As a sort of New Year’s resolution I’ve decided to retire a few stories that I sometimes tell people. I suspect I repeat some of these a bit too often (and sometimes to the same person) and they are getting a little stale. Feel free to offer other suggestions.
Kicking down door at work
My day as a court witness
Co-Worker electrocuted and comes back for more
Co-worker at Gang Party
Co-worker mugged on 1st day in Auckland
Colour-blind co-worker and windows
My Uncle meets Bill Gates
Stories about crazy head of the company I used to work for.
The day I meet the guy from the Fraud Squad
The above are all retired until Jan 1st 2015 unless specificly requested.
Looks like a USB keyboard to a computer, generates a 44 character OTP each time button is pressed. No batteries, 2st 23 characters fixed for each key
$12 each in volumn – $40 as one-off
Based on secret AES 128-bit key
Yubicoships yubikeys with pre-generated IDs and AES keys. Offer publicauthentication, they know secret 128-bit key, need to trust them
secret-id+sess+timestamp+session+rand+CRC string created by key , then encrypted and public ID prepended.
Server decrypts , checks checksums and looks to make sure secret-id matches and session and timestamps are incrimented from previous values.
Unless you trust and always want to use Yubicom’s servers you should reprogram you keys with your own keys and IDs. Can’t then be used against Yubicom’s server.
weaknesses – requires computer with usb port that accepts usb keyboard – some bugs with 1st generation keys – unused generated keys remian live until the next valid key is used
You can run your own server fairly easily – ykaserver – various interfaces, postgress database for storage – can also call out to PAM for two-factor authentication
softykey – software Yubikey – can use to generate 1-time pad for stuff without usb keyboard interfaces
Tested with ssh, VPNs , web logins – mostly use PAM or LDAP method
See Linux Journal and yubico.com
vimperator – automatic launch prog for netbooks
Jan Schmidt – Towards GStreamer 1.0
History of dev, faster bits during hackfests, when switched to git etc
Overview of last year, switched to git, slowdown when people busyswitched to binary registry
Support for various DVD playback functions, special subtitles etc.
I’m not really in this area so I was just listening to get an idea where things are going. A bit too much detail for me at times.
Adam Jackson – The rebirth of Xinerama
Once again this was a bit over my head. It does look like the X guys spend a lot of time fighting assumptions built into the protocol and code 10 years ago however.
Stewart Smith et al – Building a Database kernel with Lego Like parts (Drizzle)
What would you change about Mysql – Modular architecture
Some crazy legacysuff in the Mysql code – good oppertunity to clean
move alot of code out of core, especially option parts – understandable and to reduce load – don’t load if you don’t need
“If part of API sucks then fix API rather than work around it”
New this week – rot13() powerful encryption
Authentication plugins – auth_pam , auth_http
Various Logging plugins – logging_query , logging_syslog
Drizzle Community – All contributors equally – All project information public – No contributor license agreeements – Release early and often (~2 weeks ) – 100+ contributors , 500+ on mailing list
Milestone releases
When production release? – waiting to solidfy compatability – Sounds like a few months. – Reliable but still in flux
Pacakages to be pushed out to dists once things stable
Afterwards I had some dinner and went to the Professional Deligates networking session.
Wednesday is the first day of Linux.conf.au proper. I thought that today I’d just keep my notes in a blog post to prevent doubling up.
The keynote was Benjamin Mako Hill talked about various things the most interesting bit was “antifeatures”. Things like DRM, crippling of products etc. The one of these I most hate right now is they way that cheap netbooks have fairly low specs (small resolutions, low RAM, slow CPUs ) partially because they have to keep the spec below a certain value in order to qualify for the really cheap Windows license.
The dreamwidth talk was quiet interesting (although the speakers pre-rehearsed banter between the speakers didn’t really work). Lots of practical examples , war stories and good sound advice.
Selena Deckelmann talked about choosing which open source database your should choose. The quick answer is “what problem are your trying to solve?”. She did a survey of the 50-odd databases out there and got 25 replies. Also did her own research and comparisons. Classified DBs into several categories (which I won’t list) such as
General Model – Key-Value, OLTP.
