Search Results: "Thom May"

25 April 2007

Thom May: How can these people sleep at night?

Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt.
Ah, Christian compassion is alive and well.

20 March 2007

Andrew Pollock: [tech] Best. Quote. Ever.

Thom May: "... until my $PATH on Solaris is shorter than the next Harry Potter tome, Ubuntu has this won hands down." Amen, brother.

19 March 2007

Thom May: Ian Murdock and Sun

This is what I just wrote on Mark’s blog about Ian’s move to Sun:
“To some extent I m quite excited by what this might mean for OpenSolaris going forward, but Nexenta have been pushing the OS/Debian (or Ubuntu, more accurately) integration kick for some while without actually seeming to get any (public) traction within Sun
I ve also been disappointed by how little Ian seems to be in touch with how linux development works these days, but that s mostly from what he s been writing in public, rather than any particularly interaction with him, so hopefully that s not a fair summary.
I really hope that Sun can actually make this work.”
I thought I’d expand on this a bit, especially in light of my past moaning about Solaris and the installer and package management in the installer specifically.
What I really, really want, is a modern OS, which has an easily extensible and controllable installer, with good visibility and debugging infrastructure, which is very easy to manage on a grand scale - by which I mean hundreds or thousands of machines up to date, secure and consistent. At present, Ubuntu comes closest: However, there are some definite areas where Ubuntu or Debian (or Linux in general) struggle compared to Solaris – the sheer engineering resources that Sun can throw at a problem, and the talent they have available to them do result in fantastic results when they correctly identify a problem space. They also “own” Solaris – there’s no need for them to try and build awareness of a problem, and the correct solution, over a number of disparate communities.
ZFS and DTrace are the hackneyed and obvious projects here, but from a sysadmin perspective I think FMA, while far less sexy, is one of the best things Solaris10 has. And this is what I mean when I say operating system visibility.
The integration of Zones is also far better than Zen on Linux can offer currently, although both Red Hat and skx are working hard to fix this.
I’m really looking forward to the day when I get an OS that solves all these problems…

14 January 2007

Thom May: Venice Project invites

As per Ugo, I’ve got some Venice invites kicking around. Conditions are more or less the same - drop thommay [at] gmail dot com a line, and blog about your experiences.
(Bribery may clinch deals in case of competition ;-) )

12 January 2007

Thom May: Holy bus shelter, batman!

Who knew that bus shelters could be so cool? Polar Inertia has some awesome photos of soviet era bus shelters…

23 December 2006

Thom May: Almost a Christmas present

The Project for the New American Century” has been reduced to a voice-mail box and a ghostly website. A single employee has been left to wrap things up.
A more glorious lead sentence has never been written about the Project, which basically created and nurtured the neo-con view of the world, and the policies of the current presidency - 8 signatories have been senior members of the administration.
The Project is apparently going the way of Republicans across America with some fantastic backstabbing…. Kenneth Adelman, one of the signatories of the Project (and considered to be a member of its pro-war faction - a pretty terrifying concept, given the hawkish tendencies of the Project in general) and a member of the Defense Policy Board, has gone from
“I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”
to
“I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent.
They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”
in just four years.
Sadly, this isn’t the death knell sounding for neo-conservatism - but it’s always nice to see its edifices crumbling, even just a little.
Merry Christmas!

9 December 2006

Thom May: Rising from the Murky Depths

In a watery contrast to the real Venice, The Venice Project surfaced from stealth mode recently (and I just fixed my blog, so I figured I’d get caught up). Our blog has some more official news and buzz, too.
People who know me at this point will be wondering why I’m involved in a TV project when I hardly ever watch TV, but we’re actually aiming to solve much of my irritation. Colm writes about what TVP solves for him, and I agree that the social aspect is one the fundamental points to our work. We’re seeing - via MMORPGs, blogging communities, etc - the attraction that connectedness has and the importance people are beginning to attach to sharing and aggregating data effectively.
Leo has written about some of the underlying technologies that parts of the project are using, although unfortunately he somewhat takes the reasoning behind the choices for granted.
My other major problem with TV is timing. This one is pretty obvious, but being able to build channels with content that I want to watch, and watch them when I want to is pretty compelling.
And I’m looking forward to combining these two…
So what am I doing? I’m broadly doing operations, with - unsurprisingly - a Linux bent… But more about that later.

