Theologians

Where I'm going, you cannot come...
"Theologians", Wilco

At 2.45am, I woke up because a) my phone was buzzing with a page from work, and b) the room was shaking. I was quite bagged, since I'd been up 'til 1 finishing yesterday's blog entry, and all I could think was "Huh...earthquake. How did Nagios know about this?" Since the building didn't seem to be falling, I went back to sleep. In the morning, I found out it was a magnitude 6.2 earthquake.

I was going to go to the presentation by the CBC on "What your CDN won't tell you" (initially read as "What your Canadian won't tell you": "Goddammit, it's prounced BOOT") but changed my mind at the last minute and went to the Cf3 "Guru is in" session with Diego Zamboni. (But not before accidentally going to the Cf3 tutorial room; I made an Indiana Jones-like escape as Mark Burgess was closing the door.) I'm glad I went; I got to ask what people are doing for testing, and got a some good hints.

• Vagrant's good for testing (and also awesome in general). I'm trying to get a good routine set up for this, but I have not started using the Cf3 provider for Vagrant...because of crack? Not sure.

• You might want to use different directories in your revision control; that makes it easy to designate dev, testing, and production machines (don't have to worry about getting different branches; just point them at the directories in your repo).

• Make sure you can promote different branches in an automated way (merging branches, whatever). It's easy to screw this up, and it's worth taking the time to make it very, very easy to do it right.

• If you've got a bundle meant to fix a problem, deliberately break a machine to make sure it actually does fix the problem.

• Consider using git + gerrit + jenkins to test and review code.

The Cf3 sketch tool still looks neat. The Enterprise version looked cool, too; it was the first time I'd seen it demonstrated, and I was intrigued.

At the break I got drugs^Wcold medication from Jennifer. Then I sang to Matt:

(and the sailors say) MAAAA-AAAT you're a FIIINNE girl what a GOOOD WAAAF you would be but my life, my love and my LAY-ee-daaaay is the sea (DOOOO doo doo DOO DOO doot doooooooo)

I believe Ben has video; I'll see if it shows up.

BTW, Matt made me sing "Brandy" to him when I took this picture:

I discussed Yo Dawg Compliance with Ben ("Yo Dawg, I put an X in your Y so you could X when you Y"; == self-reference), and we decided to race each other to @YoDawgCompliance on Twitter. (Haha, I got @YoDawgCompliance2K. Suck it!)

(Incidentally, looking for a fully-YoDawg compliant ITIL implementation? Leverage @YoDawgCompliance2K thought leadership TODAY!)

Next up was the talk on the Greenfield HPC by @arksecond. I didn't know the term, and earlier in the week I'd pestered him for an explanation. Explanation follows: Greenfield is a term from the construction industry, and denotes a site devoid of any existing infrastructure, buildings, etc where one might do anything; Brownfield means a site where there is existing buildings, etc and you have to take those into account. Explanation ends. Back to the talk. Which was interesting.

They're budgeting 25 kW/rack, twice what we do. For cooling they use spot cooling, but they also were able to quickly prototype aisle containment with duct tape and cardboard. I laughed, but that's awesome: quick and easy, and it lets you play around and get it right. (The cardboard was replaced with plexiglass.)

Lunch was with Matt and Ken from FOO National Labs, then Sysad1138 and Scott. Regression was done, fun was had and phones were stolen.

The plenary! Geoff Halprin spoke about how DevOps has been done for a long time, isn't new and doesn't fix everything. Q from the audience: I work at MIT, and we turn out PhDs, not code; what of this applies to me? A: In one sense, not much; this is not as relevant to HPC, edu, etc; not everything looks like enterprise setups. But look at the techniques, underlying philosophy, etc and see what can be taken.

That's my summary, and the emphasis is prob. something he'd disagree with. But it's Friday as I write this and I am tired as I sit in the airport, bone tired and I want to be home. There are other summaries out there, but this one is mine.