Distribution model (replication, partitioning, sharing).
Memory vs disk (eg keegin g everything in memory only like memcached).
HA options, Node failover.
Code dev model – Core +modules , Monolithic , Infrastructure
Community dev model – Dictator, Feature driven, Small group, A mix
Need verification that protocols correctly implimented
Need tools/test to check things like replication working
More connections between projects/people (eg java seperate)
Ted Ts’o – Production-Ready filesystems
Hard to make robust. Many different workloads, lots of state, very parallel
Hard to balance getting it out with getting it stable enough to be fairly safe to use
75-100 persons-years for filesystem to be production ready.
eg zfs around a dozen people , start 2001, announced 2005, shipped 2006, people confident with it around 2008-2009
Ext4 renamed from ext4dev at end 2008
Ext4 Shipping is some community distributions, soon in some enterprise distributions, widespread adoption 12+ months later
Lots of bugfixes still in ext4, most not real-world and picked up by auto-tools or careful checks in weird conditions.
Ted: “my other prefered term for Dbench is ‘random number generator’ “
Paths like online resize, online defrag that are not regularly tested by users or testers so source of many bugs.
Many bugs were in the recently subsystems and features
Making General purpose file system takes longer and a lot more effort than you might expect. Labour of love, hard to justify from business perspective.
Solid state drives with “flash translation layer” in place are fairly much the same as spinning disks. Extra optimizations for disks don’t help but they don’t hurt
Matthew Garrett on the Linux community
Started by listing things he’s not talked about
The Linux community is “Like the Koreas”
To be a member of the Linux community “you just have to care, just have to turn”
As community we are very hostile, it’s seen okay to flame and it is being rewarded still
Should we stop just cause it’s a nice thing to do or because it’ll stop scaring people off?
Ubuntu code of conduct has mean’t that users are consider part of the community more than in other distributions
Code of Conduct must be enforced or it’s useless
“We value code above all else… not a good thing” . We need people to feel that by using software they are part of something
Communty entirely based on technical excellence or encompasing everybody who users, cares, contributes to projects
Idea for positive examples Wiki with pointers to COPs and best practice examples
Not gained behavior standards normally associated with grown communities
Sage Weil – ceph distributed file system
How different
scaleable to 1000s , grow from a few
reliable, HA, replicated data, fast recovery
snapshots, quota-like accounting
Motivation – avoid bottlenecks and symetrical shared disks
metadata (MDS) servers/clusters and object store boxes seperate
CRUSH hash function used to distrubtute objects across devices, works as devices are added. Spread them out explicitly across infrastructure if required
fast (no lookups), relieable, stable
celp object storage daemon on each node
talks to peers on other node: rep data, detect failures, migrate data
hashing fuction means nodes don’t have to negotiate with each other, CRUSH says where data is going.
monitor storage nodes, moves data around, make sure it’s in the right places, uptodate. fixes if required.
raw storage API if you don’t need full filesystem fun (dirs etc)
proxy that emulates s3 REST interface
metadata cluster , uses object store for all long term storage, needs memory and fast network for performance.
metadata streamed to journal. large journal (100s MB) flushed now and then
snapshotting on per-directory basisi via simple mkdir
First real day of Linux.conf.au is always full on anticipation. I woke up a little early and nibbled a small breakfast as I walked from ustay to the venue. After the crap weather on the weekend things were stating to look a bit better.
The signup are at the venue was fairly quite with people being processed quickly and many having been signed up for the weekend.
First up was the Welcome talk which had a few hitches. Due to illness it was being given by and understudy who was a little unpracticed with the delivery and had a problem when the overhead screen went blank for 5 minutes due to technical problems (not sure if it was the screen or the laptop’s fault). Highlights were a 42-below ad for Wellington and everyby singing Happy Birthday to Rusty.