27 October 2006

Scott James Remnant: Apologies to Planet Readers

Apologies to anyone reading my blog on a Planet for the sudden dump of old posts from my blog. In fact, as it’s already been pointed out, I should apologise twice as much since I wrote Planet itself and am doubly-responsible for the flood. In order to satisfy the suggestions from the like of Jono Bacon and Matthew Revell and actually blog more about the things that I do, I decided it was time to try some new blog software. Until now I’ve been using PyBlosxom, and while it’s popular with the geek crowd, I’ve never really got on with it. The principal problem is that it’s a pain to actually add blog entries to it, or to manage those that you’ve added previously. I’m slightly ashamed to say that I wanted something with a web interface. Thom May pointed me at Typo which seems pretty neat so far, and it doesn’t require PHP which can only be a good thing! So now when I don’t post, I won’t be able to blame the tools. Damn. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, after all?

15 August 2006

Thom May: Apache 2.2 finally hits debian

Yup, the long wait is finally over and thanks to a cast of thousands 2.2.3 is now in experimental. I’d like to extend thanks to Mark and Canonical for sponsoring much of the original work, and also the sprint at the start of this year that got most of the remaining work done. What we really need now is lots of upgrade reports so we can figure out how much automated help a 2.0->2.2 upgrade can reliably provide, and also where. I’ve been running these packages in production for some time so I’m not that concerned about overall stability, but I’ve not been using some of the weirder modules. We also need to get third-party module packages to stage updated packages into experimental built against 2.2

14 August 2006

Thom May: MLP-tastic

Both of these come via Newshog; the first is a very interesting article from NBC talking about the ”unprecedented cooperation and coordinationbetween US and UK officials; unprecedented in this case appears to mean ”arguing all the way to the police station”, but this is just according to one unnamed UK official, so possibly a pinch of salt required. The article goes on to mention in passing the arrest of the ringleader, Rashid Rauf, in Pakistan, apparently causing another disagreement between the US and the UK over choice of jurisdiction - which some are linking to the possibility of torture. There are some fantastic quotes in the NBC article, regarding the timing and actual preparedness of the “attack”, especially that ”the suspects in Britain had obtained at least some of the materials for the explosive but had not yet actually prepared or mixed it.” and that ”the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.”. All this added up begins to bring serious doubt as to the actual danger represented by the terrorists, and also raises the question of what a more “hands-off” - not arresting the suspects, but allowing them to continue their preparations longer - approach to monitoring and intelligence gathering would have resulted in. The second is interesting in its own right - Max Hastings - friend of Lady Thatcher, dyed in the wool Conservatist - writing for the Guardian - left/liberal and proud of the fact - leads his article with “George Bush sometimes sounds more like the Mahdi, preaching jihad against infidels, than the leader of a western democracy” (edited to link to Wikipedia’s conservative party page.)

11 August 2006

Thom May: Note to self

One Self - Bluebird is the track on the Nextmen mix cd that I hadn’t worked out.

10 August 2006

Thom May: System attack or just stupid terrorists?

The “foiled” terrorist attack looks suspiciously like an attack on the underlying system, rather than an actual attempt to blow planes up - it’s almost laughable that terrorists in this day and age could hope to get explosive devices onto planes in hand luggage. If we decide that the terrorists aren’t stupid, the attack begins to look decidedly different. They’ve succeeded in causing absolute chaos in one of the busiest weekends in the british airline calendar, the effects of which will probably drag on for a few days. If you wanted to be really nasty, they’ve also caused a large number of people to be trapped in one place, and extremely vulnerable to attack. The BBC report says Heathrow Terminal 1 is “jam packed”. I suspect that a terrorist organisation will look at something like this as relatively cheap, too - 18 peons arrested, sure, but we know they can afford the manpower and they’ve once again demonstrated that the air travel infrastructure our society is so reliant on is extremely fragile and vulnerable.

9 August 2006

Thom May: The Solaris Installer

I had my first introduction to the Sol10 installer today. Oh My. For anyone who has ever complained that Debian is hard to install, go try solaris and then come back. Dependency resolution? Sure, we can tell you what dependencies you’ve missed. Then you get to go hunt around the appallingly laid out tree of packages (subtrees with one package in, no indication of what subtree a requirement might be in) trying to find the thing. Then you hope you’ve not missed something else, otherwise, repeat ad infinitum. And the granularity of the thing is just dreadful. I’ve ended up with all kinds of crap installed that I’ll never use just because something else that I’ll never ever use, but is a required package, depends on it. And Heaven forbid that you should wish to search for something in the package list. I walked back into our office and the Solaris Admin I share an office with tells me about all this cool stuff you can do, that is utterly undocumented in the manual as far as I can tell, that would actually be a really useful default, like Live Upgrades. And don’t get me started on the package system itself, especially not when you have to throw the abortion that is Blastwave into the mix. Tim Bray has also mentioned just how good the Debian/Ubuntu packaging system is in comparison, and wonders why Sun aren’t investing quality engineering time in making it work on Solaris. In contrast, the Ubuntu installer’s approach of installing the bare minimum and letting the packaging system do the work post install feels to me like the perfect method for installing a server.

