review

Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: slots

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 20, 2014
Post category:OpenStack

If I had to guess what would be a controversial topic from the mid-cycle meetup, it would have to be this slots proposal. I was actually in a Technical Committee meeting when this proposal was first made, but I'm told there were plenty of people in the room keen to give this idea a try. Since the mid-cycle Joe Gordon has written up a more formal proposal, which can be found at https://review.openstack.org/#/c/112733. If you look at the last few Nova releases, core reviewers have been drowning under code reviews, so we need to control the review workload. What is currently happening is that everyone throws up their thing into Gerrit, and then each core tries to identify the important things and review them. There is a list of prioritized blueprints in Launchpad, but it is not used much as a way of determining what to review. The result of this is that there are hundreds of reviews outstanding for Nova (500 when I wrote this post). Many of these will get a review, but it is hard for authors to get two cores to pay attention to a review long enough for it to be approved and merged. If…

Review priorities as we approach juno-3

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 15, 2014
Post category:OpenStack

I just send this email out to openstack-dev, but I am posting it here in case it makes it more discoverable to people drowning in email: To: openstack-dev Subject: [nova] Review priorities as we approach juno-3 Hi. We're rapidly approaching j-3, so I want to remind people of the current reviews that are high priority. The definition of high priority I am using here is blueprints that are marked high priority in launchpad that have outstanding code for review -- I am sure there are other reviews that are important as well, but I want us to try to land more blueprints than we have so far. These are listed in the order they appear in launchpad. == Compute Manager uses Objects (Juno Work) == https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+project:openstack/nova+branch:master+topic:bp/compute-manager-objects-juno,n,z This is ongoing work, but if you're after some quick code review points they're very easy to review and help push the project forward in an important manner. == Move Virt Drivers to use Objects (Juno Work) == I couldn't actually find any code out for review for this one apart from https://review.openstack.org/#/c/94477/, is there more out there? == Add a virt driver for Ironic == This one is in progress, but we need…

Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: social issues

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 15, 2014
Post category:OpenStack

Summarizing three days of the Nova Juno mid-cycle meetup is a pretty hard thing to do - I'm going to give it a go, but just in case I miss things, there is an etherpad with notes from the meetup at https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/juno-nova-mid-cycle-meetup. I'm also going to do it in the form of a series of posts, so as to not hold up any content at all in the wait for perfection. This post covers the mechanics of each day at the meetup, reviewer burnout, and the Juno release. First off, some words about the mechanics of the meetup. The meetup was held in Beaverton, Oregon at an Intel campus. Many thanks to Intel for hosting the event -- it is much appreciated. We discussed possible locations and attendance for future mid-cycle meetups, and the consensus is that these events should "always" be in the US because that's where the vast majority of our developers are. We will consider other host countries when the mix of Nova developers change. Additionally, we talked about the expectations of attendance at these events. The Icehouse mid-cycle was an experiment, but now that we've run two of these I think they're clearly useful events. I…

Slow git review uploads?

Post author:mikal
Post published:February 3, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

jeblair was kind enough to help me debug my problem with slow "git review" uploads for Openstack projects just now. It turns out that part of my standard configuration for ssh is to enable ControlMaster and ControlPersist. I mostly do this because the machines I use at Canonical are a very long way away from my home in Australia, and its nice to have slightly faster connections when you ssh to a machine. However, gerrit is incompatible with these options as best as we can tell. So, if your git reviews are taking 10 to 20 minutes to upload like mine were, check that you're not using persistent connections. Excluding review.openstack.org from that part of my configuration has made a massive difference to the speed of uploads for me.

