Preparing for Velocity and the Puppet MiniConf
I finally got access to my blog again (laziness combined well with the SSH key exploit to lock me out for a bit), and it's long past time I posted an update.
Andrew and I will be at Velocity Monday and Tuesday, and I'll be giving a presentation there on Tuesday afternoon. We then have to hurry downtown to CloudCamp, and then Wednesday will be at Structure. Adam Jacob says we should all be sure to attend the Velocity Ignite! on Monday night, too.
Then, because hey, free time is for losers, Jay Aras is hosting a Puppet MiniConf on Thursday
Andrew has been working steadily on getting new Puppet logos going (you should see a new favicon on the Trac site), and he promises to update our CSS in time for the conference.
And, last but not least, we'll be showing up with fancy new Puppet t-shirts. We'll be trying to figure out over the course of the week how to dole out shirts, so if you've got any good ideas, send me a note.
Anyway, I hope to see many of you over the course of the week, and I also hope to be updating far more often.
Sat, 21 Jun 2008 | Tags: conference, travel, sanfrancisco, velocity, velocity08, structure, structure08, cloudcamp
In LA for SCALE
I'll be in LA for SCALE this weekend, arriving on Friday the 8th and presenting on Saturday the 9th from 3 until 4. A Configuration Management BoF has also been set up for Saturday from 7 until 8, which I'm apparently moderating.
Ping me if you're going to be at SCALE; I'll likely be wandering the hallways like a zombie, trying to figure out what city and time zone I'm in.
Tue, 05 Feb 2008 | Tags: travel, scale, scale08, la, lax, presentation
LCA Video is Posted
I'm finally back from LCA (and San Francisco and Seattle, although I haven't posted my LCA pictures yet). It looks like they've already posted the video (search for "luke", then click the ogg link).
As always, there were a lot of great presentations and even more great attendees. I'm not yet recovered enough to give out the link love, and really, I didn't schmooze as much as I should have -- a little too much time in the cocktail bars and trying to find a spicy meal, I think.
Hopefully the video turned out well; I think I kind of stuttered for the first ten minutes or so but then found my groove. I originally intended to spend the talk on directly using Puppet, but after some client work in Seattle I realized it made more sense to really focus on the idea of the Resource Abstraction Layer (RAL), which seemed to go over well. The previous presenter went quite long, despite my best attempts to rudely let him know he should leave, so I had to skip quite a few slides.
Tue, 05 Feb 2008 | Tags: travel, lca, lca08, mel8ourne, puppet, presentation, video, download
In Melbourne for LCA
I'm in Melbourne now for LinuxConf Australia, which last year was my favourite technical conference. Even better is that it's in Melbourne; I quite like Sydney, but I like Melbourne just a bit more, and the location in the city is a bit more central.
And, best of all, I've got a bike this year, which means I'm more mobile and just happier in general.
I think I've got 20 or so posts saved somewhere in my head, but I've been on the road and insanely busy since January 9th, so I haven't had time to get any of them out. Hopefully I'll have a chance to get some of them out this week; conferences are always busy, but there is at least plenty of downtime during them.
Sun, 27 Jan 2008 | Tags: travel, lca, lca2008, mel8ourne, melbourne
Finding Other Puppet Users
I've been using TripIt for a few months now to manage my travel -- it's been great for handling details like arrival/departure times, confirmation numbers, addresses, and just about all the other crap you have to know but don't want to deal with when traveling.
I'm always looking for even better solutions, though, so I asked Dopplr for an invitation and got one last week while at LISA. Its focus is on figuring out when you and your friends will intersect in a given city, rather than on handling the details of the travel. It's somewhat frustruting having to manage two travel sites (hopefully I'll be able to use my TripIt schedule in Dopplr at some point, since Dopplr is more of a social network built around travel than a travel site), but it's definitely worth it at this point.
If you're interested in an invite to Dopplr, send me a note. I'm certainly interested in knowing when I'll be in a city with Puppet users.
Sun, 18 Nov 2007 | Tags: travel, dopplr, puppet, meetup, tripit, lisa, lisa07, lisa2007
LISA Progress Report
I'm at LISA again, in Dallas this year (which makes my fourth trip to Texas in the last few months). I ran a configuration management BoF on Tuesday night and a Puppet BoF last night. Both of them were well-attended, and we maintained good discussion through almost the entire two hours in both cases without having to resort to presentations, which I'm very happy about.
