that’s whacked

and then there were none…

Sunday, Apr 30. 2006  –  Category: Football

first owen and now rooney

i don’t fancy our chances with our backup strikers. who are we gonna play? bent and crouch? bent and defoe? crouch and defoe? as much as i think crouch is ineffective, i think as a target man, he would play well with bent or defoe. bent and defoe are too alike to pair up well.

dried fruit is… dry

Wednesday, Apr 26. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

funny exchange at the Costco counter yesterday, when we noticed the guy in front of us was buying a bag of dried kiwis we had been thinking of getting.

[wendy]: are those good?
[other guy]: yeah, we really like them
[wendy]: how are they? are they dry or juicy?
[other guy looking puzzled]: well.. um.. they're kinda dry.  they're dried kiwis.

in our defense, dried fruits can still be kind of juicy… like Trader Joe’s dried cranberries… anyway. they’re good. i like ‘em.

the chaos that was fisl

Monday, Apr 24. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

that chaos was the Sun booth/area at fisl. this was probably one of the peak crowds we saw flowing through our area on friday (a national holiday in Brasil). in the centre you can see Fernanda (green sweater w/ yellow/red stripe) either talking about JavaDB or explaining the Ultra 20 giveaway contest we were having. behind her in the white t-shirt is Francois giving a JavaDB demo on his laptop. to the right of Francois is Rebecca (blond hair, black sweater) also there representing JavaDB. next to her in the blue shirt is Tim giving a NetBeans demo on the w2100z.

to the left of that centre table is the table with the coffee machine dispensing free coffee for all fisl attendees. i setup my OpenSolaris demo station next to that (as visible in this photo).

food at fisl

Monday, Apr 24. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

while this is fisl related, it’s really all about the food. so ignore this if you don’t care about my food experiences in brasil

alright. so obviously a big part of Brasil is the food. i glossed over the details in my earlier blog, but only because i couldn’t do them justice on thursday morning at 3am. food is a topic deserving of its own blog. on wednesday night, we went to a churrasco. waiters walk around with giant spears of meat. you’re given a little card that is basically a big red STOP on one side, and a bright green GO on the other. depending on what side you have showing, the aforementioned meat will arrive next to your head along with a friendly waiter asking if you want a slice. mine remained on GO much of the night… the restaurant was filled with an amazing myriad of smells. everything was kind of permeated with this smell of amazingly salt-marinated meat. i can’t even begin to do justice to how great it smelled. (unless you’re vegetarian, in which case… i’m sorry - but don’t visit Brasil). there was chicken, chicken hearts, pork, javali (the Brasilian name for the warthog, which also happens to be the name of a big Java event that is hosted at FISL), and of course various cuts of beef. during the meal, Fernanda told us that one of the Brasilian laws is that customers have to be allowed to go into the kitchen to inspect things. i couldn’t pass up the opportunity, so we went into the kitchen where we could see the rock sea salt marinade “bath” the meats go through before being put onto this enormous cluster of rotiseries. i knew i wouldn’t know how to explain it, so i took a photo instead. it’s… well.. it’s like a giant rack-mount cluster of meat.

the second day, our group kind of splintered with Simon & Tim going to have dinner with the GPL3 guys including Richard Stallman. the rest of the Sun gang ended up going to an Italian place. i ventured off to join the Ubuntu-BR guys for pizza. i intended to hang with them at this FISL party later in the evening, and they suggested pizza for dinner. i wasn’t totally hot on it, since..well.. it’s pizza. but whatever. i mentioned earlier that there were tons of Italian restaurants and pizzerias in Brasil, which i was told was due to the Italian heritage that a lot of Brasilians have. anyway, i was extremely pleasantly surprised at the pizzeria we went to. it was like the churasco… but with pizza. waiters walked around with big pizzas offering individual slices (yes, it was all you can eat, woot!). i had beef stroganoff pizza, tuna casserol pizza, and other crazy and interesting new flavours. of course, i also had the good old standbys of pepperoni, ham/pineapple, etc. anyway, overall, a really fun dinner and a great experience. the even cooler thing was how alive everything was. we had dinner from about 11:30 to 12:45am. that’s right. dinner at midnight. and the streets were hoppin’ with people. traffic was jammed with people drinking, eating, and just having a good time. we got to the club/bar for the party and it didn’t even start filling up until around 1:30am.

