Advogato blog for mikal

The next thing

Sun, 5 Feb 2012 00:28:08 GMT

It has been a couple of months, so I feel that perhaps its time that I mentioned more publicly where I ended up after Google. I am now a systems administrator at Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu. That's a pretty good fit for me in the sense that I have been a Ubuntu user for a very long time. For reference, I don't love the job title "systems administrator" because it doesn't really match what I do, but it isn't something I'm fixated on.

One of the things I help manage at Canonical is our Openstack infrastructure. Along the way I've been finding a few things there I think can be improved, which is why I've been hacking on Openstack in my spare time. I've had a couple of patches merged already, and am generally having fun contributing to an open source project which I think stands a very good chance of being the Apache of cloud management. It is a lot like the stuff I was doing at Google in the sense that I like working on things which I think will affect the quality of life for a large number of people, and Openstack is clearly in that space.

Canonical is also much more open about contributing to open source projects than Google was, so expect me to be able to talk more about what I do in my work life than I did before. I think its already noticeable that I am blogging more than I did during my six years at the big G.

Tags for this post: work canonical google
Related posts: Taking over a launch pad project; Slow git review uploads?; Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; Wow, qemu-img is fast; Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?; Announcement video; linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013; Openstack compute node cleanup

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Rise of a Merchant Prince

Sun, 5 Feb 2012 00:28:08 GMT

ISBN: 0006497012
CollinsVoyager (1996), Paperback, 496 pages
LibraryThing

I didn't really like this book, but I persisted with it because I want to keep reading the series. I thought the previous Serpent War book Shadow of a Dark Queen was weak, but this book was weaker. The book follows the rise of Roo as a merchant, and is improbable at best -- Roo's wealth is generated by cornering the food market for Krondor and I see weaknesses in the analysis there -- surely the Duke wouldn't allow such a manipulation of the market when it harms his citizens, why weren't there food riots when the cost of basic staples jumped to record levels overnight? Basically, it just doesn't seem believable to me.

The sequence at the panthian lair on the other hand is much better, and the best bit of the book. Its a pity it is only about 50 pages long.

Tags for this post: book raymond_e_feist midkemia combat crime fantasy sword_and_sorcery serpent_war
Related posts: Shadow of a Dark Queen; Daughter of the Empire; The King's Buccaneer; Servant of the Empire; The Riftwar Series; Silverthorn; A Darkness at Sethanon; Mistress of the Empire; Prince of the Blood; Magician: Master; Magician: Apprentice; Raymond E Feist's Empire Trilogy; Polar City Blues; Dawnspell: The Bristling Wood; Caves of Steel; Currency; Tipping point: windscreen washers; You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat; Belgarath the Sorcerer; The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat; Mona Lisa Overdrive

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An update on Catherine's health

Sat, 4 Feb 2012 10:33:04 GMT

In the last week we've now seen the two specialists that we needed to see to learn more about Catherine's pituitary adenoma. The first was the opthamologist, who kindly saw us at very short notice. Even better, he's Andrew Tridgell's brother and a lovely guy. He did a great job of answering our questions and generally reassuring us, and the short of it is that Catherine's vision is not current disturbed and barring another hemorrhage or a significant growth in the tumor it shouldn't be. He of course couldn't rule these things out, but that's because all things are possible even if they are unlikely. The ongoing strategy here appears to be a series of MRIs and visual field studies done every six months or so for the foreseeable future. The only real wart here was that if there is a hemorrhage, which is something we can't control, the prognosis here could change rapidly for the worse with very little warning. There is evidence of a previous hemorrhage on the MRI.

The second specialist was the endocronologist, who we saw on Monday in Sydney. Again he was a lovely guy and put up with our two pages of questions. As best as he can tell the adenoma is not cancer, but he's not sure if it is functional or not (controlling the level of prolactin in Catherine's body). The first steps are that he's going to take the MRI films to a radiologist specializing in cranial scans, and has put Catherine on a drug which should control her prolactin levels. Then it will be a blood test in a month to see if the drug is working, and we'll take it from there. He was talking about the possibility that this whole thing is related to Catherine's sarcoidosis from a decade ago, but he thinks that only a biopsy of the tumor will confirm that. I feel that if they're going to do brain surgery for a biopsy they may as well just take the darn thing out while they're there, but we'll have that argument when we get there.

