OpenStack PTG and the Beast From The East

I’m at the OpenStack PTG in Dublin. I’ve started posting some of my videos on my personal YouTube channel – http://youtube.com/RichBowen – as well as on my work channel – http://youtube.com/RDOCommunity.

It turns out we’ve planned an event in the middle of the storm of the century, which the press is calling the Beast From The East.

So far it hasn’t amounted to a lot, but there’s a LOT more snow promised for this afternoon, and the government has warned people to stay off the roads after 4 unless they have a really good reason. Which is disappointing because I have a party planned to start at 6. I’m still trying to get hold of the venue to decide what happens next.

Yesterday I suddenly realized that I had bought my plane ticket for Sunday instead of Saturday by mistake. I quickly booked another hotel room for Saturday night, closer to the airport. Well, it turns out this may have been the most fortunate travel error I’ve made in a long time, as pretty much everything is cancelled for the next few days, and getting out of here on Saturday might have been impossible.

For now, we’re just watching the weather reports, and hoping for the best.

Not a Kenya citizen, apparently

There’s some drama going on in the news in Kenya right now. Without going into all of the detail (it’s quite a soap opera) one of the characters in the drama is one Miguna Miguna. (Yes, that’s really his name.)

Weirdly, I have been acquainted with Miguna for several years. He used to come to my Kenya website, say awful things about pretty much everyone, and then threaten to sue me when anyone said anything at all about him. Even when they had documented evidence. Like about his time in prison for opposing the Moi government, and other details that are conspicuously absent from his Wikipedia page.

But I digress.

One of the details of great interest to me is his citizenship. At some point, he acquired Canadian citizenship while in exile from Kenya (again, due to his political activism). The constitution says pretty clearly (and, as a lawyer, one would think he’d know this) that if you acquire foreign citizenship, you lose your Kenya citizenship. Read it for yourself. And you must apply for reinstatement, if you want it. Kenya does not automatically recognize dual citizenship, although there is a process you can go through to gain it, if you’re in that position.

Now, this last part was news to me, and so I’ve been reading over the last few days. Perhaps I could apply for reinstatement of my dual citizenship?

The 1991 constitution, I vaguely remember, introduces some language that eliminates dual citizenship. However, everything I can find about it now says that the only substantive change in that revision was the abolishment of the one-party state.

This led me to dig some more, because I have always believed that I had dual citizenship when I was born. I was born in Kenya to USA citizen parents.

Turns out, the 1963 constitution does not recognize Jus Soli – the notion that you’re a citizen of the bit of dirt you’re born on. Turns out, that’s actually somewhat uncommon, and mostly only recognized in the Americas. Not in Europe, Africa, or Asia, where (for the most part) you are a citizen only if your parents (or, in most cases, one of them) was a citizen.

So, although I have believed all my life that I’m a citizen of Kenya by birth, it turns out, legally, I never was. And, of course, the 2010 constitution makes it impossible for me to have that citizenship (re)instated, even if I had been, as I would have to reside in Kenya for 7 years, which is not practical at this stage in my life. And, as someone who was not, legally, born a citizen, I’d have to renounce my US citizenship as part of that process.

This is odd. Practically speaking, it makes no difference. I have never had enough knowledge of local politics to want to vote. I can still travel to Kenya without a visa. And I still have my childhood and my memories. It makes no practical difference whatsoever.

But I still feel like I’ve lost a part of who I am. Or, something that I always believed I was.

FOSDEM ’18, and the CentOS Brussels Dojo

The first weekend in February always finds me in Brussels for FOSDEM and the various associated events, and this year is no exception.

I arrived in Brussels on Wednesday morning, in order to have a little time to get over jet lag.

I have an AirBnB with two of my colleagues, and on Thursday, we cooked a fancy dinner and had a few friends over to share it. I think this is going to become an annual thing. It was a lot of fun, and I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. I kind of wish we could have invited more people, but space is limited.

On Friday, CentOS had a dojo at the Marriott. We had roughly 75 people in attendance, and two rooms of presentations. I was, on the whole, very pleased with the event – both the attendance and the great talks.

Videos from the talk will start to appear on YouTube over the next few days, for those that missed it.

(We’ll have another Dojo in Singapore in March. Details coming real soon.)

Today was the first day of FOSDEM, with the chaos that always accompanies that. As usual, I worked shifts at the Apache, CentOS, and OpenStack tables. As usual, I was exhausted by quitting time. (Ok, quite a while before quitting time.)

Of course, I have to go back and do it again tomorrow.

This event is always exhausting, but it’s also a great time to see friends and colleagues from pretty much every open source project I’ve ever worked on, all the way back to the beginning.  Today I saw Apache friends I haven’t seen in many years, and also got to spend time with colleagues that I usually only see a few times a year.

I’ll be writing more over on the CentOS blog, as well as in the RDO newsletter, so see those for the rest of the story.

Curb side checkin

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When I was a kid, someone told me that curb side baggage checkins at airports were usually a scam – unaffiliated with the airline and just there to steal your luggage.

