Lost, Bagdad, and a Brain-dead Bouncer

Taking a break from the Ubuntu Distro Sprint here in Portland, Oregon, a few of us took a field trip tonight, to...

Lost, the Final Season premier episode -- awesome. This is going to be an entertaining finale to the best show on network television in 15+ years.

The Bagdad Theater, Portland, OR -- excellent. I'm a big fan of nice, old fashion theaters. In Austin we're blessed with a series of Alamo Drafthouse Theaters. The Bagdad, too, has big comfy chairs, good beers, and decent pizza. The crowd was really into Lost, too, which was a lot of fun.

The jerk-hole management at the Bagdad -- big pile of SUCK. After having waited in line outside in the drizzling rain for over an hour, these guys refused entry to my friend Nick, because he presented a French National ID. The dude is 40. His ID clearly showed his birthday in YYYY-MM-DD numeric format. However, the retarded automaton loser checking IDs at the door cited Oregon law that apparently says that he is required to refuse entry to any person bearing identification which he is not able to read. Are you effing kidding me? Nick is clearly of age, and his birthday was written in plainly readable digits. Come on, Oregon! You are a free thinking, progressive, open minded state. I mean, even in Texas, where some counties barely recognize present-day France as a nation, we would happily accept Nick and his French ID. WTF!?!

Disappointing, Bagdad Theater. Disappointing, McMenamins. Disappointing, Oregon. Get it together and learn to treat people fairly, and with dignity.

So anyone from a foreign country, bearing an ID that's not written in plain English, beware... You are not welcome at McMenamins establishments. You will likely be refused entry to McMenamins', so you may want to steer clear...

Seriously.

eCryptfs Interview by Slo-tech.com

I was interviewed recently by the Slovenian online tech magazine, Slo-tech.com, about eCryptfs and Ubuntu's Encrypted Home Directory feature. Enjoy!

• https://slo-tech.com/clanki/10008en/

:-Dustin

KVM Ubuntu Developer Week Session

My apologies for not announcing this in advance, but I just today gave a 1-hour session on KVM in #ubuntu-classroom in IRC for the Ubuntu Developer Week.

You can read the log here.

From this session, you should learn:

• a bit about what KVM is, how it works, what you need to have to be able to use it
• launching of a basic virtual machine (using testdrive)
• dissection of the most useful KVM command line parameters
• creating a backing disk image (even arbitrarily large, like 1 Petabyte!)
• live migration of a VM

Enjoy,
:-Dustin

LCA2010: Day 5, Wellington, New Zealand

The day opened with a series of Lightning Talks. Unfortunately, I missed most of these as I had some issues with checkout at the hotel. Paul Fenwick's was a hilarious satire about unfriending people on Facebook.

Next, I attended Andrew Tridgell talk on Patent Defense for FOSS Developers. Having worked at IBM previously, I (unfortunately) have read many, many patents. Tridge's talk was about how to read a patent. The most interesting point he made was about triple damages. Many open source projects (or companies) have a "don't read patents so that we're not one day liable for triple damages" policy. Tridge says this is dumb for open source projects/companies. If they're sued for damages for infringing a patent, then they're probably dead bankrupt. If they're sued for triple damages, well, they're still probably dead bankrupt ;-)

He talked about the three types of patent defense:

• non-infringement - we don't do that - best defense
• prior-art - someone did that before - very tricky
• invalidity - you can't claim that - almost impossible
  

The most important part is independent versus dependent claims. When working against a patent, focus on the independent claims. Prove that you don't offend those, and you won't offend the dependent claims either. And when looking at the independent claims, focus on the elements. Try to find elements that you omit.

I've read more patents that I care to admit, and I pray that I can avoid being dragged back into that world again. That said, God bless the people who still are doing this today. They're doing this behind the scenes, and they're getting no credit whatsoever for it. Thank you so much. What you're doing for us is more valuable than anyone knows.

