Made by Mikal – Page 43

Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 26, 2012
Post category:Conference

Canberra was announced as the host for LCA 2013 at the close of LCA 2012. As part of that closing, we handed out postcards and laptop stickers to delegates. However, we deliberately had extra printed on the theory that groups like LUGs, university computer societies and so forth would be interested in having promotional materials for their groups. For those of you not lucky enough to attend the excellent LCA2012, the stickers looked like this: And the postcards look like this: All credit for the excellent art should go to the very capable Jenny Cox. So, if you're interested in having some stuff to hand out at your next LUG or computer society meeting, please drop us a line at contact@lca2013.linux.org.au. Don't forget to include the name of the group and a mailing address.

linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 22, 2012
Post category:Conference

I am incredibly pleased to announce that linux.conf.au 2013 will be hosted by Canberra, Australia between 28 January 2013 to 2 February 2013. As the director for 2013 I have been blessed with a simply incredible team who has done fantastic work during the bid process, and I am confident that we will pull off a fantastic event. 2013 is Canberra's centenary year, so I think its appropriate to have a conference with a bit of a party atmosphere. We're working hard already on making 2013 a conference to remember. For those who were unable to see the announcement at the conference, you might find the following interesting: Call for papers: June 2012 Early bird registrations open: October 2012 Conference: 28 January 2013 to 2 February 2013 linux.conf.au is one of the foremost open source conferences in the world, and is considered the most prestigious in the southern hemisphere. Many of the team that brought you linux.conf.au 2005 are coming back to help with the 2013 effort, and we're cognizant of the extremely high standard left by previous conferences, especially the astounding job that Josh's 2012 team did. The web site for the conference http://lca2013.linux.org.au is already live, and we'll…

Its a good sign that they’re already making fun of me, right?

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 4, 2012
Post category:Conference

So, today on IRC... 16:07 <mikal> So, breakfast catering at the student accommodation... Will there be bacon? 16:07 <ctudball> mikal: You have my permission to riot if there is no bacon. 16:07 <mikal> Yay! 16:07 <mikal> Real coffee? 16:08 <ctudball> mikal: No. 16:08 <mikal> ! ... 16:10 <mikal> I can still add breakfast to my rego, right? 16:10 <mikal> I'll just fill a sock with $18 worth of bacon each morning 16:11 <ctudball> mikal: You can! 16:11 <mikal> Ok, that's official authorization for Operation Bacon Sock ... 16:11 <mikal> If anyone complains, I am showing them a lightly edited version of this IRC log Which somehow became baconsock.org.

Further adventures with base images in OpenStack

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 4, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

I was bored over the New Years weekend, so I figured I'd have a go at implementing image cache management as discussed previously. I actually have an implementation of about 75% of that blueprint now, but its not ready for prime time yet. The point of this post is more to document some stuff I learnt about VM startup along the way so I don't forget it later. So, you want to start a VM on a compute node. Once the scheduler has selected a node to run the VM on, the next step is the compute instance on that machine starting the VM up. First the specified disk image is fetched from your image service (in my case glance), and placed in a temporary location on disk. If the image is already a raw image, it is then renamed to the correct name in the instances/_base directory. If it isn't a raw image then it is converted to raw format, and that converted file is put in the right place. Optionally, the image can be extended to a specified size as part of this process. Then, depending on if you have copy on write (COW) images turned on or…

The Ghost Brigades (2)

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 30, 2011
Post category:Book

The second time around I think my opinion has changed a little. I found the plot a little hard to believe (perhaps I am scarred by other book's twee explorations of the motivations of alien species), and overall the book not as good as Old Man's War. Then again, its far from the worst book I have read this year. Original post about this book. [award: nominee prometheus 2007] [isbn: 0765354063]

Red Mars

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 21, 2011
Post category:Book

This is another book on colonization. To be totally honest I enjoyed the first half of the book more than the second, and I rather thought the book dragged on and could have done with a more vigorous editing. There are sections which are deeply descriptive, but it doesn't progress the story. Overall, I was a little disappointed.

Openstack compute node cleanup

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 20, 2011
Post category:OpenStack

I've never used openstack before, which I imagine is similar to many other people out there. Its actually pretty cool, although I encountered a problem the other day that I think is worthy of some more documentation. Openstack runs virtual machines for users, in much the same manner as Amazon's EC2 system. These instances are started with a base image, and then copy on write is used to write differences for the instance as it changes stuff. This makes sense in a world where a given machine might be running more than one copy of the instance. However, I encountered a compute node which was running low on disk. This is because there is currently nothing which cleans up these base images, so even if none of the instances on a machine require that image, and even if the machine is experiencing disk stress, the images still hang around. There are a few blog posts out there about this, but nothing really definitive that I could find. I've filed a bug asking for the Ubuntu package to include some sort of cleanup script, and interestingly that led me to learn that there are plans for a pretty comprehensive image management…

On syncing with Google Contacts

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 16, 2011
Post category:Google

So, I started with a new company a few weeks ago, and one of the things I missed from my previous company was having the entire corporate directory synced onto my phone. Its really handy as an on caller to be able to give people a call when something goes wrong, without having to dig around and find their details. Back in the good old days at Google the way you got this sort of data onto your phone was to run a script written by one of the guys on the gmail team. The script grabbed the LDAP directory, and pushed it into Google contacts, which you could then sync with your phone. Now I wanted something very similar -- especially as the contacts sync stuff with Android is pretty reasonable. However, I'd never coded with the Google public APIs before, and that turned out to be the hardest part of the problem. First off I wrote a little script which dumped the corporate directory into a text file. I mostly did this because I wanted other people to be able to run the script in as light weight a manner as possible -- for example, if we wanted…

Speaker For The Dead

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 14, 2011
Post category:Book

This is the second book in the Ender's Game series, and is better than the novelized Ender's Game, although it is impossible to beat the short story version. Ender has grown a lot over the time between this book and the last, and the story is compelling and believable. I really enjoyed this book.

By Blood Alone

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 7, 2011
Post category:Book

Maybe I've been reading too much combat fiction recently and need a change of scenery. Or perhaps its just that this book isn't as good as the last two (Legion of the Damned and The Final Battle). The characters aren't the strongest, and the plot is weaker than the previous two books. On the other hand, I did finish the book, and don't regret reading it. Oh, the cliff hanger ending is annoying too. [isbn: 9780441006311; 0441006310]