Category: Tech

Technical

2012 New Year’s resolutions

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions let alone publish them but I thought I’d go for it this year. If nothing else it’ll make me feel a bit guilty not keeping to them.

1. Get weight down to 80kg – Over the last couple of years my weight has drifted up from around 85kg to 95kg. My goal for this year is to get it down to 80kg.

2. Get my learners driver license – I don’t have a drivers license at all right now. Goal for this year is to at least pass the written test and get the first stage of a full license. Hopefully I’ll actual do a bit more than this but I think the learners is a good minimum.

3. Get chess rating to 2000 (either NZCF or FIDE) – My rating is currently hovering around the 1800 level for both my New Zealand (NZCF) and International (FIDE) rating. My goal is to get this 200 points higher which will put me into New Zealand “A” grade.

4. Complete  “Learning Python the Hard way” – My programming skills are a bit weaker than I would like. The is a fairly well known book/course Learn Python the Hard way by Zed Shaw that I’d like to complete to get my skills up a bit.

I’ve tried to make the goals realistic and list things I can actually finish. The weight goal and the chess goal are probably the hardest. The weight one will require me to stick to a diet pretty much all year while the chess one will require at least a couple of hours a day of study and practise.

I’m not sure how long the programming course will take, I’m guessing 20-50 hours if I do most of the extra-credit exercises. The drivers license things should be less perhaps 20 hours of road-code study plus the test itself.

Some of the things above cost money but I feel that they are all worthwhile enough to spend a bit on. This is especially the case where I’m spending a lot of hours on something. For example there is a video version of the python course available for $US 29. It would be silly of me to invest 20-50 hours in the course but “save” $29 by not paying for the full version.

The license and programming goals are a little unambitious but with them I’m hoping to (a) have something I will actually complete and (b) be things that have obviously follow-ups.

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July Update

I just updated this blog to wordpress 3.2 which came out this week. Only a small glitch caused by me running an old theme which wasn’t 100% compatible. WordPress itself seems to be better. I had a quick look at the Twenty Eleven theme which comes packaged with wordpress and it looks nice even via my mobile browser. I’m tempted to update from the Simplicity theme which I currently use.

I updated my hosted Linux VPS to Ubuntu 10.04 last week and took the opportunity to change the web software around when I did it. I’ve now replaced lighttpd+fastcgi with a standard apache2+mod_php setup but I’ve put Varnish 3.0 web accelerator in from of everything. Complete overkill for a bunch of small sites that I host but it gives me peace-of-mind for slashdotting type situations. Main reason for the move is that lighttpd is a little obscure these days while I use apache and varnish at work.

Last week I attended the 3 day NetHui conference in Auckland. The conference was aimed around Internet Policy for New Zealand. An interesting 3 days during which I attended (and missed) plenty of great discussion, talking to interesting people and saw a few great talks. The event was cheap to allow more people to attend and features a wide range of people including Lawyers, educationalists, techies, businessmen, civil servants and a few “interested in a private capacity” people. Great event. Here is a link to the media/blog coverage.

Later this month I’ll be in Christchurch for the South Island Chess Champs ( link to site not page since sites uses frames!!). Christchurch has been hit by 3 big earthquakes in the last year (and hundreds of small ones) and thousands of buildings have been damaged (Many have or will be demolished) so it will be interesting seeing some of this for myself (although I’ll be playing chess during most of the day). The tournament is one the other side of down from the most damaged areas however.

Also coming up this month I’ll be at Barcamp Auckland 5 , probably not speaking though.

The Call of Papers and Call for Miniconfs have also just come out for Linux.conf.au 2012 in Ballarat. Once again we’ll hopefully be able to run a Sysadmin Miniconf and I’m also thinking of putting in a talk proposal.

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Work shuffle

Work recently had a bit of a reorg and my “infrastructure” team (me and two other guys who look after the hardware, network, database,  OS and everything apart from the the actual website code) were moved from the “online” division to “Central IT” . Next week we physically move down to the basement (yes, really) to be with the rest of IT.

Note: One of my rules of seating is “always be as close to marketing as possible” . This is because marketing (usually) have a bit of clout in any organisation and will always get at least semi-decent offices with things like windows, pool tables, working lifts etc. Departments like IT, Helpdesk, accounting and security on the other hand have no pull and will get pushed into windowless dungeons whenever the reorganisations happen.

The main thing I’m worried about with my new job is that I’m not cut of from my “platform users” , we are about 2 minutes walk away (for now, potentially more later) so it’s not too far for meetings but certainly too far for unsceduled chats. So I won’t know if a major stoary is breaking (with the potential load on the system) just by watching frantic acticity any more, nor will I be able to walk a few metres to check a bug, ask somebody a questions etc.