Next, I attended Arnd Bergmann's talk on Virtual Network Switching across Hypervisors. Current virtual networking in KVM looks like a basic switch/router (showing a basic home Linksys router on a slide). If that's all you want, that works pretty much fine. Arnd is working on all the other complex networks, bridging, VLANs, etc. I'm following his work quite closely on the upstream mailing lists. His slides are available at: http://www.lca2010.org.nz/wiki/Talks/virtualnetworks.

I spent the next several hours with David Howells from Red Hat (author of keyutils and the linux kernel keyring). He was helping me with a small, but invasive change to the way eCryptfs Encrypted Home Directories loads keys into the keyring. He helped me move the keys from the user keyring to the session keyring. This will improve the clearing and expiration of keys once I've tested and released it. Many, many thanks to David for his help and patience. Cheers!

Rusty Russell gave his usual excellent presentation, this time about Hacking a Wiiremote for his 2 year old daughter. Funny, cute presentation. Basically, he attached a series of LEDs to a scrunchy that his daughter would wear on her wrist. The Wiiremote detects movent of the LEDs, and it's attached to a Linux system where his code runs, using libcwiid (pronounced lib-seaweed, heh). He wrote a couple of Python programs, one that lets her smear paint on the TV screen, and another that lets her smack a baseball bouncing around the screen. Rusty is the quintessential hacker ;-)

And, alas, the week is over... Finally, the Closing Session. Lots of thank you's all around. These guys and gals put on an amazing conference. I hope I'm so lucky as to attend again some time.

From here, I'm taking a couple of days off, and hiking the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealands 5 Great Walks. I'm really looking forward to a couple of days unplugged, and in the Kiwi back country. Hopefully I'll get some beautiful pictures, and have some stories to tell in another post.

Kia ora,
:-Dustin

LCA2010: Day 4, Wellington, New Zealand

Back at the conference for Day 4!

The opening keynote by Glynn Moody was entitled Hackers at the End of the World. He started out by noting how amazed he was when researching Rebel Code (Sep 1999 - Sep 2000). He conducted 50+ interviews and was struck by how nice people were. Dan Lyons said much the same thing at his keynote at Canonical's All Hands meeting last year.

Glynn talked about "free and openness" leaking out into areas beyond software. There was actually an open physics project that started 2 weeks before Linus' famous 8/23/91 post. The Open genome project was saved by a lone hacker (Jim Kent) and a cluster of 100 Linux PCs. Open Science, open access to results, data... In many ways, the hacker culture is paving the way for science.

Documentation licensing has evolved. GPL, FDL, Copyright Commons, GNU GFDL. Wikipedia is probably the easiest way to explain to other people what Free Software is. I think I'm actually going to start using that to explain my job to friends and family. "So, Dustin, what do you do?" "Well, you know how Wikipedia works? Well, I'm a computer programmer that works on software in a similar manner!"

He says that the new millennium is thus far all about sharing. Web pages mostly have visible source code. Flash/Silverlight being the nasty exception. Blogs, delicious, Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, Myspace. People want to share.

Twitter/identi.ca is the "release early, release often" principle, applied to thinking :-)

For 25 years, hackers have been showing others how to create and nurture sustainable commons through openness and sharing. Great talk!

Next, I attended a session on Flapjack Monitoring for the Cloud. It talks Nagios, and uses beanstalkd. The examples were mostly shown on Ubuntu and packaged in Launchpad PPAs. The goal of Flapjack is to be easy to install, configure, maintain, and scale. The project looks interesting, but I really couldn't quite see the application for "the Cloud" yet.

As always, Jeremy Allison's talk was excellent and entertaining. He spoke about Microsoft - The Elephant in the Room. Great talk about Microsoft, and all the dirty things they do to Open Source. He talked about a few famous cases (Samba, OOXML, TomTom). The good news is that we have made Microsoft blink in the staring contest. This is good, but we haven't had a knockout punch yet. Microsoft may be winning in court, but they're rapidly losing the mindshare battle. OOXML showed this in a nutshell -- they pushed the standard through, but everyone lined up against them. Patents are their nuclear option. TomTom was the first time Microsoft really tried this tactic; we all should be very afraid! Jeremy reminds us that IBM was once as feared and hated as Microsoft is today. Elephants can learn new tricks.

