Thu, 15 Jul 2010
GLLUG: July 2010 - Android Talk
This'll be a short write up for a short talk. I went to the July
2010 GLLUG Android Talk where Sunny Aujla explained some of the history
behind Android,
Googles Linux operating system for mobile devices. He gave a brief
overview of how the system differed from the main stream kernel, details of
some of the interactions between the mainline kernel devs and the Google
Android team and fielded a fair few questions about the tool chain and ideal
uses.
Considering it was a LUG meet the number of the audience members who had an Android phone (including a couple of HTCs and a Dell Streak) wasn't exactly surprising, but the popularity of the Nokia N900 was. It does seem to be a popular piece of kit for the sub-netbook ssh running niche.
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Posted: 2010/07/15 22:24 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Tue, 01 Jun 2010
PuppetCamp Europe 2010
To me puppet has always been a major evolutionary step up on the sysadmin
tool chain. I consider it important enough to be ranked alongside version
control systems and virtualisation as one of those mental leaps that leads
to better management and enables more flexible solutions than you could
offer before understanding it.
While I'm quite a long term member of the puppet community I'm no where near as active as I should be, but even I couldn't miss the chance to attend PuppetCamp Europe, and I'm glad I didn't! I finally got to meet some of Europes most prolific puppet module releasers in person, discovered that Brice is every bit as nice and as scarily smart in person as he is on-list and that the new PuppetLabs people are a very impressive bunch. Even I've still not had the chance to buy James some of those beers he's racked up over the years on the list.
Puppet may be an open source project but a very high proportion of its development and community support has always come from Puppet Labs, so it's critical to both the product and the users that their staff be as good with the community as they are with the code base, and having met half-a-dozen of them I can honestly say it feels like the project is in safe hands. Jeff gave an excellent talk on using Puppet in environments with strict compliance rules, Markus had a razor sharp grasp of what people were really asking (and gave the answer to what they wanted, not just what they asked) and Luke made the event for many of us, he very patiently gave a lot of advice and information not just about the now but also about the historical whys and theoretical hows.
I had an excellent time (Ghent itself is a lovely place to visit for a couple of days) so I'd like to thank Patrick for organising the event, Luke and Puppet labs for Puppet itself and the participants for making PuppetCamp Europe 2010 such an educational and enjoyable experience.
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Posted: 2010/06/01 20:45 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sun, 21 Mar 2010
Giving Cloud Computing An Edge - LOSUG March 2010
The LOSUG seems to
be the user group with the least cross over of attendees that I go to. It
seems to be a three part mix - Sun engineers going along to meet co-workers
and get the external eye on to what's happening in different parts of the
project, Unix people with dozens of years of experience who want something
technical and interesting that matters on the server and people that
don't listen to the speaker and then ask questions that, quite frankly,
they should be embarrassed over. It's hard to stress how much I've
always enjoyed the talks at LOSUG but some of the questions are just...
insane.
Right, now I've got that of my chest - and I'll probably get lynched for it in the future - back to the March presentation by Alasdair Lumsden. I'm not going in to details about it as you can read the Giving Cloud Computing An Edge slides yourself now. It was an interesting talk and provided a nice counterbalance to similar talks I've heard in the past about Xen and UML hosting.
What made this LOSUG different to all the others though is that things are changing. Sun's always been very supportive of LOSUG (and always willing to put their hand in their pockets for food, drink and speakers) and now that Sun is owned by Oracle the group will be less driven by the core organisers. You can find more details (and less of me putting words in peoples mouths) at The Future of LOSUG but I wanted to take this chance to both encourage people to come along and show Oracle that the group's important and to say thank you to Joy Marshall, James MacFarlane and Stuart Smith - who have month in and month out organised an excellent event with speakers you couldn't see anywhere else.
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Posted: 2010/03/21 19:30 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
LibguestFS GLLUG Talk
Over the years there have been a handful of GLLUG members
that have given so many interesting talks that I'll always turn up to watch
them - and Richard Jones is
definitely in that short list.
The website does an excellent job of explaining: "libguestfs is a library for accessing and modifying virtual machine (VM) disk images. Amongst the things this is good for: making batch configuration changes to guests, viewing and editing files inside guests (virt-cat, virt-edit), getting disk used/free statistics (virt-df), migrating between virtualization systems (virt-p2v), performing partial backups, performing partial guest clones, cloning VMs and changing registry/UUID/hostname info, and much else besides." but it doesn't quite convey how cool it is to spin up access in to a windows machine in a handful of seconds and then dump out the registry key you're looking for - all from a Linux command line.
