Tag Archives: linux

Switching to KDE

I’m in the midst of switching from Gnome to KDE/Plasma. I’m doing this because KDEnlive crashes a lot less under KDE, and the every-3-minutes crashes were making editing videos amazingly painful.

I’m actually really liking it. The biggest problem right now (less than 24 hours in) is muscle memory making unexpected things happen.

One of the things I liked most about MacOS was that I had different applications on different virtual desktops, and I had my fingers trained so that if I wanted, say, to go to email, that was on desktop 2, and alt-2 took me there. This was never possible (or, at least, easy) on Gnome. But it’s easy on KDE, and I’m rapidly getting back into that habit, even though it’s been roughly 5 years since I’ve used a Mac.

There are, of course, small irritations, having more to do with what I’m used to than whether they are “good” or “bad”. But I think, over all, in addition to improving how long it takes to edit video, this will be a net win for productivity.

We’ll see.

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..

todo.txt

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Reposting from an email I sent a while back:

As several people have asked about my todo list within the last 2 weeks, I thought I’d share the goodness with everyone.

I’ve been using todo.txt for about a year now. http://todotxt.com/

Don’t let the website fool you. todo.txt isn’t (primarily) a gui app, or a phone app. The todo list is in a plain text file. There’s a dozen different tools that you can use to manage it, but I just use the command line:

t ls – what’s in my list?
t add ITEM – Adds ITEM to my todo list
t pri ## A – Makes item ## priority A
t do ## – Marks item ## as done, moves it to DONE list for later reference
t ls blarg – Lists todo items that match ‘blarg’
t lsp A – Show me all the things that are priority A
done – An alias to ‘cat ~/Dropbox/todo/done.txt’ which shows me what I’ve done most recently

If you happen to store your todo list in your Dropbox directory, you can then also use the free Android app to manage your todo list from your phone. (I’ve heard it also work with google drive, or owncloud, or a variety of other things.)

As someone who has used every possible todo list out there, including a dozen issue trackers, and writing a few different todo list webapps, sticking with a single tool for a whole year is unprecedented. Being able to work from the command line made all the difference for me, since that’s where I always am anyways.

Server Not Found

Up until about 9 years ago, I had a server rack in my home office. At one point, there were as many as 12 servers running on it, running websites, DNS services, email , NNTP, and a variety of other services.

I blogged about this a while back.

servers

As time went on, I started to recognize the benefits of running services in the cloud. This meant everything from moving email to GMail, to running web and DNS on a hosted server at Rackspace (then known as SliceHost).

Eventually, I had no computers in the house at all, except for my work-issued laptop.

A little while ago, I started to miss my servers, for many reasons. I still run some mail services on my VPS at Rackspace, to do things like mail aliasing for a variety of domains, and of course I still run all my own web servers there. But there’s something about having a server that you have to physically maintain that keeps your skills going in ways that you just don’t have to when it’s out there somewhere.

A year or so ago, I found a refurb Dell machine for next to nothing, and put CentOS 7.1 on it. That released in April, so it must have been about then. For a while I didn’t do much with it, other than test OpenStack installs. But after a while I brought up a Minecraft server on it, running the Bukkit distribution of Minecraft, to play with family members. Then I opened it up to a few friends.

treasure_huntThis Christmas, one friend did a treasure hunt for her kids in the Minecraft world, which was incredibly cool. I’ve seen them on the server a number of times since then.

When I posted on Facebook about this a few days ago, someone from ArcLight responded, saying I should host my server there, which brought on this trip down memory lane. No, Seth, while I appreciate the offer, and I’m certain you’d do a better job than I, running it myself was the entire point. Thanks, though, and I wish you well with your business.

LinuxCon NA 2014

Last week I attended LinuxCon North America in Chicago.

As always when I go to a conference, there’s always about 5 things going on at any moment, and one has to decide where to be and what to do, and then wish you’d done the other thing.

I spent most of the time working the Red Hat booth, talking to people about RDO, OpenShift, Atomic, and, of course, 3D printing.

I also spent a little time over at the OpenStack booth, although it was mostly staffed pretty well without me. The cool thing about the OpenStack booth was the representation from many different companies, all working together to make OpenStack successful, and the ability to be cordial – even friendly – in the process.

While I didn’t attend very many talks, there were a few that I made it to, and some of these were really great.

Rikki Endsley’s talk You Know, for Kids! 7 Ideas for Improving Tech Education in Schools was largely a story about an unfortunate experience in a high school programming class, and the lessons learned from it. I’m very interested in stories like this, primarily because I want to teach my daughters, but also, my son, how to deal with gender discrimination in their various interests, although it seems particularly troublesome in geekly pursuits.

Guy Martin’s talk Developing Open Source Leadership was brilliant. He talked about how to participate in Open Source projects, and encourage your employees to do so, for the specific goal of establishing your company as a leader in a particular field. While this sounds like it may be about subverting the character of Open Source for your own financial benefit, it didn’t go that direction at all. Instead, he talked about being a good community citizen, and truly establishing leadership by participating, not merely by gaming the system. This was a great talk, and well worth attending if you happen to see him giving it again.

The 3D printing keynotes on Friday were very high in geek factor, and, as we had a 3D printer at the Red Hat booth,
I learned more about 3D printing last week than anything else.

A large part of the value of the conference (as with most tech conferences these days) was the evening and hallway conversations, evening events, dinner with various people, and conversations with people stopping by the booth. The technical content is always useful. The personal connections and stories are absolutely the most valuable thing. Running into old friends and making new ones is also always a highlight of these events.

Wednesday evening, I participated in an event where we talked with the folks from Chicago CTO Forum about The Apache Software Foundation. That was a lot of fun, and I learned at least as much as I taught.

Thursday was superhero day, with various people dressing up as their favorite heros. Alas, I didn’t take a costume, but several of my coworkers did.

A final highlight of the conference (and of which I have no photos) was the running tour of the city. Friday morning, CittyRunningTours took me and 20 or so other runners on a historical and architectural tour of downtown Chicago. we ran about 4 miles, stopping every half mile or so for a history lesson. It was fascinating, as well as being a good run.

Time Change

I’m somewhat baffled by the press that the time change got, with respect to Microsoft Windows. We’ve been doing daylight savings time since that Ben Franklin guy, and it’s not like the change in the date was a surprise. We’ve known about it for 2 years. Why on earth did they wait to the last minute?

Anyways, all of my Linux machines change my clocks for me, and kept it to themselves. No fuss. No clicking OK. No patches needed. They just did the right thing.