Neil Brown gave an interesting presentation on Design Patterns in the Linux Kernel. He gave lots of great examples, grepping through the kernel for some interesting recurring patterns. Jono Lange asked (what I considered to be a really funny) question. Neil had shown a few dozen binary searches in the kernel. Jono says that he's a python developer, rather than a kernel developer, but in Python, he'd just write a binary search function, and use that in all of these places :-) Things are done differently in the Linux kernel.

Finally, I attended Launchpad Code Reviews by Tim Penhey. He started out by referencing the very funny website, http://thedailywtf.com. The talk was an excellent tour of Launchpad's merge proposal and code review features.

After the conference we had a couple of beers on the waterfront at Mac's Brewery, and then headed over to the Professional Networking event held at the Opera House.

Today is the final day of the photo competition. These entries focus on the Lambton quadrant.






Cheers,
:-Dustin

LCA2010: Day 3, Wellington, New Zealand

The day started with Benjamin Mako Hill's talk on Antifeatures, about technologies that are artificially hindered copyrights and market segmentation. The lyrics to Happy Birthday are actually still under active copyright. Mako has a satirical website that shows the ridiculousness of this: http://unhappybirthday.com.

The first example of an antifeature is paying to not list your phone number in the phone book. Who here has paid to have their phone number not listed? Spammers pay the phone company to get lists of phone numbers, and you pay the phone company to not give it to them. Absolutely ridiculous. He talked about Gator, the "most successful spyware in history". You could pay OEMs to not install this crap on your computer. All in the name of market segmentation--different people pay different amounts for basically the same software. The Gator episode was 10 years ago ... surely things are different now... Slide shows: Windows Vista (Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Vusiness, Enterprise, Ultimate). Vista Basic can only run 3 graphical applications simultaneously. The goal was to make a barely functional, crippled Windows and offer it at almost no charge, but it was so bad, you really had to buy the upgrade.

Some cameras charge more to support the raw image format. Surely compressing the image using jpeg compression is more work (all images start out raw). Most of us here have bought a printer for $100, and then subsequent ink cartridges for $75... Modern print cartridges actually have some silly, copyrighted code in the cartridge that makes it basically impossible (illegal) to buy cheap refills. The XBox is a simple PC engineered not to run another OS (specifically, Linux). TiVo, same thing. Computers are ultimately perfect copy machines -- much effort has been spent in the last 20 years trying to make PCs less perfect copiers. Who here hates the DVD "unskippable track"?

Phones are the most pervasive computers in the world, and almost every one is locked by a SIM card. Who here had an OpenMoko? "It didn't do a lot of things, but some of the things it didn't do were pretty great", quote-of-the-day by Benjamin Mako Hill. DRM is basically the mother of all antifeatures. There are currently over 10,000 people employed in the DRM industry. You can submit your antifeatures at: http://wiki.mako.cc/Antifeatures.

I experienced a pretty crappy antifeature on my way over here... I had a total of 4 flights to get from Austin to Wellington. Austin -> Houston -> Los Angeles -> Auckland -> Wellington. Although I didn't know it when I booked my travel, I happened to be in Houston the day before my flight started. For this reason, I called Continental to ask if I could just "skip" my Austin -> Houston leg. I wasn't asking for a refund. Just to print my boarding passes as normal, tear up the AUS-IAH boarding card, show up in Houston with my ID and my other 3 boarding passes, and commence my journey. The Continental agent told me that this would cost $700 in addition to the $2500 that had already been paid for my fare. I would have had to pay Continental $700 to not take a flight. Effing retarded.