Just last week we had a bug on the site for a few minutes that caused one article to 302 (temp redirect) to itself for about 10 minutes. I noticed the big jump in hits and was able to talk to the 2 editors in charged or the article and the head programmer right away. As of next week something similar will take much longer as I would either have to run upstairs (and be offline) or phone/skype people until I got hold of the right ones.

It’s a common situation with disjointed teams but it means that things have to get a lot more formal in order to keep the site reliable. So I’ll probably be spending the next few weeks going over rollout, escalation, ticketing and similar procedures because I’ll no longer be able to just turn around and yell to find out if somebody is running something causing a problem.

At least one good thing that’ll come out of this is that we won’t be doing the “level 1” helpdesk stuff for the dept any more, so we’ll be able to concentrate on our actual job.

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lca2011 – Fri Close

Apology re keynote material

Lightning talks

  • New policy on open source software in Govt, stronger, participate in community
  • Linux.conf.au in antartica. Cooler than brisbane, drier than wellington
  • other conferences by lca drupal down under, wordcampe, pycon. You run your own conf, LA may even support. Join planet LA, Join a LUG
  • Next 12 months in IP law: ACTA will happen in next 12 months. TPP might be stopped by NZers. Iinet decission very soon. DRM [cutoff]..
  • usbdoodad.info . Surface mount soldiering help, kits available
  • macbook people. not too hard these day. Get hold of reefer bookloaded. partition under OSX. Leave a gap between linux and OSX partition. testing many common distributions
  • LDAP. ldapauthmanager software
  • OSIA Open source industry australia. Join for advocacy & networking
  • Debian 6.0 released next week!
  • Donna promoting “Digitise the Dawn”
  • secan does ipv6 now says Rusty
  • Women in Open source, under-represented still. No funding. Suggested ideas if they had money. training courses. adainitiative.org – looking for funding for 2 years of full time work on women in open source.
  • SUDE studio – create virtual appliances
  • new conference in australia – oct 2011 – Sydney – php conf australia – twitter.com/phpconfau

Closeup

  • lca2012 in Ballarat
  • http://lcaunderthestars.org.au
  • 2013 bid process in next few weeks
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lca2011 – Fri session 5 – Open source in education

Open Source in Education – ASHS One Year On by Patrick Brennan

  • Followup to last year
  • greenfield school – flagship school – no classrooms, learning commons, 2 floors of open plan
  • 2011 enrolments 740 – 16-18 year olds
  • open for teaching 4 days per work, 5th day do “impact projects” eg work to raise money for charity, local video storage system
  • Ubuntu Desktops, teacher laptops
  • Xero for account
  • Mandriva Servers
  • Terminal servers for edge cases
  • Cloud Apps
  • Single sign on
  • Windows remains for building management
  • Education space Microsoft ffocussed
  • Heavily subsidised by the MoE and Microsoft
  • Established Norms / established design refs
  • Perception that students should train with “real world” tools
  • Free as in beer vs free as in freedom
  • Licensing costs – NZ Govt / MS Subsidised – My Opinion underhanded monopoly
  • Learning tax – expensive for software at home – leads to piracy
  • Web filtering
  • MOE funds watchdog to 10Mb/s
  • $5000 to install Cisco device supporting 100Mb/s
  • Coast to support watchdog to 1Gb/swith existing FW $0
  • “Dill” provide no installed OS on desktops
  • Teachers working out how to do with tools, sharing techniques on eduwiki with other schools
  • No learning tax yields freedom
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lca2011 – Fri Session 3 – Lightweight messaging

Lightweight messaging for a connected planet – Andy Piper

  • The internet of things, smart devices in our hands
  • Instrumented, interconnect, intelligent
  • MQTT = MQ telemetry transport
  • publish/subscribe paradigm.
  • Optimized for Low bandwidth, high latency, unreliable, high cost networks
  • Expect client apps to have limited processing resources
  • provide QOS where possible
  • simple semantics, minimized format ( 2 bytes minimum packet )
  • “last will and testament” to publish if client goes offline
  • what about HTTP – MQTT much simplier, message not document centric, less verbose, lightweight
  • variable QOS
  • Free Client API / libraries for most languages, various propriety products as well
  • various examples
  • IBM rsmp official client – free for personal use, various binaries for many platforms
  • http://mosquitto.org – packages for various dists, windows, Mac. Open source , python and C++ examples
  • Random stuff – file syncs, desktop notifications, digital to analogue readouts, LEGO microscope control
  • Smart meters, heathcare patient monitoring
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lca2011 – Friday Session 2 – & habits of PMs

The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Project Managers – Carol Smith