So, overall not as horribly bad as it could have been. There are still risks if there is a hemorrhage, and its possible that we'll end up seeing a neurosurgeon to have the tumor removed, but we'll cross those bridges when we come to them. The next step is either that the radiologist will see something on the MRI that he thinks needs more information, or that Catherine will have a blood test in a month. We'll keep you posted.

Tags for this post: health catherine brain tumor pituitary adenoma
Related posts: It hasn't been a very good week; JJJ's hack

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Wow, qemu-img is fast

Sat, 4 Feb 2012 01:31:28 GMT

I wanted to determine if its worth putting ephemeral images into the libvirt cache at all. How expensive are these images to create? They don't need to come from the image service, so it can't be too bad, right? It turns out that qemu-img is very very fast at creating these images, based on the very small data set of my laptop with an ext4 file system...

mikal@x220:/data/temp$ time qemu-img create -f raw disk 10g
Formatting 'disk', fmt=raw size=10737418240 

real	0m0.315s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.004s

mikal@x220:/data/temp$ time qemu-img create -f raw disk 100g
Formatting 'disk', fmt=raw size=107374182400 

real	0m0.004s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.000s

$ time qemu-img create -f raw disk 100g
Formatting 'disk', fmt=raw size=107374182400 

real	0m0.055s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.004s

$ time mkfs.ext4 disk 
mke2fs 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
disk is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
warning: Unable to get device geometry for disk
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
6553600 inodes, 26214400 blocks
1310720 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=0
800 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
	32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 
	4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872

Writing inode tables: done                            
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 36 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first.  Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

real	0m4.083s
user	0m0.096s
sys	0m0.136s

Tags for this post: openstack qemu ephemeral mkfs swap speed canonical

Related posts: Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; Openstack compute node cleanup; Taking over a launch pad project; Speed limit; Slow git review uploads?; My machine was thrashing a lot; Large inodes = faster samba; Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?; Announcement video; linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013; Linux USB quandary

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Slow git review uploads?

Fri, 3 Feb 2012 01:28:35 GMT

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.

Tags for this post: openstack git review gerrit ssh voices
Related posts: More reviews; Book reviews; Contact details for the Canberra LCA 2013 bid; Working on review comments for Chapters 2, 3 and 4 tonight; A ssh quickie; Review; LCA 2013 bid process opens - Canberra at the ready!; Andrew's SSH filtering causes me pain; Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; Twisted conch; The Wild Palms Hotel; The mechanics of bidding for LCA; Status of the book; Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?; Announcement video; linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013; Canberra officially expresses interest in hosting LCA in 2013; clusterssh; Openstack compute node cleanup

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Announcement video

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:29:49 GMT

I imagine that most people saw this at the conference closing. However, for completeness and because I feel that if we're going to put videos of other speakers online then I should suffer the same fate, here is the LCA 2013 announcement from Ballarat:

Tags for this post: conference lca2013 announcement video
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Shadow of a Dark Queen

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:28:32 GMT

ISBN: 9780006480266
LibraryThing

I read this book before LCA 2012, but never had a chance to mention it here. It was the first return to Midkemia for me since I read the Krondor's Sons books. This book is set a lot later, and there is very little reuse of characters between The Riftwar Saga or even Krondor's Sons. The only real overlap is the presence of Pug briefly. This book over does its "dirty dozen" aspects, with much of the book focusing on the military training of criminals. The rest of the book feels like a rushed military adventure in a far land, and could have done with some more attention. However, the book isn't terrible, and I thought it was ok overall.

Tags for this post: book raymond_e_feist midkemia combat crime fantasy sword_and_sorcery
Related posts: Daughter of the Empire; The King's Buccaneer; Servant of the Empire; The Riftwar Series; Silverthorn; A Darkness at Sethanon; Mistress of the Empire; Prince of the Blood; Magician: Master; Magician: Apprentice; Raymond E Feist's Empire Trilogy; Polar City Blues; The Stainless Steel Rat Sings The Blues; Dawnspell: The Bristling Wood; Caves of Steel; Currency; Tipping point: windscreen washers; You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat; Belgarath the Sorcerer; The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat; Mona Lisa Overdrive

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

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:27:45 GMT

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.

Tags for this post: conference lca2013 canberra promotion postcard sticker
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linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:37:37 GMT

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:

Our media release post reveal: http://lca2013.linux.org.au/media-release-entries/linux.conf.au-returns-to-canberra-in-2013
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 be keeping it up to date as details are locked in.