Next, I attended The Kernel Report by Jon Corbet (which actually hit Slashdot today). He list 7 challenges facing the Linux kernel:

1. Vitality - Andrew Morton famously said that he expected the number Linux kernel patches to drop off at some point, implying that one day we would "finish" this kernel project (Sep 2005, 2.6.14 release). Changesets are still increasing, in fact, at a rate of 144 changesets per day, 7330 lines of code added per day. In the last year, the kernel has added: GEM, ext4, staging tree, wireless USB, KMS, btrfs, squashfs, wimax, 4096 cpu, tomoyo, integrity measurement, nilfs, radeon r6xx/r7xx, perf counter, userspace char devices, kmemleak, radeon kms, kernel shared memory, dynamic ftrace, drbd, tcp cookie transactions, nouveau.
2. Scalability - in June 1996, Linux 2.0 added support for 2 CPUs. Today, Linux supports 4096 CPUs! Problem areas: 10G ethernet for large packets okay, not for small packets though; SSDs with 100K ops/sec are on the horizon. Scalability is a 2-way street; scaling down is important too, with so many of us here with root on our phone. The amount of resources required to run our kernel is increasing, fortunately behind Moore's Law (at least for now).
3. Storage - Ext4 - better perf, many limits fixed, ext3 compat, still stabilizing. Btrfs - is a totally new filesystem, performance, full checksumming, snapshots, is likely the Linux FS of the future. SSDs - poor performance over time.
4. Visibility - What do we want to know about what our system is doing?
5. (????) - Real time is important for gadgets (sound, music), but also financial services.
6. Containment - Virtualization. Containers, more efficient, trickier to implement, in progress, still a long ways to go.
7. Hardware - Nearly universal now. Support more hardware than almost any other OS now. Few remaining problems are in graphics and network adapters, -staging tree is helping.

Corbet suggested that LKML is now friendlier than the Ubuntu mailing lists.

Note: At the time, I took offense to Jon's comment, calling it a "potshot" against Ubuntu. Per a private conversation with Jon, he was referring to a really nasty ubuntu-users@ thread. I consider the ubuntu-devel@ and ubuntu-devel-discuss@ lists to more akin to LKML, as developer/developer or user/developer communication. The latter two lists are tightly governed by the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, and in my experience, are much friendlier than LKML, historically. Jon assures me that he meant no offense to Ubuntu with his referenced comment.

Thankfully two other speakers today (mako and mjg) mentioned the Ubuntu Code of Conduct as being both important and effective in the Ubuntu community.

Next, I attended a Survey of Open Source Databases by Selena Deckelmann. In 2005, there were basically 5 open source databases -- BerkelyDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite. Today, there's 50+. She conducted a vast survey, asking a dozen or so questions of ~50 different open source database projects. See the results at: http://ossdbsurvey.org.

Ted Tso gave a talk on Ext4 -- the 5th such talk by Ted in the last year and a half. It's quite interesting to see how the talk has evolved from design level to the implementation retrospective that this talk was. This talk was absolutely standing room only. Since I was standing, I didn't take notes. Basically, Ted cased a couple of the most critical bugs that were found, how they were found and fixed.

The next talk was on The Linux Community by Matthew James Garrett. It wasn't a technical talk at all -- it was all about the soft skills and relationships in the open source community. He notes that there are lots of different communities in the Free and Open Source community, each with their own definitions, and different rules for inclusion and exclusion. He showed a picture of the 2009 Linux kernel summit, followed by the UDS Barcelona group picture.

Matthew notes how much hostility there (still) is in the Linux community. He quotes himself from 2004, having said "**** on my ****" on a public mailing list. He also quotes a recent saga harassing girls that in the Linux community.

Matthew notes that that Ubuntu introduced the Ubuntu Code of Conduct to avoid some of the failings of the Debian Project, which can be summarized with, "Be excellent to one another" -- Bill and Ted. The Ubuntu Code of Conduct has made Ubuntu users part of the community in a way that's unique among distros. He asks, "What do we want our community to be?" He seems to suggest that we need to be far more open and welcoming. Question from Martin Krafft, "What changed in you, Matt, between 2004 and now for you to speak on this?" He responded that he's had a change of heart, realizing he work with people without screaming at them. Applause from the audience, and Matthew says that the applause is bizarrely touching. :-)

I really enjoyed the next talk on Teaching FOSS in Universities, by Andrew Tridgell and Bob Edwards. It's not just about programming, or how to use Linux. It's about how to format and submit a patch, join a project, start a project, run a project. They taught a CS Masters class, with a combination of practical and theoretical training, trying to get students involved in real projects, and to understand the FOSS community. The audience asked if they used Jono Bacon's book Art of Community. Tridge said "No, not really", but did use Karl Fogel's book, Producing Open Source Software, (and mentioned it several times in the talk).

