linux.conf.au 2013 setup
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[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Earthbound
 ISBN: 9781937007836 LibraryThing |
This is the third book in the Marsbound series. The Others have just turned off all electronics on Earth, and now we need to survive. One problem with this book is that it jumps straight into the action -- I had to go back and re-read Marsbound and Starbound in order to understand what was happening in this book. That was ok because those two books are excellent, and I enjoyed re-reading them. In fact, those two are probably a little better than this one.
Overall Earthbound is pretty dark, and there isn't a lot of hope presented -- its just a series of scenes where the main characters attempt to deal with an all powerful adversary. Perhaps if the Others weren't so powerful this would be a better book, because you just know that everyone is doomed. I also respect authors who are willing to kill off lead characters, but that happens a lot in this book, which sort of bothered me. Perhaps that's what combat is really like though -- people you have an attachment to just stop being there. There's no warning or explanation. The end of this book isn't very satisfying. There better be a sequel or I'm going to be annoyed. Tags for this post: book joe_haldeman mars aliens exploration space_travel first_contact marsbound post_apocalypse combat Related posts: Starbound; Marsbound; Rendezvous With Rama; Red Mars; Mars: A Survival Guide; Camouflage ; The Coming; The Apocalypse Troll; Death Bringer; Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow ; East of the Sun, West of the Moon; The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress; Agent to the Stars; Runner; The Ship Who Sang ; Bolos 1: Honor of the Regiment; Iron Master; Cloud Warrior; Amtrak Wars; The Accidental Time Machine ; Earth Thunder |
How will I identify an organizer at lca2013?
I think it will be pretty hard to spot us given how cunning our camouflage is.
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First day of setup for lca2013
Some of the linux.conf.au 2013 team took the chance to rock on over to ANU today and do some final AV testing. While I was there I took some pictures of the various theaters, as I figure it will help answer some of the questions our speakers have.
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Its either a third child, or Cat is pregnant with a unicorn
So... Catherine is 8 weeks pregnant. We had an ultrasound this morning, and everything seems to be going well. We wouldn't normally tell people this early (its traditional to wait until 12 weeks), but it turns out that we're terrible at keeping secrets. This child is code named "Ducky" until released to the public.
More playing with the new toy
I promise to stop taking pics now...
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OpenStack at linux.conf.au 2013
As some of you might know, I'm the Director for linux.conf.au 2013. I've tried really hard to not use my powers for evil and make the entire conference about OpenStack -- in fact I haven't pulled rank and demanded that specific content be included at all. However, the level of interest in OpenStack has grown so much since LCA 2012 that there is now a significant amount of OpenStack content in the conference without me having to do any of that.
I thought I'd take a second to highlight some of the OpenStack content that I think is particularly interesting -- these are the talks I'll be going to if I have the time (which remains to be seen):
Monday
Image handlers (in essex)
George asks in the comments on my previous post about loop and nbd devices an interesting question about the behavior of this code on essex. I figured the question was worth bringing out into its own post so that its more visible. I've edited George's question lightly so that this blog post flows reasonably.
Can you please explain the order (and conditions) in which the three methods are used? In my Essex installation, the "img_handlers" is not defined in nova.conf, so it takes the default value "loop,nbd,guestfs". However, nova is using nbd as the chose method.The handlers will be used in the order specified -- with the caveat that loop doesn't support Copy On Write (COW) images and will therefore be skipped if the libvirt driver is trying to create a COW image. Whether COW images are used is configured with the use_cow_images flag, which defaults to True. So, loop is being skipped because you're probably using COW images.
My ssh keys are obtained by cloud-init, and still whenever I start a new instance I see in the nova-compute.logs this sequence of events:This is a bit harder than the first bit of the question. What I think is happening is that there are files being injected, and that's causing the mount. Just because the admin password isn't being inject doesn't mean that other things aren't being injected still. You'd be able to tell what's happening by grepping your logs for "Injecting .* into image" and seeing what shows up.qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd15 /var/lib/nova/instances/instance-0000076d/disk kpartx -a /dev/nbd15 mount /dev/mapper/nbd15p1 /tmp/tmpxGBdT0 umount /dev/mapper/nbd15p1 kpartx -d /dev/nbd15 qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd15I don't understand why the mount of the first partition is necessary and what it happens when the partition is mounted.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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