30+ years later, I don’t think I’ve ever used on of these outside baggage checkins. They seem somehow suspect, even though I’m pretty sure they’re probably legit. I’m just certain I’d never see my luggage again.

Do you use them?

Flight delay out of Amsterdam

Yesterday I flew from Amsterdam to Prague on the 2:30pm flight, scheduled to arrive around 4pm.

Boarding began on time. This being Amsterdam, you don’t just walk out of the gate onto the plane – there’s a bus that takes you from the gate out to the plane. So, we all got on the bus, and got on the plane. No trouble.

At this point (unbeknownst to all of the passengers) one passenger calls a flight attendant over and reports that the bag which he/she has boarded with is not, in fact, his/her bag.

This started a chain of events from which there was no escape, due to both airline and federal policy.

A full security sweep of the plane was ordered, which involved everyone getting off of the plane. There was quite a bit of confusion – I assume they were trying to avoid panicking anybody, and so communication was slow? – but eventually we all got off of the plane, and back onto the buses. After sitting on the bus for a while, we started to drive around the plane parking area, making several loops.

At one point, the driver told us that the pilot had been arrested, and later that a passenger had been arrested. Neither one of these turned out to be true.

Finally, the driver got word that we had to go back to the terminal, and so we headed that direction, only to turn back a minute or two later with new instructions. Back at the plane, we sat for a while, and then did in fact go back to the terminal, where we were issued new boarding passes for the rescheduled flight, now scheduled for 5:30pm. We also received a generous 5 Euro voucher for dinner. (Yes, that was sarcastic. That won’t even get you a sandwich at Schiphol.)

Meanwhile, the flight crew exceeded its mandatory maximum on-the-clock time, and were relieved of duty, so the 5:30 flight was cancelled. Fortunately, there was a KLM plan and crew with nothing to do, and they picked up the flight.

Throughout this entire process, various passengers were loudly demanding more information! Answers! Explanations! None of which in any way helped things along. Others offered advice as to how to handle the situation, which was equally unhelpful, since a procedure was being observed, which wasn’t open to improvisation.

What remains a mystery is why the passenger waited until we were all on board to notify someone that he/she had the wrong bag.

CERN CentOS Dojo, part 4 of 4, Geneva

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This is part 4 of a series about my visit to CERN in Geneva. You can read the entire series here: https://drbacchus.com/cern-centos-dojo-2017/

On Friday evening, I went downtown Geneva with several of my colleagues and various people that had attended the event.

CERN is right on the France/Switzerland border, so we’ve been going back and forth between the two countries several times a day, often not really knowing what country we were actually in.

I had been to Geneva when I was younger, but I really couldn’t say for sure when that was. The only thing I remember was the fountain – the Jet D’Eau – so I wanted to see that again. It was every bit as impressive as I remembered it.

CERN and Geneva

However, it was the end of a very long day, and between that, and jet lag, I was absolutely exhausted, so headed back to the hotel. I hope to go downtown again for a few hours this afternoon, but I kind of wanted to get these articles written while the memories were fresh.

When I was a kid, I dreamed that some day I would have a job traveling around the world, getting paid to see cool things. I think a lot of people dream of that. I have had the amazing good luck to achieve that goal. I have the best coworkers in the world, and I get to do things that I’m passionate about, every single day. The only way that this could be better is if I could have my beloved travel with me. Perhaps some day.

 

CERN CentOS Dojo, part 3 of 4: Friday Dojo

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On Friday, I attended the CentOS Dojo at CERN, in Meyrin Switzerland.

CentOS dojos are small(ish) gatherings of CentOS enthusiasts that happen all over the world. Each one has a different focus depending on where it is held and the people that plan and attend it.

You can read more about dojos HERE.

On Friday, we had roughly 60-70 people in attendance, in a great auditorium provided by CERN. We had 97 people registered, and 75% is pretty standard turnout for free-to-register events, so we were very pleased.

You can get a general idea of the size of the crowd in this video:

The full schedule of talks can be seen here: https://indico.cern.ch/event/649159/timetable/#20171020

There was an emphasis on large-scale computing, since that’s what CERN does. And the day started with an overview of the CERN cloud computing cluster. Every time I attend this talk (and I’ve seen it perhaps 6 times now) the numbers are bigger and more impressive.

CERN and Geneva

This time, they reported 279 thousands cores in their cluster. That’s a lot. And it’s all running RDO. This makes me insanely proud to be a small part of that endeavor.

Other presentations included reports from various SIGs. SIGs are Special Interest Groups within CentOS. This is where the work is done to develop projects on top of CentOS, including packaging, testing, and promotion of those projects. You can read more about the SIGs here: https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup

If you want to see your project distributed in the CentOS distro, a SIG is the way to make this happen. Drop by the centos-devel mailing list to propose a SIG or join an existing one.

The entire day was recorded, so watch this space for the videos and slides from the various presentations.

The CERN folks appeared very pleased with the day, and stated their intention to do the event again on an annual basis, if all works out. These things aren’t free to produce, of course (even though we strive to make them always free to attend) so if your organization is interested in sponsoring future dojos, please contact me. I’ll also be publishing a blog post over on seven.centos.org in the coming days about what’s involved in doing one of these events, in case you’d like to host one at your own facility..

