Patchwork of Open Source Memories

One of the biggest differences in my new job is that I have to commute into the office every day.  And with that, comes the second biggest difference -- that I can't wear a t-shirt and pajama pants as I sit and hack the day away in my Eames lounger.

And so I drive 12 (scenic) miles from my house in the hills west of Austin right to the heart of downtown, fighting traffic if I sleep even a few minutes past 7:15am.  I wear a button-up shirt almost every day.  Not that that's formal -- I also wear jeans and cowboy boots.  But I'm dressing for the job I want, not the job I have.  A dude rancher, I reckon  :-)

The net result is that I had a closet full of awesome Linux and open source t-shirts -- shirts I had worn for years -- that just weren't getting their due anymore.  And my Etsy-awesome lovely wife Kim convinced me to part with a number of my favorites to create a t-shirt quilt that captures my last ~7 years in the Open Source world!

Now, mind you, I shed a tear or two as Kim's shears tore through a couple of these shirts that I've carried with me across six continents and most of the two dozen timezones...  :-/  On the other hand, a few of these weren't particularly my favorites, but did fit the color scheme she was going for.  In the end, her work was really quite beautiful!  And warm.

For those interested, I'll document the 6 rows by 4 columns:

• Row 1:
• Ubuntu Jaunty "I Ubuntu My Desktop"
• Puppet Labs, Peace/Love/Mozilla
• Linux Foundation 20th Anniversary of Linux
• Google Summer of Code (Mentor)
• Row 2:
• Texas Linux Fest
• IBM Community
• Ubuntu Precise Pangolin
• Linux Foundation (back of shirt, weird, hard to read, fit color scheme)
• Row 3:
• Linux Plumbers (Santa Rosa)
• Ubuntu Developer Summit (Orlando)
• OpenStack (Boston)
• Open Source Red Hat Summit (New Orleans, 2005)
• Row 4:
• Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, Fedora Project (FudCon 2005, Boston), Ubuntu Developer Summit (2008, Prague), Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx
• Slashdot
• Ubuntu (simple, probably my first Ubuntu shirt, circa 2005!)
• Ubuntu (all release version and code names 4.10 - 9.04)
• Row 5:
• Google
• Ubuntu Developer Summit (Barcelona 2009)
• Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy (the most beautiful Ubuntu t-shirt ever, which either shrunk too much, or my belly grew too big; let's say it shrunk too much)
• VMWare Cloud Foundry (Kim wanted a black t-shirt in this spot?)
• Row 6:
• Gazzang, the little start-up that could (lure me away from an awesome gig at Canonical)
• Back of Texas Linux Fest
• Back of Ubuntu 10.10 random 1's and 0's
• Ubuntu Ensemble DevOps t-shirt before the Ensemble project name was deprecated in favor of Juju :-)

Ah memories...  So Kim enjoyed making this for me, but it was a heck of a lot of work, and I don't think she'll be doing it again.  But if you're looking for a quilt made of your own favorite shirt, check out our friend Liz who has her own Etsy site for this sort of thing ;-)

Cheers!
:-Dustin

mcollective now in Ubuntu

The Marionette Collective

I thought some Ubuntu Server users and Linux system administrators out there might be interested in the fact that mcollective (from Puppet Labs) is now packaged and in the Ubuntu Natty (11.04) archive.

The Marionette Collective (mcollective) is a framework for server orchestration and parallel job execution.  Have you ever needed to run the same command on thousands of systems?  mcollective is a very flexible, powerful way of doing just that (and much more).

If you run into issues, you can file bugs here.  Otherwise, the good people from Puppet Labs have some excellent documentation and demos.

Finally, if perhaps you'd like to get involved in Ubuntu or upstream development, mcollective is in need of a few basic manpages: mcollectived, mc-call-agent, mc-controller, mc-facts, mc-find-hosts, mc-inventory, mc-ping, mc-rpc.

If you're interested, I can help get you started!  Please ping kirkland on irc.freenode.net.

Cheers,
:-Dustin