Entries tagged 'ubuntu'
Thoughts from SCALE 21x, day 1
Today was the first day of the 21st Southern California Linux Expo, also known as SCALE 21x. I gave a talk at way back at SCALE 4x and hadn’t made it back since then.
I attended a couple of talks on the UbuCon track at the beginning of the day. They weren’t technical talks, but focused on how the Ubuntu community operates and how Canonical relates to that. It sounds like Canonical has opened itself up more to the community by adopting Matrix as both their internal communications tool as well as what the community uses, which I think is very important for encouraging the developers in a commercial open source environment to engage with the community. This was an issue for us back in the MySQL days, too.
(There was also a comment about “neck beards” being annoying about not adopting newer communication tools and wanting everyone to stick with IRC, I think coming from someone involved with openSUSE, which I thought was kind of funny.)
After that, I popped over to the beginning of the Kwaai Personal AI Summit because Doc Searls was giving a (brief) talk and I thought I would see if there was anything to this AI thing that I’ve been hearing about. The room had a lot of old dude energy that just wasn’t sitting right with me, so I ended up bailing after Doc’s talk.
Since I left that earlier than I had planned, I ended up wandering into a PostgreSQL talk on how “wait events” can be used for troubleshooting performance, and I had a déjà vu moment because only yesterday I had run across the old Worklog for MySQL’s PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA
which blames credits me for suggesting that’s what the name of the schema should be. It was yet another random “plate of shrimp” moment that has been happening with frequency as of late.
Then I attended a workshop from the Kubernetes Community Day track on using Argo CD to put the OpenGitOps principles into practice. While I have been using Docker for a while, I haven’t really played around with Kubernetes or other container automation tools, so I figured this might be a good way to start learning more. Unfortunately, the hands-on workshop part of the session didn’t actually work due to some problem with the training environment from the sponsoring company, which kind of helped reinforce my instinct that a lot of these tools still have a lot of sharp edges. The concept sounds great, though.
Finally, I popped back over to the PostgreSQL track for their (apparently popular) “Ask Me Anything” session with some of the prominent community members and core developers that were in attendance. I was reminded today that the PostgreSQL project doesn’t have a bug tracker aside from their mailing list archive. I remembered writing about this before, and it turns out that was in 2008. (No shade intended that they don’t have one, it seems to be working out okay.)
That was the day. I really don’t want to seem like I am passing any judgement on anything because I know that putting on an event like this is tremendously difficult, and while there is an impressive line-up of sponsors this is clearly a community-driven and focused event. I was disappointed by how old, white, and male the crowd seemed to be (fully acknowledging that’s my demographic), and I’ll be interested to see if that holds true for the whole run or if this an outlier day because it was more workshop-oriented and the expo floor wasn’t open.
Back on Linode
For some reason I couldn’t keep the the instances I was setting up on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) from eating themselves when I did something fancy like run apt-get update
, so I moved everything back to Linode ($100 referral credit there) on one of the lowest-price Nanode compute instances.
I took the opportunity to rebuild the host on Debian just to give that a spin. My setup runs on containers managed by docker-compose
, so the underlying system doesn’t matter to me that much.
I should probably be using this as an opportunity to learn some infrastructure-as-code tools.
a very dorky sunday
today i upgraded the (virtual) machine that hosts this site and some others to karmic koala. in the process, i discovered that linode’s user-mode linux kernel is not up-to-date enough for that, so i had to migrate to one of their xen hosts (totally painless, and probably long overdue).
i also wrote the beginnings of an endpoint for tweetie 2’s new support for a custom image server, which explains the earlier picture of wonton. a custom url shortener will be next to come.
oh, and i made banana bread.
pthread_rwlock_wrlock bug on amd64 with hoary hedgehog
my otherwise-painless upgrade to ubuntu’s hoary hedgehog release was marred by a bug in pthread_rwlock_wrlock() on amd64 that was fixed in the upstream glibc more than a year ago. ugh.
i wonder what the policy of ubuntu is with regard to fixing things like this. i really hope i don’t have to created a patched glibc myself.
on the bright side, the upgrade fixed the xserver configuration, so now it starts up and shows the pretty login screen. i logged in and it looked and sounded pretty.
the best part of matthew thomas’s review of usability problems with ubuntu is the punchline.