on the third day, and my last evening there… we had Uruguayan food. i’d met a few Uruguayans at FISL, and a common question i got from them was “have you been to Uruguay?” to which i could reply “i know nothing about Uruguay except ‘Diego Forlan!’”. “ahhh!!! Diego Forlan!!! football!” was the inevitable response. anyway, this was a great opportunity to try some of the food and experience something to add to my in-depth knowledge of Uruguay. the food was great… another bbq kind of place, but with a really interesting bean/red wine sauce; and an amazing Uruguayan caramel pie.

fisl days 1 & 2

Thursday, Apr 20. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

wow. what a whirlwind. i now firmly believe that fisl has to have the most energy of any conference i’ve been to. this place is rockin’!

so. day 1. i finally got all my packages, and headed to the conference hall with the Java dudes. Tatiana did a fantastic job of getting Sun a prime prime spot on the floor as a community meeting point. we setup a coffee machine and gave out free coffee - which has got to be one of the best ideas (courtesy of simon i believe) for drawing a crowd to your area. our “booth” was setup perfectly. rather than a traditional closed booth, it was setup as a bunch of comfy chairs, and tables for people to hang out in and meet up and chat. we had a center table with a w2100z workstation and eye-catching 24.1″ LCD. francois, fernanda, and rebecca were demoing JavaDB, while i was demoing Solaris/OpenSolaris. i ran tons of Dtrace, BrandZ, Dtrace AND BrandZ, ZFS, and Zones demos. suffice to say, people were amazed.

i brought a ton of freebies down of course, and went through the SXCR DVDs and Nexenta CDs in a blaze. i got a ton of great feedback from people saying they loved the fact that we (Sun) were there, and giving out other people’s OS’s (Nexenta). i really think it got us a lot of good cred.

at 5pm, i gave a talk with a quick intro on the OpenSolaris project and community. i then borrowed greatly from nils and edp’s slides and presented on BrandZ. at the end, i gave a demo of BrandZ. i’d hoped to have time to do a DTrace of a BrandZ app - but ran out of time… but i hope i made up for it by doing tons of DTrace/BrandZ demos at the booth area. the room was packed, which was great. every seat was taken, and there were maybe about 20-30 people standing in the back too - so it was really well attended. i only hope it was well received as well.

that night i went out to dinner with the Sun folks and the SOJAVA folks to a churrasco (the brasilian bbq) where i had my first churrasceria and caipirinha. these will be the subject of another blog entry later.

the second day was mostly a repeat of the first day. except i got to meet and chat with a people… notably, Keith Packard, Miguel de Icaza, and Marcelo Tosatti. i talked with a bunch of people in various communities (Fedora Ambassadors, Brasil’s Ministry of Science & Technology, Ubuntu-BR, etc.) about the OpenSolaris community, what we were doing right, and more importantly: what we could be doing better. i took a ton of photos and plan to post them when i get back to a place with a better network connection (Hey Sheraton! improve your freaking internet connection. the connection here is dismal)

btw - the Ubuntu-BR guys rock. they were totally plugging Nexenta/OpenSolaris at their user group booth and giving away CDs for us as well. i got along great with them, we did the obligatory t-shirt swap and had a great time. really friendly bunch of guys. we grabbed all-you-can-eat pizza for dinner (at 12:30am!!!) and went to a FISL party after the conference on the second day.

overall, so far, i think things are going pretty well. there has been a ton of enthusiasm around OpenSolaris. a surprisingly high number of people are aware of Nexenta and were really interested in it (so i’m really glad we burned the livecds and brought them). people showed a lot of interest in the OpenSolaris project, and were really receptive to the idea of an open source Solaris.

lessons learned: 1. if you give out a CD, put the username/password on the disc art. 2. if you give out an install DVD, people will want a live CD. if you give out live CDs, people also want an install CD. i think it would have been even better to have brought Nexenta LiveCDs as well as install CDs 3. everyone and their mother wants a t-shirt at FISL. 4. if you go to FISL, and your lactose intolerant: bring lactaid. 99% of the food they sell has some form of dairy on it or in it. 5. if you don’t bring lactaid, bring immodium. seriously. it sucks being lactose intolerant

okay, i’ve got tons more to blog - i’m sure i’m missing details. but it’s almost 3am and i’m exhausted.

first (fisl) post!