CERN Centos Dojo, event report: 2 of 4 – CERN tours

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(This post is the second in a series of four. They are gathered here.)

The second half of Thursday was where we got to geek out and tour various parts of CERN.

I was a physics minor in college, many years ago, and had studied not just CERN, but many of the actual pieces of equipment we got to tour, so this was a great privilege.

We started by touring the data center where the data from all of the various physics experiments is crunched into useful information and discoveries. This was amazing for a number of reasons.

From the professional side, CERN is the largest installation of RDO – the project I work with at work – that we know of. 279 thousand cores running RDO OpenStack.

For those not part of my geek world, that translates into hundreds of thousands of physical computers, arranged in racks, crunching data to unlock the secrets of the universe.

For those that are part of my geek world, you can understand why this was an exciting thing to see in person and walk through.

The full photo album is here, but I want to particularly show a couple of shots:

Visiting CERN

Here we have several members of the RDO and CentOS team standing in front of some of the systems that run RDO.

Visiting CERN

And here we have a photo that only a geek can love – this is the actual computer on which the very first website ran. Yes, boys and girls, that’s Tim Berners-Lee’s desktop computer from the very first days of the World Wide Web. It’s ok to be jealous.

There will also be some video over on my YouTube channel, but I haven’t yet had an opportunity to edit and post that stuff.

Next, we visited the exhibit about the Superconducting Super Collider, also known as the Large Hadron Collider. This was stuff that I studied in college, and have geeked out about for the years since then.

There are pictures from this in the larger album, but I want to point out one particular picture of something that absolutely blew my mind.

Most of the experiments in the LHC involve accelerating sub-atomic particles (mostly protons) to very high speeds – very close to the speed of light – and then crashing them into something. When this happens, bits of it fly off in random directions, and the equipment has to detect those bits and learn things about them – their mass, speed, momentum, and so on.

In the early days, one of the the ways that they did this was to build a large chamber and string very fine wires across it, so that when the particles hit those wires it would cause electrical impulses.

Those electrical impulses were captured by these:

CERN visit

Those are individual circuit boards. THOUSANDS of them, each individually hand-soldered. Those are individual resistors, capacitors, and ICs, individually soldered to boards. The amount of work involved – the dedication, time, and attention to detail – is simply staggering. This photo is perhaps 1/1000th of the total number of boards. If you’ve done any hand-soldering or electronic projects, you’ll have a small sense of the scale of this thing. I was absolutely staggered by this device.

Outside on the lawn were several pieces of gigantic equipment that were used in the very early days of particle physics, and this was like having the pages of my college text book there in front of me. I think my colleagues thought I’d lost my mind a little.

College was a long time ago, and most of the stuff I learned has gone away, but I still have the sense of awe of it all. That an idea (let’s smash protons together!) resulted in this stuff – and more than 10,000 people working in one place to make it happen, is really a testament to the power of the human mind. I know some of my colleagues were bored by it all, but I am still reeling a little from being there, and seeing and touching these things. I am so grateful to Tim Bell and Thomas Oulevey for making this astonishing opportunity available to me.

Finally, we visited the ATLAS experiment, where they have turned the control room into a fish tank where you can watch the scientists at work.

CERN visit

What struck me particularly here was that most of the people in the room were so young. I hope they have a sense of the amazing opportunity that they have here. I expect that a lot of these kids will go on to change the world in ways that we haven’t even thought of yet. I am immensely jealous of them.

So, that was the geek chapter of our visit. Please read the rest of the series for the whole story.

CERN Centos Dojo 2017, Event report (1 of 4): Thursday meeting

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Over the last few days I’ve been in Geneva for the CERN CentOS Dojo, 2017 edition.

(This is part 1 of a series of four posts. They are gathered here.)

On Thursday, prior to the main event, a smaller group of CentOS core community got together for some deep-dive discussions around the coming challenges that the project is facing, and constructive ways to address them.

This meeting was very potentially productive. I say potentially because some great decisions were made, with universal approval, but everything depends on the execution. Some of these decisions will take a great deal of work over the coming months. Of course, nobody is averse to hard work, but we all also have other things to do. So we need to keep the long-term health of the project firmly in mind, and find time for these tasks.

 

The full notes from that meeting have been posted to the Centos-devel mailing list for further discussion.

The attendees were from many different organizations, countries, and cultures. While the various organizations represented have rather different goals and motivations, there was great unity of purpose – ensuring the long-term health of the CentOS project.

Topics covered were focused on removing roadblocks to forward movement on the project, and removing obstacles to new contributors to the project coming on board and getting things done. This was very encouraging.

We were disappointed that a number of prominent community members were unable to attend. Notably, Karanbir was absent due to a broken toe:

 

Continuing discussion of the topics will happen on the centos-devel mailing list, and, as always, people who want to step up to assist in any of the identified tasks are encouraged to speak up and volunteer.

CentOS is a community of project communities, and works best when those projects identify the things that will make them more productive, and then step up to make those things happen.

 

The Margin Is Too Narrow