Their lectures included:

1. Intro to FOSS, getting started in a project, using source code management
2. History of FOSS, FOSS licensing, FOSS and the law
3. FOSS project governance, FOSS and business, FOSS motivation
4. Samba case study, FOSS distros and platforms, FOSS culture
5. Starting a new project, FOSS tales, release early/often
   

The Lab work included:

1. Install a FOSS project (a2ps), contribute to one of 5 suggested projects
2. Finding a FOSS project, getting in touch
3. Project work
4. Project work
5. Video presentation on the experience
   

I asked if this really needed to be a grad level course, and if it could be taught as an undergraduate course to teach some FOSS skills a bit earlier in the student's academic career. Tridge answered that he thinks this could be a 2nd or 3rd year course, easily. After they taught the course, they found Greg DeKoenigsberg's Teaching Open Source course.

What can you do? Approach your local uni! Drop a line to a FOSS friendly lecturer. Help with the TOS textbook. See:

• http://teachingopensource.org
• http://cs.anu.edu.au/students/comp8440
  

The most entertaining, hilarious talk of the day was about the World's Worst Inventions, by Paul Fenwick (in a mad scientist costume). This talk is brought to you from the L.O.O.N.I.E.S. the League Of Overambitious New Inventors, Engineers and Scientists. The presentation was a series of funny old ads things like cocaine pills for headaches, asthma cigarettes (not for children under 6 years old). There were some great slides on really bad toys. The feed-me cabbage patch, from 1996, had one-way metal rollers in the mouth of these dolls. They came with some plastic, fake food. But when the food ran out, refills were expensive. So kids fed this dolls all sorts of things. Particularly, hair, fingers, and siblings. These were the ultimate zombie dolls :-)

Anyone remember melty beads? My sisters had these things that could be melted into keychains. Rather than using heat, Bindeez used water to fuse together. Unfortunately, they replaced one chemical with another that was 10x cheaper. The problem was that the cheaper chemical was actually GHB (yup, Liquid Ecstasy). Kids nibbled on the beads and were entertained for hours before being pulled from the market.

In the '50s, good parents could buy the Atomic Energy Lab for their enterprising young scientists, complete with a Geiger counter and, with real uranium samples!

The image that brought the house down was US Patent #4320756, Fresh-Air Breathing Method and Device. Yikes!!!


And finally, a modern one you can buy straight off of Amazon.com today, the Laptop Steering Wheel Desk.

What a great talk, and a nice way to end a highly technical day.

There was a showing of Code Rush there at the conference--the story of Mozilla opening their code. The movie itself is a free download under the Creative Commons, so I downloaded it, and I'll watch it later, perhaps on my flight home.

Instead, I attended a screening of Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones at the Embassy Theatre. This was poignant for a few reasons. Wellington, being the home town of Peter Jackson, and also being the Hollywood of New Zealand, a good bit of the movie was produced here. My new friends at Weta Digital did the digital effects rendering for the film (again, on a 5,000 node Ubuntu server farm). And the Embassy Theatre is phenomenal! Huge seats (with brass name placards on each), a perfect screen, perfect sound, very fancy.

Finally, I submitted a few more images for today's Photo Competition, of the Waterfront quadrant. For your enjoyment ...






:-Dustin

LCA2010: Day 2, Wellington, New Zealand

Day 2, Tuesday, January 19, 2010...

I already covered Tuesday's highlight in another post, noting that Weta Digital used Ubuntu on their 35,000 core to render the digital effects and graphics for the recent blockbuster, Avatar.

I had lunch with Paul Gunn, the gentleman who gave the morning presentation, and he introduced me to several of his colleagues at the end of the day, retiring to The Malt House for a few local ales, and hearing much more about their impressive data center and heavy using of Ubuntu throughout their infrastructure.