I spent the first couple of sessions at the Haechsen/LinuxChix Miniconf since most of the topics were interesting and for various reasons (mumble mumble) talk times between miniconfs were not sync’d so it was hard to move between them.
It looks like this year the video situation is fairly good. All Miniconfs and main sessions are both being streamed live (although in wma format which caused some comment ) and being record for later download. Hopefully It’ll all work out.
Talks I attended:
Version control for mere mortals by Emma Jane Hogbin was a good intro to VCS and practices including a bit aimed at sysadmins and content maintainers rather than just coders. She obviously likes Bazaar a lot more than git. Goods intro and once again I feel guilty about not using it more.
Happy Hackers == Happy Code by Sara Falamaki was an overview of what makes programmers happy. Mostly concentrating on tools but with some other bits and pieces mentioned. Great, especially the bit where Sara started throwing (often wildly) lollies to members of the audience who made good suggestions.
Through the Looking Glass by Elizabeth Garbee gave here perspective on using open source software and the high-school level. Interesting stuff on tools, and how other teens viewed open source and programming and the scary story about how her school had a rule that any student how bought a computer to school running Linux/Unix would be expelled!
Creating Beautiful Documentation from Lana Brindley covered some high level bits of the process redhat uses to create documentation as well as a bit of an overview of what technical writers do and why their jobs rock 🙂
Getting you feet wet for Angela Byron gave ways and advice for getting involved with Open source projects ( including the old “woman’s work” (my, not her term)) of documentation etc. Pretty good.
Code of our own from Liz Henry was about the first feminist orientation talk of the day. Lots of stories and advice for women in open source as well as a few bits where she gave your low opinion of how well some ideas have worked in practice.
Overall fairly interesting sessions. I noticed that for most of the 2 session the majority of people in the room were male and quite a few of the audience questions/comments were from them. This didn’t really cause a problem for most talks which were on general topics but I noticed the “male perspective” was less useful/welcome for Liz Henry’s talk.
For Lunch I wandered around a little bit an eventually found a place called “The coffee club” where I had a soy milkshake and a pesto bruschetta. Very nice.
For the last session I went to “The business of Open Source” Miniconf and then “Libra Graphics”
The 100 mile Client Roster from Emma Jane Hogbin was an interesting overview of the way her business and business model has evolved and where she thinks the next step is. Good talk and delivery although it’s a bit outside my area for me to give a good review of the content.
Building a service business using open source software by Cameron Beattie didn’t really appear to me. The talk was a bit flat and delivery lacked much spark.
Cheap Gimmicks to Make your designs ‘New’ by Andy Fitzsimon from suffered a bit from technical problems with delivery but looked like there was a good talk in there somewhere that just required a bit more prep.
Dynamic PDF reports via XSL and Inkscape by Peter Lieverdink was cool but a little over my head.
Inkscape: My Cheerleading Adventures by Donna Benjamin was a little sparse even for a 5 minutes talk
After the end of the day I went along to a Wikipedia Meetup at the Southern Cross Hotel. The Meetup was fairly small ( just 3 other people) but interesting people and several hours of discussion. Some talk about a NZ Wikimedia Chapter and also helping with the Wikimedia stand at the LCA open day.
Last up I grabbed a coffee and cake at Midnight Espresso.
Overall not a bad day, tomorrow will by Sysadmin Miniconf all day wih the Speakers Dinner in the evening.
I’m not sure why I suddenly seem to be publishing a food blog but I have a few tech articles up my sleeve which should get posted in the near future. But for now I have another review of one of my regular food haunts.
The Bluebird is a vegetarian and vegan cafe is locate in the Valley Road shops on Dominion road, across the road from the foodtown supermarket. It is own and run by the New Zealand Sri Chinmoy Centre which is a group/church/whatever of followers of spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy .
The shop is on two levels, downstairs there is seating for around 20 and a counter at the back where you can order. Upstairs seating is about the same but includes a couple of couches and low tables. Normally you order and pay at the counter and the food is brought out.