Oh, and even if you didn't turn up (tsk tsk) you can read all about the libguestfs gllug talk here.
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Posted: 2010/03/21 18:12 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Thu, 18 Mar 2010
London DevOps - March 2010
This month was the first of the London DevOps tech talks. Organised
by R I Pienaar and masterfully
shepherded on the evening by Chris Read about thirty
sysadmins (and some developers, project managers and scrum masters) met for a
series of impromptu discussions, beer and pizza
While there was no formal schedule for the evening Chris led the group in a fishbowl, seeding some ideas and then watched the conversations bloom. We went through some tool chain issues, trending, log analysis, how Splunk is the best thing since sliced bread with bacon in it and how Centos does some very interesting things with the data they collect. It was the first fishbowl I'd ever attended and it was actually a lot of fun, especially when people suggested RDF and SPARQL for a common data store.
A short break was taken when the pizza arrived and a number of interesting conversations broke out, how little admin time Apache Solr seems to need (and how odd it is to use rsync and shell scripts to sync out changes), how Redis and CouchDB are making certain problem domains easier to deal with and how the BBC has so many cool people hidden away were among those I ambled in to.
ThoughtWorks kindly donated beer, pizza and most importantly the venue - and for that we should say thank you. Getting a decent venue is always difficult for a new group. Although it's early days the group feels like it's got potential, the conversations were interesting, we don't all agree on where we should be heading and what we need next but the atmosphere was friendly and open. Hopefully these meets will last longer than SAGE-WISE did, with all the developer focused events in London it's nice to get to one that's a little closer to what I do.
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Posted: 2010/03/18 00:13 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sat, 17 Oct 2009
Hadoop Talk - SkillsMatter 2009
After an embarrassing tale of misunderstanding, wrong locations and blind
luck I recently ended up at the Introduction
to data processing with Hadoop and Pig talk over at SkillsMatter - and
it was excellent.
For those that don't know about Hadoop, it's an OpenSource Java framework for data-intensive distributed applications. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers. I was aware of the basics but even in an hour I learned enough to know where to look for more details. Pig on the other hand is (to me) like SQL but for Hadoop, it's a lot easier to use than writing your own Java apps and simpler (and actually possible) for non-developers to read than the reams of classes required for custom jobs.
The speaker was excellent, the presentation was well timed, fluid, concise, paced just the way I like it and other than the question session the evening was very enjoyable. You can find the Hadoop slides online.
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Posted: 2009/10/17 19:17 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sun, 27 Sep 2009
DJUGL September 2009
Despite the fact a large percentage of the DJUGL meetups have occurred in the building I work
in I've been very lax in attending one, and it's been my loss.
The crowd was friendly, the pizza and diet coke plentiful and the speakers enjoyable, and I've got every intension of making the next meeting - especially if it's in the same building.
Gareth Rushgrove started the talks with a subject very dear to my heart, deployment. The talk went quite quickly with an intro to Fabric and a live demo of a deployment. The demo went as most demos do but fabric itself looks interesting, especially when you consider that our websites are written in Python. Unfortunately the two different versions (with different goals) and the fact that a new owner's pushing the development now means it's not something I can drop in right now with any degree of comfort. I'd like other people to find the rough edges first so for now I'll stick with the plan of getting Capistrano involve id in one of our more self contained projects alongside puppet.
Although I disagreed with little bits here and there it's always nice to hear a developers point of view on this stuff.
Ben Firshman was up next with a selection of talks, the Celery distributed task queue (very nice API but passes pickled python objects so only good for Python at each end projects), a rewrite of MPTT (a topic of which I know nothing) and some highlights about py.test (a quite nice Python test framework). I've been lucky enough to work with Ben over the last few months and he's someone to keep an eye on technically.
This was the last DJUGL organised by Robert Lofthouse, he's passed the baton on to Gareth, and from the people I met at the event, and he can pass it on proud of the group he's put together.