28 July 2006

Thom May: Where in the world is...

Carmen San… that’s not right. Anyway, people who saw my earlier blog entry might wonder why I’m not in San Francisco or New York, and blogging about the US. There’s a good reason for that. I’m not in the US. I Amsterdam (I’m not quite in Amsterdam, either. But they say a picture’s worth a thousand words, and I’m lazy. So there!) I’m actually in a town called Leiden, best known for the university and for being the birthplace of Rembrandt. Leiden

3 July 2006

Thom May: Would sir like gold leaf on his blog post?

I feel obligated to blog this - I wish someone would pay me the best part of half a million US dollars of public money to investigate blogging…

9 June 2006

Thom May: World in Python?

Emmanuel, I think you’ve somewhat missed Corey’s point - he’s not saying that the world should be rewritten in python, he’s saying that at the moment Red Hat’s sysconfig tools are more mature than g-s-t and (as a bonus) they’re written in python.
Now, I’m not sure that he’s correct - there’s an awful lot of assumptions and decisions in sysconfig-tools that are extremely RHAT/Fedora specific, and it’s unclear at the moment whether that’s worth fixing rather than just working on g-s-t, but certainly he’s correct in calling for just one project, rather than the balkanisation we’re seeing currently.

19 May 2006

Thom May: colophon

Quick entry on how this blog is coming to you, should anyone happen to care.
It’s a Typo install off Typo’s Subversion trunk. This pulls in trunk of Rails via an svn:external.
Originally I was going to be super-brave and use the FCGI proxy module backported from Apache trunk, but I decided I’m not that brave, so I used some slightly less bleeding edge code.
I upgraded to Apache 2.2.2 and ensured I had mod_proxy_balancer , mod_proxy_http and mod_proxy loaded.
I then installed Mongrel and ran that in my typo checkout like so: mongrel_rails -d -e production -p 3000; this brings up mongrel on port 3000 and sets Rails into production mode rather than the standard development mode.
Having checked that the install on the high port was working correctly, I then configured Apache to properly connect to it. First I set up a very small - I only have one server, but I wanted to play with the technology - balancer config:
<Proxy balancer://server>

BalancerMember http://server:3000

</Proxy>
</Proxy>
I then set up a VirtualHost as usual, but added the following lines to force content onto the load balancer.
ProxyPass / balancer://server/

ProxyPassReverse / balancer://server/

Thom May: Leaving... on a Jet Plane

I’ve already posted about this elsewhere, so those who’ve seen that can probably skip to the bottom of this post. For everyone else, I’m leaving Claranet at the beginning of June to go and seek my fortunes in a brave new world. (eventually!) Without the flowery language, this actually means I’m going to be working for Mochila, based in their New York office. Of course, this is all subject to the whims of the US Immigration Service, and up until October or November (in theory, anyway) I’m going to be splitting my time between working in London, San Francisco and New York. I’m going to be a senior sysadmin, but this is a startup so I guess the job role will cover just about anything and everything, which should be fun! I’m really looking forward to this - the chance to move to New York for a few years is really the icing on the cake - because the job’s going to cover a lot of my interests, including a lot of design and development work for test and deployment infrastructure.

Thom May: Relocating

<p>I&#8217;ve decided that with the amount of changes my life will be going through in the next few months (of which more in a later post), I should really start blogging again.</p> <p>I&#8217;ve gone looking for something with a pretty web front end, and since I refuse to install the <a href="http://www.php.net/">Abomination</a> on my server, <a href="http://www.typosphere.org/">Typo</a> looked like a pretty good choice.</p> <p>The titles are a nod to two of my favourite authors - Kim Stanley Robinson for &#8220;haecceity&#8221; and Ken Macleod for &#8220;biolog&#8221;, his take on blogs in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=as2&amp;path=ASIN/1841493449&amp;tag=haecceity-21&amp;camp=1634&amp;creative=6738">Learning the World</a></p>