LISA itself doesn't seem to have changed all that much over the years. In fact, someone complained to me that USENIX should be prescribing antidepressants before the config-mgmt BoF because it hasn't changed since he was last there four years ago (he did allow that Puppet was a significant change, fortunately). I unfortunately agree -- we're still discussing what the term means and how we should move forward.
This year, the biggest source of discussion in the BoF was whether and how to support ad-hoc, manual administration in an automated world. Most people in the room who spoke up wanted their automation tools to support it, but to me it's like asking compiler writers to support writing in assembly when necessary. My perspective is that assembly is a separate problem; if you want to write assembly, then do so, but don't expect my compiler to know or care that you're doing so, and certainly don't expect my compiler to extract semantics from the assembly that you wrote.
I know I've barely been blogging, and I'm going to try to fix that. I've been moving painfully slowly on this latest release, and I'm embarrassed enough at the lack of progress that I haven't wanted to publicize that, but I realize that that's a big mistake; I should instead be advertising what I'm doing and what problems I'm having (and solving), so people can clearly see what's being accomplished, even if it isn't in the form of a release.
So, hopefully, I'll start blogging more, including discussion of what's going on development-wise.
I'm also planning on blogging the test Puppet scripts that I write - these are simple scripts that I use to verify behaviour manually. For instance, here is the code currently at ~/bin/test.pp:
class yayness {
$testing = funtest
}
class other {
include yayness
$value = $yayness::testing
notify { "my value is '$value'": }
}
include other
The purpose of this was to test that the include method was no longer doing lazy evaluation.
I've also just joined Dopplr, which helps people who travel track their friends' travel, hopefully helping them to meet up in the various destinations. I use TripIt to organize my travel, but Dopplr is really a different kind of service and is relatively complementary -- TripIt is useful for keeping track of all of the details I need when traveling (confirmation codes, times, etc.), while Dopplr can hopefully allow me to meet up with friends who are in town while I'm traveling.
Thu, 15 Nov 2007 | Tags: travel, lisa, lisa2007, usenix, dallas, conference, puppet, lisa07
Houston is Unto Hell
I just got back from around 24 hours in Houston, and let me tell you, Dante has his work cut out. He's helped them see their way through two circles of hell, and they're working on a third, but that's still six to go.
Houston has two ring-roads, each of which are at least six lanes, and (this is the really crazy part) each of which is flanked by another six lanes of surface roads. Yep, 12 lane ring-roads, with ramps all over mixing between the surface roads and the freeways (many of which were toll, rather than free). Of course, this just encourages sprawl, which itself requires scads of large surface roads surrounded by strip malls, so Houston had those in spades, too. I mean miles and miles of 8 lane surface roads separated by a curb with periodic turn-outs and constant strip malls.
Strangely, the city has tons of trees, I assume filling in all of the empty space afforded by the massive sprawl. If they could replace all of those roads with light rail, maybe it would be a cool place to live, but as it is... Wow. Unbelievable.
The ring-roads were so bad that I saw something I'd never seen before (and is difficult to describe): Most of the exits off of the highway had a sharp left turn available that basically did a U-turn onto the surface road going the opposite direction. This U-turn was completely enclosed with curbs, so you could only get onto that lane from the surface road going the opposite direction (normally after having just exited the freeway).
shudder
Wed, 07 Nov 2007 | Tags: travel, hell, roads, dante
Video from Open Source panel at InnoTech Austin
Whurley just posted a video of part of the panel I was on at Austin InnoTech with Brian Behlendorf, Michael Cote, and Sara Dornsife.
Whurley says he'll be putting up the other segments later, and I did two video interviews while at the conference, so if you just can't get enough of my ugly mug, this may be your month.
Fri, 19 Oct 2007 | Tags: conferences, travel, speaking
Luke meets Thomas the Train
It was apparently "A Day with Thomas the Train" or something during InnoTech last week, and Cote got a great shot of me posing with Thomas. And for the record, I don't need to practice my poses, man, they always just work.
Sat, 13 Oct 2007 | Tags: travel, innotech, train, pose
In Austin Again
I'm in Austin, Texas again (woe! Texas twice in a month!), to participate in an Open Source panel with whurley, Michael Cote, and Brian Behlendorf. Git definitely has its warts, but commits on a plane are awesome.
The panel is InnoTech Austin. I don't know much about the event; I mostly just signed on as an excuse to harass whurley, and I've got a client here I need to spend some more time with. Still, if you're in Austin on Thursday, drop by and pepper me with annoying question.
Wed, 10 Oct 2007 | Tags: travel, austin, innotech, git
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