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Posted: 2009/09/27 18:53 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Thu, 17 Sep 2009
Ubuntu Security Talk - Skills Matter September 2009
A couple of days ago I had the chance to attend a talk on PAM and AppArmor at
Skills Matter. To be honest it wasn't what I expected, the subject level
was very beginner focused, PAM only received scant coverage and the other
tools were all old hands like a port scan with nmap or basic IP Tables
rules.
The evenings highlight for me was the coverage of AppArmor, both because it's a very neat tech that seems orders of magnitude easier to use then SELinux and secondly because the last time I saw it mentioned was when Crispin Cowan spoke at GLLUG. It's great to see it in a mainline distro and I've added it back on to my experiment with list.
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Posted: 2009/09/17 22:06 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sun, 30 Aug 2009
FrOSCon 2009
Last weekend I joined the hordes and worked my way from London to Seigburg
for FrOSCon 2009. Along the way I
experienced an airport evacuation due to fire alarm, a delayed flight,
four trains (one in the wrong direction) and numerous kindly old
German ladies that took pity on me and gradually got me in the right
direction. And it was worth every second.
I'd never really considered going to FrOSCon before, the percentage of talks given in German is quite high and I don't speak a word of the language but this year there was an excellent line up of speakers (all presenting in English) in the OpenSQLCamp room. As I'm getting more and more MySQL requests at work I thought it'd be a handy thing to go along and learn from.
In general it reminded me of the earlier FOSDEMs in tone, especially with the selection of project based developer rooms. The only annoyance was that so many sysadmin related talks, with excellent attention grabbing titles, were in German only. I plan on working my way through the slides in the hope that I can get at least a basic idea of their subject matter.
A large percentage of the sessions were recorded and I'm looking forward to catching up on the sessions where I was already booked or engaging in the hallway track. The only annoyance was that so many sysadmin related talks, with excellent titles, were in German only. I plan on working my way through the slides in the hope that I can get at least a basic idea of their subject matter.
Speaker highlights for me were Dag Wieers and Simon Wardley, both are very entertaining, highly practised speakers that grab the audience and don't let go. I especially like watching the audience in swardleys cloud computing talks as they gradually come to see how it's going to impact all of us eventually. If he was paired with someone in the mobile space with the same kind of eloquence we'd have a nice road map of the tech future.
Although the English language talks were a little thin on the ground during the second day the organisers did an excellent job (although the newbies like me could have done a few pointers about things like the BBQ, do we buy tickets? Pay at the counter?) and with a little luck I'll have the money to go back again next year.
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Posted: 2009/08/30 11:00 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Thu, 27 Aug 2009
NW Rug - Capistrano Talks
I recently headed up to the August NWRug in
Manchester, firstly because it's been a while since I've seen Will Jessop, the organiser (and more
importantly a mate) and secondly because I was interested in Capistrano.
While we use puppet at work for the more strategic stuff, such as ensuring machines start off with a well-defined configuration, I've been in need of something to perform sets of tasks against defined groups of servers. While I've been using the time honoured pattern of wrapping our inventory commands in ssh loops I've started to have more complex needs. While we're not using Ruby or Rails Cap looks like it should be able to fulfil a lot of my need for immediate action (something that puppet isn't good at).
While the first talk of the evening was about the basics of Cap the second was much more interesting to me. It was an advanced talk given by (I think) the current maintainer. He did an excellent job of explaining some of the less common features and how they related to the Unix philosophy - such as streams and pipes. The speaker obviously knew his stuff and it's given me the push I need to hopefully spend some time in the future looking at the software. If his slides go up they are well worth a read.
The group were a friendly bunch, the venue was nice and the talks educational. If it wasn't for the train cost and the time spent travelling I'd be more than willing to attend more of their meetings.
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Posted: 2009/08/27 18:38 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Thu, 02 Jul 2009
EuroPython 2009 - Wrap up Post
Over the last week I've been up in Birmingham catching up with some old
friends and attending some talks at the little get together of around 450
Pythonistas that was EuroPython
2009.
This was my second Python conference. The first was PyCon 2008, which was so well organised (by many of the same team as this years EuroPython) that I was inspired to come back. And I wasn't disappointed. There were a lot of very good talks, some that have planted seeds that I'll have to come back and try to find the time to look at and some that showed me things I plan on using in the very near future (such as py.test).
The atmosphere was topnotch. Everyone seemed friendly, the speakers were approachable and after spending the evening with so many people working on so many things it was a pleasure to get back to the room and make sure I actually did something technical before bed.
