As of yesterday, we now have the following operating systems in this house:
Desktop:
* Windows 7
Laptops:
* Chrome OS
* OS X
* Fedora 20
* CentOS 6
Phones:
* Android
* iOS
* Random AT&T phone
Tablets:
* Android
* Android with CyanogenMod
Raspberry Pi
* Pidora
* Raspbian
And, of course, being The Computer Guy, they’re mostly my job. Fun, fun.
I just upgraded Habari (the blog software) and in the process of purging spam comments, I appear to have also nuked all legitimate comments. I suppose I should be upset, since there were almost 3000 comments on the site, but it feels like a chance to start fresh, and not have to paw through a million spam comments for the occasional diamond.
The one page with really valuable comments is archived at archive.org
Cool OpenStack video with footage of Red Hat engineers at the OpenStack summit in Hong Kong last month.
Last night I attended the OpenStack meetup in Cincinnati. It was a lot longer drive than I anticipated, as it was on the north side of Cincy. But it was worth the drive. There were only five people there including myself, and although there was nothing formal planned in terms of a presentation, we had a great conversation around what we do in our various jobs with OpenStack, and I think we all learned something new about the OpenStack world in the process.
If you’re in the Cincy/Louisville/Lexington area, and you’re interested in future meetups, please let me know (rbowen at red hat dot com), so that we can get you included in those announcements. I’d really like to do something in Lexington, so that I don’t have to drive so far. 😉 So if you’re in Lexington and are interested in, or are using, OpenStack, please ping me and we’ll set something up.
Today I saw this tweet:
Proposing a game to cheer up our programming newbies: Experienced coders, let’s share code snippets we wrote after half a year of coding.
— Lena Herrmann (@kilaulena) November 26, 2013
And it took me back …
2000, I was attending YAPC. I had been doing Perl stuff for several years at that point, and had written, among other things, a web calendar app called Hypercal. Calendar math was something I was very interested in at the time – particularly non-Gregorian calendars.
While at YAPC, I had several conversations with people about calendrical calculations, and on improving the core Perl date/time libraries. It was, in fact, immediately after one of these conversations that I attended a talk titled something like “how not to program”, which featured spectacularly bad code examples from published works. I *think* that the speaker was MJD, but this was a long time ago.
As I watched the speaker expound on the horrors of the code he had found, I gradually realized that this was MY code that he was lambasting. As it happens, an early version of Hypercal had been used as an example in a Japanese book on CGI programming. I still have a copy of it somewhere, I’m sure, but I expect it’s out of print now. But, there it was, on the big screen, for everyone to see.
It was truly awful code, and it could have been a truly humiliating experience, had I not, by that time, progressed a ways past my early errors. What’s amazing was that, at the time, there were few enough people producing Open Source web apps that my dreadful code ended up being an example worth putting in print.
I often think of that incident when helping beginners. It’s good to remember that 1) everyone you meet knows how to do something you don’t, and 2) no matter where you are now, at one point you were a clueless beginner.
This is “How Mr. Weasel was made an outcast”, from the book Mother West Wind “How” Stories by Thornton W. Burgess. I haven’t recorded something in a long time, but hopefully will do more of these in the weeks to come.
Listen to it HERE, or subscribe to my podcast to listen to it in your favorite podcast app.
7 years ago this evening, I knocked nervously on Carie’s door. We had a date to make mulled wine. Yes, it’s an odd first date.
We made several bottles of mulled wine, a few of which we still have. I said that one of her paintings was “nice”. Yep, I really did. “Nice.” Sheesh.
Eventually, it was time to go, and I said I’d like to see her again some time.
And here we are. And, seven years on, it just keeps getting better all the time. If there’s a regret, it’s that I didn’t find her sooner. The nice painting hangs over my desk. It’s still very nice.
I spoke with several Red Hat engineers at the OpenStack Summit last week in Hong Kong, about what they work on with the OpenStack project. Here’s Dan Radez, talking about what he does.
See also TryStack.org
You can listen to this conversation HERE, or subscribe to my podcasts to listen to it in your favorite podcast app.
I recently acquired a Samson Go Mic. It’s awesome. I’m so used to having to shout into my mics that it’s actually taken some adjustment to go back to talking at a normal volume, and also reduce the mic volume, to get audio that isn’t clipped.
I did a couple of interviews in Hong Kong last week, and realized, when editing the result, that I didn’t have the selector switch set correctly. There’s a little slidey switch on the side, and the manual has a lot of technical jargon about what settings to use.
Here’s the summary: The circle makes the mic dual-sided, which is good for interviews. The one that looks like pacman makes it one-sided, which is good for just recording yourself. I have no idea what the one in the middle does.
I just had it set on the wrong setting, so it didn’t pick up the person I was interviewing very well. So … problem solved.
Last week at the OpenStack summit in Hong Kong I talked with Flavio Percoco about the Marconi project, which is incubating in OpenStack.
You can listen to this conversation HERE, or subscribe to my podcasts to listen to it in your favorite podcast app.
Transcript:
Last week at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong, I had an opportunity to speak with a number of Red Hat engineers who are working on OpenStack.
This is a conversation with Flavio Percoco, who is working on the Marconi project.
Rich: I’m speaking with Flavio Percoco, and he is working on the Marconi project. First of all, what is Marconi?
Flavio: Marconi is a queue and notification service for OpenStack. It’s basically a really nice API on top of existing technologies, so we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel there. We are just putting an API on top of existing brokers like RabbitMQ, Qpid, or AMQ, or whatever broker is there. Even databases can be used as messaging tools within Marconi.
Rich: One of the policies of OpenStack is that core components be really pluggale. So I assume that’s a goal of Marconi as well.
Flavio: Yeah. That’s definitely a goal of Marconi, and one of the things we want to make sure we are respecting is the fact that Marconi shouldn’t be invasive in your infrastructure. So if you want to deploy Marconi you can easily install it and build it like using Lego bricks. You can pick whatever transfer you want to use – either use http or tcp or zeromq or whatever you want to use, and you can also choose what backend you want to use. It could be RabbitMQ, QPID, or MongoDB, or some mysql database if you prefer, because maybe you already have that deployed in your infrastructure, so you want to keep your data how you already have it and still use that.
Rich: And what are you doing in particular on the Marconi project?
Flavio: I started contributing to Marconi since the very beginning. I co-PTL’ed the project with Kurt until now, and now that Marconi is Incubated in OpenStack, Kurt is the official PTL, but we’re still doing that work together. We split the PTL duties, and we lead the development of Marconi and the whole team – keeping the priorities straight and making sure we’re doing the right thing for the project.
Rich: What else are you excited about that’s coming up in OpenStack?
Flavio: Marconi is definitely something I’m really really excited about. Solum looks like a very good project. TripleO – TripleO is really amazing. I think the effort Red Hat is putting there is definitely worth it. It’s the way to go. I think those three projects are the most intrigueing ones for me right now.
There’s many new features in existing projects that maybe are worth highlighting for people. For example, Glance has put a lot of effort in being able to be deployed as a public service, so that’s something that might be useful for some use cases. Like if you wanted share usage, or for Red Hat itself, sharing RHEL ditributions, it would be cool to be able to share them using Glance, for example.
Oslo now also has messaging. Basically we pulled out the whole RPC code to its own repository, and we started doing that with many other libraries that were incubating in Oslo. Oslo is definitely paying out right now. The whole process of incubating libraries and improving the API, and making sure they are stable enough to have their own repositories, so that’s something that is definitely cool about the current state of OpenStack.
Rich: Thank you very much. Thanks for talking with me.
Flavio: Thank you very much.