Tags for this post: conference lca2013 announcement canberra
Related posts: Two more weeks to go; In Canberra; Mont 24 hour race; Most novel traffic jam cause goes to... Canberra!; So, what on earth was I doing up at 4:30 am anyways?; Announcing early results of my survey of SMTP servers; What are we doing with the pets?; Electric shadows has a RSS feed!; Travel details so far; Frank Arrigo discovers Steve Walsh's free wireless; On a bunker kick; Calling Tate Needham, or, Hiring in Canberra; Historical revisionism; LCA weather; Back in Canberra again

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It hasn't been a very good week

Sat, 7 Jan 2012 01:28:09 GMT

This week has presented me with a few learning opportunities. Catherine and I are expecting to get a fair few questions about the week, so we thought we'd try and write it up here. That way we can tell people something that's consistent and complete, without having to type the same thing out 200 times. I also think that this topic deserves more space than twitter will allow.

On Wednesday Catherine was told she probably has a brain tumor, and to get an MRI immediately. This was obviously pretty upsetting, and if I've been irritable at you this week that's why and I apologize. Neither of us are medical professionals, and we didn't really know what this meant. Catherine was told that the tumor was "almost certainly" benign, but that wasn't all that reassuring.

Catherine had her MRI the next day. It sounds like a pretty unpleasant process -- your head is clamped into position and an IV fitted, and then you're left in a room which makes the surgical metal in your lower spine feel hot for 40 minutes. Did I mention they clamp your head so you can't escape? Another irritation is that Medicare doesn't cover this MRI at all. So, you take people who have been told they have a brain tumor, and then you tell them that the government doesn't care enough about them to pay for what is considered the best diagnostic for their condition. Better than that, we rang our private insurer, and they told us that Medicare also forbids them to cover it. So, you're out of pocket at least $400.

The MRI report says this: On the right side of the anterior pituitary, there is a hyperintense lesion measuring 9 x 9 x 10mm (T x CC x AP). There is a fluid/fluid level with no definite enhancement of the lesion following contrast injection. The pituitary stalk is minimally bowed to the left. These appearances are in keeping with haemorrhage into a pituitary adenoma.

The first piece of information we had was this paragraph from the MRI company. The GP gets this information about 12 hours before the patient, but our GP was so busy she hadn't read it by the time we did. We saw this about 8pm on Wednesday night, and of course immediately started web searching for the terms in the description. "Hyperintense" for example means "bright white on the MRI", which I believe to be a measure of density of the tumor.

Other learning includes that the pituitary is the gland which moderates the behavior of various elements of the endocrine system, including reproductive hormones. Technically, the pituitary is not part of the brain, but is attached very closely to it.

We saw the GP the next morning (yesterday), and it was mostly reassuring. The tumor is almost certainly not cancer -- I didn't even know there were non-cancerous tumors before yesterday. However, the tumor is affecting Catherine's reproductive hormones, and she is probably sterile for the period the tumor is present. The tumor might also get larger, and if it does it could impact on her optic nerves (which run to either side of the tumor) and that might result in varying levels of vision problems right up to blindness.

It sounds like there are a few courses of action available -- regular MRIs to monitor the state of the tumor. Surgery is an option to have it removed, which is more of an issue if you care about having more children or are suffering from vision disturbances. There are also radio therapy and drug options, but we haven't really had those explained to us yet.

The next steps are for Catherine to see an endocrinologist to see what he thinks about the MRI. Apparently there is a huge waiting list for those in Canberra, so it will mean a trip to Sydney at the end of the month. She also needs to have her vision tested. There's also a huge waiting list for that in Canberra but the specialist she is referred to does waiting list triage, so there is some hope that it wont be too long. We'll know more about that next month.

On a personal note, one of the other things that the last six months has taught me is that I'm not very good at talking about things which are really upsetting me -- our builder going bankrupt leaving us with an unfinished house, my mother in law's ailing health, getting made redundant by Google and this tumor incident being four examples from the last six months. I find I cope much better with these things if I have a chance to internalize them first before I talk to heaps of people about them. So, if I appear standoffish, that's why.

I think its fair for people to have questions about this post, but please remember that we're not experts and we've tried to include everything we know in this post already.

Tags for this post: health catherine brain tumor pituitary adenoma mri
Related posts: JJJ's hack

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