It's a wonderful feeling to come away from a conference feeling motivated to try new technologies and all I need to do now is actually schedule some time actually write some Python code...
The organisers did a great job and I'll be back next year.
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Posted: 2009/07/02 21:13 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sun, 01 Mar 2009
London PM Moose Talks - Feb 2009
I wasn't able to get to the actual talks but luckily the Moose talk slides are now all
online (apart from Moose for Ruby programmers which has instead been
expanded in to a blog post). By all reports it was another excellent night
and I'll have to keep the evening free for the next one.
Now I've read the slides and heard so much positive feedback I think it's time I tried Moose for a couple of projects. The initial install is still a little daunting due to the sheer number of modules it pulls in (although my main dev machine has most of CPAN installed anyway) but the benefits it seems to bring (I especially like the look of MooseX::Getopt) may be well worth the trade off.
If you're not familiar with Moose have a look at the slides, it's great to see a lot of the Perl6 promise here to use right now.
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Posted: 2009/03/01 23:03 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Fri, 30 Jan 2009
LOSUG - Jan 09 Wrap Up
I'm going to try and get to more LOSUG meetings this year and the January presentation by MC
Brown has done nothing to put me off. Although some of the audience tried
their best...
First up - the good. The actual presentation, MySQL/DTrace and Memcached, was very well done. The speaker was funny, well rehearsed and knew his material extremely well. The MySQL DTrace probes are made to be used in demos and are very enticing.
Now for the bad. The talks technical coverage was quite light on the MySQL/DTrace part and the memcache section was painful. Big parts of the audience just didn't seem to get the idea. The speaker had to constantly backtrack to keep more than a handful of us with him. I had to resist the urge to join in and ask questions like 'how do you do joins?' just to see how big the vein on his forehead would get.
Still, the speaker must have been good as I've already played with the OpenSolaris Live CD they gave away. I'm looking forward to next month.
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Posted: 2009/01/30 21:17 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Thu, 22 Jan 2009
LOSUG 2009 - A MySQL Must See
LOSUG is one of
Londons best kept tech secrets. It's hosted in a nice venue, often has a very
knowledgeable audience full of Sun engineers and this month will be covering
MySQL/DTrace and Memcached.
If you're a sysadmin or a developer interested in getting more, or better, metrics and understanding of how and what your system is doing make sure you book a place.
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Posted: 2009/01/22 18:50 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sat, 08 Nov 2008
Events - November 2008
It's actually a good month for dynamic language fans in London as we've got
both the London Perl Workshop and the inaugural Ruby Manor - both
of which I'll be attending.
Although, as a sysadmin, I feel a little bad about not making it to the Linux 2008 event (organised by the UKUUG) I couldn't really justify the time and cost this year. The talks were a decent selection but not enough to get me up to Manchester on my own budget for a weekend. I'll have to keep an eye out for next years LISA event in London to make up for it.
Last but not least - the FOSDEM 2009 dates have been announced (for the second time). Assuming they don't change during the week I'll be booking those before Xmas. Roll on February!
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Posted: 2008/11/08 13:06 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Wed, 08 Oct 2008
October London Python UG
I made it along to my first ever London Python User Group tonight, and from
what the regulars said about the turn out so did a lot of other people.
Over 50 people in attendance is very respectable.
The first talk was a bit of a let down, it felt really long, quite slow moving and could have been much better as a lightning talk. Shame it was the best part of over an hour. Luckily the lightning talks themselves were good. Even though I'd seen a couple of them before at PyCon UK. PySmell, which is actually an IDE intellisense / auto-completion helper rather than anything to do with refactoring, is interesting (and you can read the slides online) and Metaclasses in Five Minutes (which took seven minutes) were both highlights of the evening.
ThoughtWorks have very nice offices in London (with a great view) and I'm looking forward to the next one. Kudos to Simon Brunning for organising it and let's hope Leon has the same turn out for tomorrows London.pm tech meet.
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Posted: 2008/10/08 21:48 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sun, 05 Oct 2008
PyCon UK - 2008
At $DAYJOB I'm working with a strong team of Python (and Django)
developers so over the last couple of months my interest in the language
has grown. Thanks to YAPC::EU not being very exciting this year I had a
spare slot in my "conference schedule" and went to the highly
recommended (by me and previous attendees I'd spoken to) PyCon UK. I'm glad I did.
