can be sometimes difficult to do in a virtual environment where results depend upon the cloud it was running on, but more on that in a moment. I then attended Upgrade testing and Grenade, Grenade is a tool which, using devstack, tests an upgrade from one OpenStack release to another and was deployed on the CI infrastructure this past cycle so this discussion was to discuss changes and improvements. Last session of the day was Beyond the API – End to End Testing of OpenStack, which is where the topic of resource performance testing came up again. The was consensus that while it’s tricky to do on hosted cloud VMs due to variability of environment, these more qualitative tests could be tracked based on averaging out tests through metrics that the CI team already produces (or could work toward producing more/better of). This way they don’t need specific details about how each individual test runs for some of this, but instead could rely upon over time metrics to show if there are any kinds of trends.

Tonight! Each night there are parties put on by sponsors, and tonight was the one by HP. Of all the conference parties I’ve been to, I have to say this was one of my favorites. They had people going around serving drinks and food, the food selection was enjoyable to me, the venue was spacious and it wasn’t too noisy – you could easily have conversations! And conversations I did have, mostly with the awesome Portland Debian folks who came by and various Ubuntu folks who I know through my Ubuntu work.

It was a great start to the week, looking forward to the next two days!

Filed under: openstack, tech, travel, work

Day of Rest

Wednesday, Apr 10th, 2013 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

In case it’s not obvious to those who read this, I work a lot. I have a day job which consumes at least 40 hours per week, more if I end up hacking on something really cool again and lose track of time, which happens a lot. Then I have volunteer work I do with Partimus and various projects and events within the Ubuntu and Xubuntu communities.

These past several months I’ve also had the added challenges of planning a wedding and adjusting to a new job. I’ve tried hard to handle this all in stride, reminding myself I’m young and don’t yet have children so I should really take advantage of all the free time I have now to get work done. It’s also been rewarding, I get to work with a lot of really smart and inspiring people and reap the benefits of being a prominent person in communities I represent.

If you asked me a year ago to consider any sort of weekly “day of rest” I would have written it off without a second thought, “I have things to do! More than 7 days worth of things! And you want me to drop that down to 6?”

What I didn’t realize is that I’m not a machine. As I continued to optimize my time to get everything done I realized how exhausted I was becoming. It wasn’t just daily tired either, I’ve been very tired for months. I started ending up with evenings where I’d just crash after work and spend all evening watching TV, exhausted with no breaks in sight. I also noticed that things were upsetting me more quickly than usual and I was letting more get to me, this is no good!

A couple months ago in my studies into Judaism I came upon an article about observance of the Shabbat, the weekly Jewish observation of the Sabbath. My first thought was “what an interesting observance, maybe we should do that” and my second thought was “What, am I crazy? I already have NO TIME!” But it’s stayed in the back of my mind. I’ve since learned that the “Day of Rest” is not something exclusive to Abrahamic religions, Buddhists have the Uposatha day of observance, which, while focused on observance is very similar to the tenants observed by many of the Abrahamic religions (the Sabbath is a day Christians go to Church, and many Jews go to the synagogue for study). I’ve also recently read some secular reports of the health benefits of taking a day off, primarily linked to calming down (lower stress) and being able to make healthier choices when we’re not running around all the time.

At the Intro to Judaism class I’m taking we learned about Shabbat a couple weeks ago, which is when MJ and I started talking more serious about some kind of observance of a day of rest. In the class it was recognized that many don’t observe it and there are a few initiatives out there to encourage more people to, like the Sabbath Manifesto which gives a bullet-point modern interpretation of observance. Going through this list was an interesting exercise, but not everything resonated with me. Even so, we decided to give it a try and work out the details as we go along, we bought some Shabbat candles a couple weeks ago and have now observed for two Saturdays.

So, how have those two Saturdays gone?

It’s not easy. Both days I ended up working on some Ubuntu stuff for a few hours because I haven’t adjusted my schedule enough to avoid some commitments that land on Saturday. This is particularly more acute since I work with other community members who have Monday-Friday day jobs not directly related to their work in Ubuntu, weekends are an important time for getting things done. I also noticed that it ended up making my Sunday pretty chaotic both weekends as I squeezed in a lot of things I didn’t do on Saturday.

But some of it is great! I was able to take time to continue my reading of the Hebrew Bible and take my time in doing the readings for our Intro to Judaism class (which is on Sundays). On the first Saturday MJ and I went to services at the synagogue and then spent a nice lunch together where we just enjoyed each other’s company and didn’t talk about work or wedding planning all that much. On the second Saturday I took public transit to the zoo and then spent some time reading on the beach. Finally finding some down time that’s not the 15 minutes before I fall asleep to read has been a huge win.

I wouldn’t say it has cured my exhaustion, part of that is certainly that I need a proper vacation (honeymoon in 3 weeks!), but I have noticed that it’s starting to help. Having a full 24 hours where I can spend time with MJ, do some reading, spend some time outside and not focus on work is quite a refreshing break.

It’s also been interesting to explore what I define as “work” on this day. I began by making a quantitative list and then was struggling with some of the things I put on it, study of Judaism is fine, but writing is an important part of my learning process, can I still write? Should I put limitations on what I should write? Maybe I shouldn’t write for work or formal published articles, but how about a personal blog post that keeps getting put off because I have so much work? What about catching up on personal email? On one blog tackling the subject of secular day of rest the author simply claimed he would reflect on each thing and use the nebulous bar of “if it feels like work, it’s work.” During my second Saturday this ended up being a good measurement, if I realized that stress or strong sense of obligation was driving my activity, I’d stop and leave it for a Sunday.

It’s hard to say how this will turn out in the long term, but for now it’s been a fascinating experiment that has given me the pause I’ve needed these past few months.

Filed under: reflection
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