Trent has a saying; “Every year February tries to kill me.”.
This year February was easy, but March? Holy crap.
I blame global warming.
Author: drew
Back To The Grind
Well, things progress.
I mean, they could be progressing smoother, of course – I still don’t have a tenant lined up to move into the apartment, and April 1st draws ever closer. I’ve had a few people in to look at the place, but twice now people have come by, looked, told me they’d get back to me in a few hours and never bothered to call back. Rude!
The boat progresses quickly – I’ve posted a few pictures of the progress on my other website, of the aft cabin and a few pics of the outside. She still needs a lot of work, but the more I work on her, the more I realize that all of the work is well within my abilities – to quote Trent, “it’s not rocket surgery!” I’m actually quite enjoying learning about epoxy and fiberglass, and the finished product is immediately gratifying; fix a leak, and water stops coming in. Boosh!
I was hoping to make it out to the boat this week to do a bit more on it, but I’ve managed to score a free pass to the CanSecWest network security conference here in town. I can’t really spare the time off work, but given that a conference pass costs $1700 for the three days, I could also argue that I can’t afford not to go. I read an article yesterday that had a quote from Benjamin Franklin; “If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him.”
The apartment is slowly emptying – more and more furniture is going away, and decisions are being made with regards to the layout of storage in the boat. I’ve decided that the starboard forecabin bunk is going to have to be sacrificed in order to make room for closet space; that’s not such a bad thing though, as it’ll mean a “proper” closet can be made, as well as a lot of extra space for boxes and such.
Anyhow – back to work. This week’s task is to get the Evil Masters’ main website up and running in the Amazon cloud, and that means finishing up these i386 AWS AMI’s and building an x86_64 AMI for use as the database server and NFS server…
ugh.
awake. too early. hung over.
or rather, I’ll be hung over once I sober up completely.
Yesterday was a full day of work, followed by a brisk 10km bikeride, a brutaltwo-hour kung-fu class, another brisk 10km bikeride, then a bunch of folks gathering for birthday sushi-beers. On the way home I braked on some gravel and went down – I think I’m ok, but we’ll see once I’m completely sober, my arm and hip are pretty banged up. I think it was pretty close, actually – based solely on the places my arm hurts, I think if I had gone down any harder I would have broken it.
Currently I’m in Gastown, trying to figure out if I should go home to work, or try to work from coffee shops today. Thinking home is a better plan.
Birthday
Today, I turn 33 years old.
Not that that’s a big deal or anything, but when I look back over the growth of the last year, I think. My friend told me that age 33 is significant to the Japanese, in that it represents the passing from being a “young man” to just being a “man”, or the entrance into the “summer” years of your life.
I couldn’t find that on Wikipedia, but what I did find was that the Muslim faith believes that the dwellers of Heaven exist eternally in a state of being at age 33, and that Jesus was crucified at age 33.
Regardless, 33 is the year in which I shall move onto my boat. In fact, with any luck that’ll begin this weekend!
My mother and sister have outdone themselves, and clued into the fact that I am selling off or getting rid of most of my belongings, and as such I have no need for more birthday “stuff”. Instead, they both gave me gift cards for Canadian Tire, which is a mind-blowingly practical and useful gift. I have a list that I’ve been compiling for weeks of things that I need from Canadian Tire, and I’m sure the grand total will be many hundreds of dollars, so the gift cards certainly help!
Another friend offered me a wonderful gift, though I’m not sure it was intended as a birthday thing – a free entry into a major security conference here in town later this month. Awesome! I was really interested in going to the conference, but frankly there was no way I’d be able to afford the $1700 entry fee. I’ll definitely be reporting more about the conference as I attend.
Anyhow – no big plans for birthday night. I have kung-fu at 7pm, then will probably meet up with some friends for sushi at 9:30pm, but other than that, nothing. *shrug*. Such is the downside of having your birthday on a Wednesday, I guess.
CloudCamp Aftermath
Wow, that was great! It’s so nice to finally be interested in a technology again – I was honestly starting to think that I’d never enjoy another conference. Half of the fun of a conference is discussing new concepts and ideas in technology, but the other half is meeting up with folks who have similar ideas and interests, both on a professional level but also in a social (ie: beer) environment.
It was also my first “un-conference”. The idea behind this is that there’s a schedule, but none of the talks are booked in advance, and people come with a talk or presentation that they’d like to give and sign up to do so on the spot. In the end it’s more about discussions than presentations, and in fact I was drafted (or more accurately, “tricked”) into hosting a discussion group on scaling Drupal in the cloud.
Now *that* was an eye-opener – I had naïvely assumed that most people working with cloud computing were working with web applications, as that’s what most of the documentation out there seems to be. Or maybe I just pitched my session wrong, and should have stressed all web applications and not just Drupal. Or perhaps I shouldn’t have scheduled the discussion at the same time as Dan Kaminski’s discussion on cloud security. Regardless, the room began with approximately eight people, and as it became apparent that we were really looking for a technical discussion but most of the people were in marketing and management, the room shrank to four people.
What was awesome was that the four people were:
Wild! I got more out of that half-hour session than I have reading documentation for the past month and a half. As the session started, we basically went around the room discussing backgrounds and technical histories, and it became apparent that I was really the only person in the room with any technical experience at all working with the EC2 cloud, I began to present my experiences to date, focusing on the three big problems that I had butted my head against – how to “auto-scale” web front ends using load balancers, how to scale MySQL databases elastically, and how to share storage between EC2 instances. As I discussed these, Dean Dierickx from RightScale showed up, and had some interesting notes to add from a high-level design perspective, which we talked about at length. We then started discussing database scaling, and it became apparent that nobody in the room had any practical experience with that at all.
Right about then, Jonathan Lambert from Work Habit let himself in, and after listening to us fumble about for a couple of minutes, grabbed a whiteboard marker and launched into a fifteen minute in-depth technical discussion on different methods of scaling MySQL. This was *great* stuff, though it pretty much cleared the room of the marketing and manager types. As he finished, he validated my whole trip with one statement – he said something like:
“Now, there are three major problems that everyone attempting to scale any web application in the cloud butts their heads against, and there’s no simple answer to any of these: how to launch instances automatically from a load balancer, how to scale MySQL, and how to share storage between instances. We’ve fought these problems hard for two years now, and we still don’t have a good answer, but here’s how we’ve managed to get everything working so far…”
…and proceeded to lay out a basic, scalable platform for Drupal on the whiteboard. Most of his layout matched my work exactly!
To top that off, just last week I downloaded a script from the RightScale website that purports to set up a basic EC2 instance to be a “RightScale” machine, and poked through the script to see exactly what they’re doing to prep a machine. I was shocked to see that every step of the way, their work matched what I was already doing to setup my own EC2 instances! That may not sound like much, but frankly after fifteen years of Linux administration, I have some particular ideas about how a machine should be setup for optimal networked administration; which additional packages should be installed, which default services should be turned on or off, what changes should be made to the default shell environment, etc. Seeing two large, successful operations doing exactly the same things as I do in my personal environments, and facing exactly the same challenges, was vindication to say the least!
Anyhow – even though it was a “free” conference (with the quotes of course implying bus fares and hotel fees), I think I got well more than my money’s worth.