I was more than a little out of my depth in most of the talks but a lot of the speakers were excellent, especially Raymond Hettinger - who I ended up stalking (by accident) and seeing all of his talks. The technical level required of the audience was quite varied but I ended up going to a lot of the more technically indepth sessions as they just seemed more interesting. The downside is that I lacked the ability to filter module based talks in the same way I can at Perl Conferences and that I learned (the hard way) that Python has many test frameworks, modules and harnesses.
The venue itself was fine, large, easy to get around and had restaurants and pubs near enough that you could make a dash outside for lunch. The keynotes were both very interesting - Mark Shuttleworth and Ted Leung both gave their view (in different ways) on where Python is, was and should be. As a (mostly) Perl guy I was a little surprised by how little it even got mentioned - twice by my count and each time it was as an afterthought. In a way this is reassuring, it fits in with my own views and encourages me to learn a new dynamic language (Python and Ruby are both interesting in different ways).
I should probably note that There won't be a PyCon UK in 2009 - instead the organisers are doing PyCon Europe 2009. And based on how good a time I had this year I'll be there.
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Posted: 2008/10/05 22:31 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Google Dev Day - London 2008
I recently went to the London 2008 Google Dev Day (the title of my post
doesn't lie!) and while it was lovely to be near that hallowed grass (only
half of which was actually down) the talks themselves left a lot to be
desired - actual technical content.
I'm not sure if I'm the wrong audience in that I've already looked at the front pages and the code samples but I hoped, given the word developer in the events title, that it'd be a bit more tech heavy.
The actual talks were mostly well presented but they lacked any real depth on the subjects, most of them contained very similar material to the actual API introductions. It was nice catching up with some ex- coworkers though and, if nothing else, I've been inspired to look at the Google Visualisation APIs a lot more. When I get some spare time. Still, here's something to tick off on my PiP.
You can also view the Google Dev Day Videos on YouTube.
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Posted: 2008/10/05 21:56 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Tue, 12 Aug 2008
YAPC::EU 2008 - Not for me
Since I've been asked where about at the conference I am I should probably
mention that I'm not attending YAPC::EU this year.
Despite the excellent job the organisers did last year at the Nordic Perl
Workshop a combination of factors stopped me going back to Copenhagen.
The first one (and it's shallow but true) is that I've been there now. I like conferences in places I've never been before. If I'm going to spend a chunk of my own cash on travel I want to grab an extra day or two and have a wonder around. While Copenhagen was nice I did most of the city (and the mermaid, the river boat and got very sunburnt) last time I was there.
The second reason is there just ain't many interesting talks. While there are a handful I'm eagerly awaiting the slides from they are spread out over the entire conference. There are a number I've seen, a bunch I've no interest in (some in topics I already have a grounding in, some by people I can't watch for an hour) and only a few that I'd get out of bed early for. And we're not talking before ten am even for those. I don't think it's a perl wide problem - YAPC::Asia had a very interesting line this year and I'm sorry I missed it.
Add those two together and I can't really justify the time or money. So I've saved this years YAPC money and spent it on PyCon UK 2008 instead. It doesn't require me to suffer through an airport, I'm pretty sure I'll know almost nothing about any of the sessions beyond what I've seen on reddit and similar sites and, considering that work is all python on new projects it can't hurt for me to pick up some of the same technologies that our developers use.
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Posted: 2008/08/12 15:35 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Fri, 11 Jul 2008
Replacing The Opening Talk at Conferences
Over the last couple of years (apart from this year oddly enough) I've
been to a fair few tech conferences and one of the most annoying things
about them (especially YAPCs) are the opening talks. If you're lucky you
get a good keynote. Otherwise you get either a bad sponsor session or
even, don't be afraid - you don't have to attend, a "Getting the most
out of a YAPC" talk.
So now I've whinged about it what's my suggestion to fix it? Have a short session where each speaker who's presenting at the conference gives a brief peek (and a chance to hook people in) to their talk.
This should be no more than a minute or two, 3-6 slides at most, all using the same laptop and lined up in the front row of the audience to keep it smooth and fast. Although a lot of people already know what they want to see doing this will help people to spot the speakers who have an... "incompatible with the audience" presentation style and may even change their mind about what to see.
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Posted: 2008/07/11 22:19 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Copyright © 2000-2010 Dean Wilson