The menu (also on the website) is completely vegetarian with about half of items being vegan. The standard item is a bowl which has a base of Baked potato, mashed potato, baked kumara or brown rice with one of about 8 toppings. This comes in 3 sizes ( $9, $12 and $15) and I’ve found that the medium size is more than enough for a main meal.
Medium size, mexican beans on rice with cheese on top. $12
The sample pictured is a medium size ( $12) meal. The base is rice, the topping is Mexican beans with sauce and there is cheese on top. The meal also comes with some bread.
A large meal pretty much fills the bowl to the top.
Drinks include water (free) and various phoenix soft drinks , juices and some smoothies (although I keep forgetting to check if they do Soy smoothies).
Other mains includes a rotating array of salads, hot-pots, Lasagna, pies etc. These may or may not be available each day. Apart from the bowls which are always available you just have to see what is at the counter.
Sweets include the very nice apple crumble (which comes in a bowl) along with a couple of cakes and a small selection of slices at normal cafe prices.
There is the usual range of coffees (50cent Soy-milk surcharge) plus some herbal teas.
Frittata
The general ambiance of the place is very quiet, music is quiet background (although a video on low volume showing Sri Chinmoy performing weight-lifting sometimes plays upstairs). The female staff are usually dressed in Saris and service is usually efficient and polite.
The opening hours are a little mixed. Mon/Tue: 10 am – 8 pm , Wed: 10 am – 3 pm, Thu/Fri: 10 am – 9 pm , Sat: 10 am – 2.30 pm , Sun: Closed. Plus they sometimes close for a week or two while they all go off to do whatever stuff Sri Chinmoy members do.
I’ve been going there for around 6 months and I quite like it (going around weekly these days). It seems to be quite popular (a little crowded on Friday nights at least) but the food is nice and quite good value for money (although it isn’t in the budget category) and I really like a nice quite place where I can just read my book over a meal.
Another person at work had a flyer for this place so I thought I’d try lunch there. The full name is “Sal’s Authentic New York Pizza”. They appear to have only recently opened (ignore the “since 1975” bit).
As you can see from their website they are just a little counter and oven on a central Auckland street. They have a couple of tables out the front on the footpath you can stand at to eat but I just took my food back to the office. When I was there (1pm on a weekday) there was one guy most making the pizza and another guy (from New York, although I didn’t catch if he had previous pizza experience) mostly serving.
I ordered a slice of Cheese Pizza ( $5 ) and 3 Garlic Knots ( $2 for the 3 ) which got put in the oven for a couple of minutes to re-warm them.
Pizza and Garlic Knots from Sal's Pizza
The pizza and knots were a good size and pretty good in general quality. Certainly filled me up for lunch. Service was friendly and fairly fast.
The only bad note was the guy serving didn’t wash his hands between fixing a rubbish bin outside and handling food a minute or two later. That’s the sort of thing that makes some people freak out and he needs to make sure he washes his hands next time.
However I’ll probably visit again, although there are a couple of other good Auckland CBD pizza options.
Update
I receive and email from Nick Turner (Director of Sal’s Pizza) in response to the above post. The email is fairly long so I won’t reproduce it here but he has explained the linage behind the “since 1975” tagline which I am satisfied with and with respect to the less than perfect food handling I saw he says:
Because we are always striving for perfection with our product, service and
cleanliness, obviously we are unhappy about the handling of the rubbish bin
before food. We will continue to ensure this does not happen again, and
continue to maintain our Grade A health certificate.
As I said originally I enjoyed the pizza at Sal’s and intend to go back there.
I thought I’d do a little review of one of the places I go to for weekend brunch occasionally.
Cafe Taska (see website) have 3 branches around the Auckland and while I work close to their Vulcan Lane branch their Dominion Rd place is just a few minutes away for the odd weekend splash-out.
Coming from town the cafe is located a block of so past the supermarket on the left hand side. The interior has lots of wood and is fairly dark although they do have a outdoor area out which I’ve not actually used. The daytime menu is the usual suspects plus a few Spanish influenced dishes.