The Wild Palms Hotel

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 1, 2009
Post category:Travel

When leaving the US, I stayed in the Wild Palms Hotel. I selected it for three reasons: I'd stayed there before; it is part of the Joie De Vivre chain which I have had good experiences with before; and it was very cheap on Expedia ($77 compared to an average rate in the area of about $150). I learnt some interesting things I thought I'd share: The hotel is ok, just make sure you get an upstairs room. I was woken by mating elephants at 5am two days running because the floors are so thin. Be the mating elephant, not the victim of it! Once I moved to an upstairs room this probably went away. The executive rooms aren't worth it. I got moved into one of these because of the noise problems. Its advantages was it was away form the road, had a bathrobe (really), and a LCD TV. I don't watch TV much, so the extra cost if I was paying isn't worth it. The cleaning service kept "short sheeting" the bed. By short sheeting I mean pulled the sheets up to make the top of the bed look impressive, but leaving the bottom couple of inches of…

More reviews

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 16, 2007
Post category:Mythtv

I just got back from a lovely four days in Tasmania, and am just now catching up with the resulting email backlog. There are some new alerts about reviews of the MythTV book in there which are worth pointing out: I'm surprised and disappointed that the installation of MythTV through pre-built packages or a CD distributions like KnoppMyth or MythDora were not covered deeper than a sentence or two in passing. This is likely to be a turn off for readers who were hoping for a quick and simple method of getting MythTV up and going. ... On the whole I consider this a good book that is excellent for the new to intermediate MythTV user, although advanced users may pick a few good pieces of information out of it as well. It was well written and covered most items at just about the right introductory (yes -- practical) level. Once it has taught you the basics, you can then go and look up more details online for features you want to get more information about. http://www.mythpvr.com/mythtv/books/Practical_MythTV.html Linked at: http://smart-home-blog.com/archives/670 Linked at: http://mythtvnews.com/2007/06/29/more-practical-mythtv-book-reviews/ I think the comments about installation technique are fair, although the method described in the book is…

Post author:mikal
Post published:June 4, 2007
Post category:Mythtv

"If you're interested in setting up a PVR, then this is definitely a book to check out. Apress sells the paper version for $30, and offers an eBook for $15. Amazon offers it for $19.79, but I doubt that price will last long. I definitely give this book a 5 out of 5..." http://www.yeraze.com/article.php/20070603160650701

Book reviews

Post author:mikal
Post published:June 4, 2006
Post category:Imagemagick

I'm always a little hesitant when I see reviews of the book. It's irrational, but I guess it's a little bit like being worried that people are going to tell you that your kid isn't the smartest in the class, or is ugly. That's why I sat on the review from Linux Format May 2006 until today, and only read it just now. Wow. "This is probably the best Linux book you will buy all year". I guess it doesn't get clearer than that. All I can say is "thanks Linux Format". They commented on the lack of colour figures in the examples as well, and once again I should point out that there are colour versions available online and as a download. A colour revision of the PDF version of the book is also currently in the works.

Status of the book

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 1, 2005
Post category:Imagemagick

The book has been written for a while, along with the technical editing and review. The copy edits have been done since last week. There are only two chapters left for page layout. The process has been interesting, educational, and in some parts long. The hardest part though? Ironically, it's filling in the marketing questionnaire. I've never done anything approaching sales before, although I have done customer facing work. Some parts of the questionnaire are easy... The target audience for instance, a short pitch for the book, that sort of thing. What about things like which magazines to ask to do a review? What about people who might be willing to do reviews? Got suggestions? Reply in a comment?

Working on review comments for Chapters 2, 3 and 4 tonight

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 14, 2005
Post category:Imagemagick

Michael Carden asks in a comment to my previous post to the book if I had considered making draft chapters available for public comment before printing. To be completely honest it hadn't occurred to me until Michael suggested it, and it does fit well with all the open source stuff I have done over the years. It's a hard call though, because there is already a review team of four or five, and there isn't much spare time in the process because we really want the book published in time for Christmas. This is why I'm going to say no this time to the offer of a more public review, and I'll do my best to take that on board next time when I know more about how long this sort of thing can take (I'm actually only about two days over schedule at the moment, but I really don't want to slip any further). Sorry Michael. Anyways, I'm working on review comments for three chapters tonight, which is one of the things that made me think about this more. I'm really rather surprised about how positive the review comments have been so far given how I feel about the…