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HomeAssistant configuration

I've recently been playing with HomeAssistant, which is quite cool. Its not perfect -- for example it broke recently for me without any debug logs indicating problems because it didn't want to terminate SSL any more, but its better than anything else I've seen so far. Along the way its been super handy to be able to refer to other people's HomeAssistant configurations to see how they got things working. So in that spirit, here's my current configuration with all of the secrets pulled out. Its not the most complicated config, but it does do some things which took me a while to get working. Some examples: The Roomba runs when no one is home, and let's me know when its bin is full. A custom component to track when events last occurred so that I can rate limit things like how often the Roomba runs when no one is home. I detect when my wired doorbell goes off, and play a "ding dong" MP3 in the office yurt out the back so I know when someone is visiting. ...and probably other things. I intend to write up interesting things as I think of them, but we'll see how we…

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Chaos Monkeys

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  • Post category:Book

A very well written tale of a Wall Street quant who left during the GFC to adventure in startup land and ended up at Facebook attempting to solve their monetization problems for an indifferent employer. Martinez must have been stomping around Mountain View because his description of the environment and what its like to work inside a Silicon Valley company ring very true to me. A good read.

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Artemis

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Its been ages since I've read a book in a couple of days, let alone stayed up late when I really shouldn't in order to finish a book. Artemis is the book which broke me out of that rut -- this is a fun, clever, light read. Its quite different when compared to The Martian, but I think that's good. Weir has attempted to do something new instead of just playing on his previous successes. An excellent book, and Mr Weir is solidly landing on my buy-everything-he-writes list.

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Turmoil

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  • Post category:Book

A very readable set of essays from Robyn Williams, the broadcaster of the Australian Science Show, not the comedian. Covering the state of modern science, journalism, the ABC, and whether modern democracy is doomed in an approachable and very readable form. I enjoyed this book greatly. A good Sunday morning and vacation read if you're into approachable non-fiction.

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Scared Weird Frozen Guy

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  • Post category:Book

The true life story of a kid from Bribie Island (I've been there!) running a marathon in Antartica, via being a touring musical comedian, doing things like this: This book is an interesting and light read, and came kindly recommended by Michael Carden, who pretty much insisted I take the book off him at a cafe. I don't regret reading it and would recommend it to people looking for a light autobiography for a rainy (and perhaps cold) evening or two. Oh, and the Scared Weird Little Guys of course are responsible for this gem... This book is highly recommended and now I really want to go for a run.

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Kubernetes Fundamentals: Setting up nginx ingress

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  • Post category:Kubernetes

I’m doing the Linux Foundation Kubernetes Fundamentals course at the moment, and I was very disappointed in the chapter on Ingress Controllers. To be honest it feels like an after thought — there is no lab, and the provided examples don’t work if you re-type them into Kubernetes (you can’t cut and paste of course, just to add to the fun).

I found this super annoying, so I thought I’d write up my own notes on how to get nginx working as an Ingress Controller on Kubernetes.

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What’s missing from the ONAP community — an open design process

I've been thinking a fair bit about ONAP and its future releases recently. This is in the context of trying to implement a system for a client which is based on ONAP. Its really hard though, because its hard to determine how various components of ONAP are intended to work, or interoperate. It took me a while, but I've realised what's missing here... OpenStack has an open design process. If you want to add a new feature to Nova for example, the first step is you need to write down what the feature is intended to do, how it integrates with the rest of Nova, and how people might use it. The target audience for that document is both the Nova development team, but also people who operate OpenStack deployments. ONAP has no equivalent that I can find. So for example, they say that in Casablanca they are going to implement a "AAI Enricher" to ease lookup of data from external systems in their inventory database, but I can't find anywhere where they explain how the integration between arbitrary external systems and ONAP AAI will work. I think ONAP would really benefit from a good hard look at their design processes…

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Learning from the mistakes that even big projects make

The following is a blog post version of a talk presented at pyconau 2018. Slides for the presentation can be found here (as Microsoft powerpoint, or as PDF), and a video of the talk (thanks NextDayVideo!) is below:

 

OpenStack is an orchestration system for setting up virtual machines and associated other virtual resources such as networks and storage on clusters of computers. At a high level, OpenStack is just configuring existing facilities of the host operating system — there isn’t really a lot of difference between OpenStack and a room full of system admins frantically resolving tickets requesting virtual machines be setup. The only real difference is scale and predictability.

To do its job, OpenStack needs to be able to manipulate parts of the operating system which are normally reserved for administrative users. This talk is the story of how OpenStack has done that thing over time, what we learnt along the way, and what I’d do differently if I had my time again. Lots of systems need to do these things, so even if you never use OpenStack hopefully there are things to be learnt here.

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city2surf 2018 wrap up

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  • Post category:Running

city2surf 2018 was yesterday, so how did the race go? First off, thanks to everyone who helped out with my fund raising for the Black Dog Institute -- you raised nearly $2,000 AUD for this important charity, which is very impressive. Thanks for everyone's support! city2surf is 14kms, with 166 meters of vertical elevation gain. For the second year running I was in the green start group, which is for people who have previously finished the event in less than 90 minutes. There is one start group before this, red, which is for people who can finish in less than 70 minutes. In reality I think its unlikely that I'll ever make it to red -- it would require me to shave about 30 seconds per kilometre off my time to just scrape in, and I think that would be hard to do. Training for city2surf last year I tore my right achilles, so I was pretty much starting from scratch for this years event -- at the start of the year I could run about 50 meters before I had issues. Luckily I was referred to an excellent physiotherapist who has helped me build back up safely -- I…

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The last week for linux.conf.au 2019 proposals!

Dear humans of the Internet -- there is ONE WEEK LEFT to propose talks for linux.conf.au 2019. LCA is one of the world's best open source conferences, and we'd love to hear you speak!   Unsure what to propose? Not sure if your talk is what the conference would normally take? Just want a chat? You're welcome to reach out to papers-chair@linux.org.au to talk things through.   https://linux.conf.au/call-for-papers/

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