The dish is especially like is the Piperada which is described as “Basque style eggs scrambled with red pepper and tomato sofrito, served in a terracotta cazuela with crusty bread” :
The whole thing is a very tomato-y mix which I find really delicious and is pretty big for the $15.50 is costs.
I also had a coffee and slice which was about normal although their sweet selection is a little more limited than many other places. They sort of try a few things like Baklava and Turkish Delight to be different. The Linzertorte (hazelnut & raspberry Tart) is interesting but not to my taste.
General atmosphere was good, music with mostly instrumental and in the background (the have live music for dinner), service was okay, reading material was a little limited with just one copy of today’s Herald and a couple of magazines.
The big surprise I have about this place is how empty it is for lunch ( at least out the front). I casually dropped by for dinner a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t get a table since it was packed so people definitely know about the place but for some reason don’t see it as a daytime destination.
It looks like the National business review has a hole in their paywall. I don’t know if this is an intentional hole but as at the time I’m posting this it enables people to read articles that are “subscriber only content”.
However if I take the article number ( 109070 ) and access it via the URL http://www.nbr.co.nz/print/109070 I can see the whole article content:
I guess somebody made a little mistake with the way the setup things or possibly this is designed to allow search engines like google to still find and index NBR’s content.
A few things I’ve been looking at or intending to look at over the next few months.
I’ve bought a new computer a couple of weeks ago for home. The computer is intended to replace the house server. The main functions will be as a file server and host for virtual machines. The big changes is that I’ll be switching from Xen to KVM as virtualisation technology.
KVM + PXE + Kickstart + Ubuntu – I really want to build my virtual machines automatically and at the same time to be using a more general machine building method . This page on the Ubuntu site looks like it is a good start and I’ll blog a bit when I get it all done.
I need to do some work on Mondo Rescue , I have a bug I reported that is supposed to be fixed and I have to test.
GlusterFS is a distributed network file system that looks really cool, I’m intending to play with this a bit.
Once again we’ve applied to do a Sysadmin Miniconf at the 2010 Linux.conf.au conference. Once again we hope to have a really good miniconf. However no less that 32 miniconfs have applied for just 12 slots so not sure if we’ll get in. We were really popular last year but personally I’ve no idea what our chances are this year. Bit down about the thought of not getting but I guess whatever happens will happen.
I keep getting good ideas for websites and products. Not programming and having poor time control means most of these ideas are probably not going anywhere. Maybe I’ll try a couple of them though. Also got some further ideas for technologies to play with but want to get the ones above sorted first.
I’ve been having a small problem on one of my server with the http daemon dying every week or two. It’s not often enough to be a huge problem or invest a lot of time in by enough of a nuisance to require a fix. So what I ended up doing was installing monit to look after things.
monit is a simple daemon that checks on server resources ( mainly services and daemons but also disk space and load ) every few minutes and sends and alert and/or restarts the service if there is a problems. So after installing the package ( apt-get install monit ) I just created a series of rules like:
check process exim4 with pidfile /var/run/exim4/exim.pid
start program = "/etc/init.d/exim4 start"
stop program = "/etc/init.d/exim4 stop"
if failed host 127.0.0.1 port 25 protocol smtp then alert
if 5 restarts within 5 cycles then timeout
check process popa3d with pidfile /var/run/popa3d.pid
start program "/etc/init.d/popa3d start"
stop program "/etc/init.d/popa3d stop"
if failed port 110 protocol pop then restart
if 5 restarts within 5 cycles then timeout
for the main processes on the machine. Sample rules are available in the config file and documentation and google is fairly safe as long as you make sure you don’t copy a 10th generation rule of a “Ruby on Rails” site ( ROR components apparently require frequent restarts). All up the whole install and configuration took me around half an hour and I’m now monitoring:
# monit summary
System 'crimson.usenet.net.nz' running
Process 'lighttpd' running
Process 'sshd' running
Process 'named' running
Process 'exim4' running
Process 'popa3d' running
Process 'mysql' running
Process 'mailman' running
Device 'rootfs' accessible
Process 'mailman' running