The day started with the keynote from Gabiella Coleman, an anthropology researcher who studies the free and open source culture. She started by quoting Dickens, "These are the Best of Times and these are the Worst of Times..." She talked about her introduction to Linux, a college classmate raving about a Slackware Linux CD. As she started her university research, that same classmate introduced her to the Copy Left movement. Her speech was interesting, very academic. She read a lot of quotes, and provided a fairly comprehensive history of Free and Open Source software.

Next I attended Paul Gunn's talk in the SysAdmin Track on Weta Digital's effects rendering data center, here in Wellington. Very early in the talk, he noted that 90% of their artists run the Ubuntu Desktop, with the remaining 10% using Windows. Adobe Photoshop is one of the few remaining apps that still need Windows for. He went on to talk more about their server render farm, noting that all of their 35,000 cores are also running Ubuntu. In the talk, he called these "Ubuntu Servers", which to me meant that they were installed from the Ubuntu Server seed. Actually, after having talked extensively with Paul and his colleagues, these nodes are actually imaged with the same Ubuntu Desktop image that the artists used. This consistency is critical for their operation -- a single image across thousands of systems. The size of the data center is just incredible. Somewhere around 5,000 HP (and some IBM) blades, mostly 4x or 8x Intel processors, for a total of about 35,000 cores (or render slots, as they call them). They have 2 petabytes of network storage, carved into hundreds of multi-terabyte NFS mounts. 10 Gigabit networking through. 10 years ago (October 2000), their render farm consisted of 13 machines, each were dual core 733MHz systems, with 100mbps networking. As you can tell, they have grown quite a bit. The rest of the talk was about heat and energy efficiency -- something that is quite important

Next, I attended a session in the Data Storage track on Sheepdog, a shared network storage solution for KVM. I've followed the discussions about Sheepdog on the qemu-devel@ and kvm@ mailing lists, so I'm fairly familiar with its promises. Admittedly, I haven't used it yet. This talk was a technical discussion of the design, which I found quite interesting. It's not a general filesystem, but instead designed specifically for QEMU. Volumes are divided into 4MB objects, each replicated to multiple nodes, for high availability. Their goal is to become the de facto standard for cloud storage. Ambitious. I'll keep my eye on it.

Back in the SysAdmin track, I attended a session on RAID. It was a lengthy narrative about this system administrator's quest to solve some strange behavior with his Linux software RAID. His talk walked through all the successive testing and debugging he did (perhaps interesting to those less expert in RAID administration). As it turned out, he used two Western Digital disks, one supporting some obscure error correction scheme and the other not. This minor difference was causing some annoying behavior.

I popped into the Launchpad track for James Westby's talk on Ubuntu distributed development. The audience (and in particular, a few Debian developers) were most interested in bzr's "send" command. Other audience members seemed to be impressed with bzr being able to handle branching from cvs, svn, and git repositories (with the appropriate plugin).

Next, I attended a short session on Linux Containers, by Sam Vilain. He noted the difference and situations where you might choose Xen/KVM virtualization (need full hardware emulation, different kernels), and where you might choose containers (need maximum performance). In truth, he noted, many situations would benefit from a combination of both. I tend to agree with this, and would like to see Ubuntu fully support both KVM and LXC in appropriate situations. He used "sudo apt-get install lxc" on Ubuntu in his examples and demonstration.

I attended a session in the Storage Track by Arjen Lentz on Multi-Master Replication with MMM that was completely over my head.

And I finished my day in the Storage Track with an excellent talk (and demo!) by Ben Balbo, on his roll-your-own-dropbox implementation. He gave a bit about the design of Dropbox, reasons why you might use Dropbox, and reasons why you might not (cost, privacy, bandwidth). Particularly here in New Zealand and Australia, latency to the US or Amazon can really be a problem. So he demonstrated his solution, which is built on top of git. I must say, it looked very impressive. There was no mention of Ubuntu One, though it was certainly in my mind.

On a second note, two of my photographs (1 and 2) were selected as finalists in the Courtenay Quadrant contest!

Today's contest is from the Cuba Quadrant. Here are my submissions:




:-Dustin