Tuesday, Apr 18. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

okay, so i guess i’m not actually at fisl yet, but at least i made it to porto alegre in one piece. 20 hours of flying and airport layovers and i’m finally here. the flight from sao paolo to porto alegre probably had the highest “geek” population density of any flight in the western hemisphere today. (random shout-out to the Postgres guy whose name i didn’t get but gave me a cool Brasil Postgres pin). i also bumped into francois, a java geek from Sun in the lobby of the Sheraton when checking in.

so i’m here. my bags are here (carry-on the whole way, thankfully). my room seems nice. my ferrari (laptop) still works. hopefully bruno’s mac mini does too. my punchin (VPN) connection has some atrocious latency, but otherwise works.

about the only thing wrong is the fact that FedEx says they delivered 6 packages, and the Sheraton claims they only delivered 2. somewhere (in this hotel, i suspect, since i have the signature of a “L. Pereira” from FedEx) is 130 SXCR DVDs, and 144 OpenSolaris t-shirts. my only objective tonight is to take a shower, find my other 4 packages, and then get smashingly … um… smashed… somewhere with good food and drink.

zfs mount root (almost boot)

Friday, Apr 14. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

tabriz blogged all the salient details on how to use ZFS as your root slice.

getting ready for fisl 7.0

Wednesday, Apr 12. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

fisl 7.0 is drawing closer and closer… and it looks like things are (mostly) coming together nicely. Sun will be sponsoring a community area with coffee, couches, and OpenSolaris geeks. well, at least one geek (me) handing out t-shirts (quite nice ones), DVDs with Solaris Express Community Release b36 + Sun Studio 10 + OpenSolaris/ON b36 source delivery, ‘powered by opensolaris’ laptop stickers, and (hopefully) Nexenta CDs.

i’ve been fiendishly tracking my swag as it makes its way through the maze that is known as customs. my t-shirts arrived at my hotel okay, and 200 of the 400 SXCR DVDs made it. the other 200 are held up in customs for some unknown reason. and i’m still not sure what the status of the Nexenta CDs (being produced in Brasil to avoid the customs fiasco) is.

i’ll be presenting a brief presentation about the OpenSolaris community & project, as well as demo’ing BrandZ on my laptop with CentOS and Debian Linux zones/brands at fisl. according to the schedule, i’ll be presenting on april 19th @ 17:00. i believe ‘Sala von Neumann’ is the room i’m in)

hope to see you there!

mmmm…coffee

Monday, Apr 10. 2006  –  Category: Food, Musings, OpenSolaris

you know what’s better than making your own vietnamese coffee at work?

nothing.

(well, coffee-wise anyway)

sometimes i really truly hate ITOps

Monday, Apr 10. 2006  –  Category: Sun

so on friday i was running a script out of my homedir. when i came back a few hours later i noticed a bunch of files missing… upon further investigation, i noticed a ton of files missing…. including my directory with all my opensolaris delivery scripts/stuff i’d written in the past 9 months.

i got freaked out and killed my script and sat there in stunned silence for about 15 minutes (well, not complete silence since i was bitching about it on #opensolaris). i then filed a ticket with ITOps to try and recover from a nightly backup.

i got a call about 10 minutes later from someone with ITOps in India who kept insisting on emailing me ‘ls’ output of my directory. i don’t need her to do that. i’m perfectly capable of doing an ls myself. she also kept trying to find out how i was connected to the SWAN (Sun’s network). she didn’t know what punchin was (our next generation VPN) and asked me a few times if i was VPN’d in (to which i replied yes, via punchin). she then asked me a what version of Windows i was running and what program was i using to connect. sigh.

anyway…nothing major was lost… i lost a few changes to some small scripts i use to deliver the nightly and build-synchronised deliveries, but nothing i can’t recreate in an hour or two. but this whole weekend i kept berating myself for writing and then running a script which had managed to trash my home directory. i felt pretty damn stupid.

until i check my email this morning and see:

Dear Jurassic users,

There was a rogue script run by ITOPS which deleted some of the files and directories in user home directories. We have disabled the script and are trying to figure out how to recover from this.

)(#!@&&#%&@#(*%&#!!!!

what the f.

this whole time i thought my script had gone insane and psycho and started trashing my home directory. turns out i was wrong. Sun ITOps had gone insane and psycho and started trashing my home directory.

i know people joke from time to time about their IT departments being unhelpful… we certainly have our fair share of disagreements with ITOps. but this is the first time i’ve genuinely felt like they were out to get me.

correction: i’ve been told it wasn’t ITOps, but somebody’s rogue cron job. i suppose that’s mildly better.