  • Works in summer of code office, previous network operations, enterprise software
  • 11 interviews at google to get her position
  • Habit 1 – spend more than 2 weeks in meetings with engineers, “makers schedule vs managers schedule” by Paul Graham
  • Habit 2 – Assuming all the engineers you work with are purposefully tryin g to do a bad job and sabotage the project
  • Assume competence – People want to take pride in their work and do a good job
  • Habit 3 – Keep a checklist – creates a big gant chart, bugs engineers constantly about status
  • Needs to be familiar with technology and project to understand what engineering is talking about when there are problems
  • Habit 4 – Let middle and senior level managers meddle with timeline
  • maintain credibility and managers will feel less inclined to meddle
  • Habit 5- make everything an emergency
  • Don’t cry wolf – get people to understand if you do say something has to be done today it really does
  • Habit 6 – Break down rapport with engineers whenever possible
  • cookies
  • don’t use small cookies to reward directly, use to build rapport not reward directly
  • Habit 7 – Assume that the dates engineers give you are spot on
  • engineers will try and tell you something will please you, under promise and overdeliver, take past estimates from that person into account
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lca2011 – Fri Session 1 – LinuxCNC

All Chips , No Salsa – Bdale Garbee

  • Got tabletop 3-axis mill 2nd hand, sloppy but got useful work
  • Bought new mill in 2006 305x765x560mm working volume + CNC conversion kit
  • EMC2 – open source machine control system
  • EMC2 – HAL between layers – very modular – real time – Linux user interface – “axis” user interface – “trivkins” control module
  • Open vs  closed loop. Closed loop tools feedback to controller to tell it result of commands issued
  • stepping vs servo motors
  • Pluto-P board – parallel port connected – source and open drivers – not open hardware but “obvious” FPGA so transparent
  • Amps boast 3.3 volt to 60-80 volts at several amps
  • Use windshield wiper motors to test before rigging up to big stuff
  • wires enclosed in clear vinyl tubing
  • http://gag.com/homeshop
  • HeeksCAD / HeeksCNC
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lca2011 – Fri Keynote – Mark Pesce

Smoke Signals – Mark Pesce

  • 1 billion seconds since learned to code ( 1979 )
  • Programmed for wide range of platforms
  • Inspired to “Neuromancer” to get into VR, Setup Ono Sendai to create VR game console
  • Companies failed cause they wanted whole market, locked down with patents etc
  • Tried more open method, created 3D browser for VRML over www. 17 years ago
  • “a resource shared is a resource squared”
  • Tried to give away as much as possible, the richer I become, more ways than financially
  • smoking habit picked up from our friends, spreads like a epidemic
  • Similar affect for overweight people
  • Similar for divorce
  • What we choose to imitate is determined by the network of our peers
  • Choose your friends carefully
  • Digital social network can be bigger than 150 limit. Average facebook 30 though
  • Facebook itself is part of your social graph
  • facebook knows stuff about you that you would never tell any one friend
  • We surrendered all our personal details to a closed source system
  • wikileaks kicked off various commercial service, coincidental terms of service violations presumably under govt pressure
  • “The Internet is fundamentally not free”
  • The internetv is now hostile since it is controlled by govts etc
  • Distribute everything – lesson of Napster, no central target, break up components, whole greater than parts, redundant parts, extension of unix progs, pipes, widely distributed
  • Transport Independence – cellphone networks central org able to be controlled by govt, uucp and fidonet decentralized communication networks,. hierarchy efficient but vulnerable. Must look at alternatives, speed and convince might have to be sacrificed
  • Secure everything – Security for simplicity is a false tradeoff. Personal data is valuable
  • Open everything
  • Resilience – above principles led to this. may be less efficient.
  • Resilience , safe, fast – pick 2
  • Plexus – Mange you own social graph
  • Number of people with mobiles = Number of people earning more than $1.50 per day
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lca2011 – Thus session 6 – Building RPMS

Building RPMS – How Fedora’s Koji Works, and how you can use it to build your own software – Dennis Gilmore

  • Koji – task scheduler, results tracker, used by fedora and redhat as a build system
  • Not – no software release life cycle, not deployment, repo mngt, continuous integration
  • Goals – build repoducability
  • Components – mock, yum, rpmbuild, createrepo
  • mock – creates a chroot for each build, executes commands, out->results location, ensures output is controlled and repeatable, builds on yum
  • yum – reads software metadata, installs rpm packages
  • rpmbuild – converts bare components into binary package , spec file + tarball + patch files – scrpm and binary rpm
  • various koji components
  • kojihub – xml-rpc – passive application – controls wring to fs – talks to DB
  • kojira – manages repo
  • kojid – runs mock to build rpms, createrepo to general repos, polls hub for new tasks
  • koji-web view status of things, can sign up for notifications, cancel and resubmit tasks
  • koji cli – users, tasks, permissions
  • Other tools can use koji
  • Other tasks  – live CDs – Appliance creation – Maven builds – windows builds(!)
  • koji org – tags ( pack name and option additional arch) – targets ( build tag and destination ) – unique nvra ( name version release arch) for all rpms
  • Live demo
  • mash tool to get things out
  • extend via koji-api
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