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ApacheCon 2009 Oakland

Friday, November 6th, 2009

I went to ApacheCon 2009 in Oakland. Why Oakland? The ASF was founded here 10 years ago.

Executive Summary

Most of the attendees that I talked to were primarily interested in search technologies, or were Apache project comitters. The search users were already using either Lucene and Solr, or were using commercial software and evaluating Lucene and Solr.

Also a lot of interest in Hadoop, Zookeeper and NoSQL projects.

I added a wikipedia NoSQL project features table after the NoSQL BoF.

The conference was very well-organized, with tutorials, BoFs, a BarCamp, and sessions. Meetup.com was used to generate the highest BoF turnout that I’ve ever seen – close to 100 at the Lucene and Hadoop BoFs. (O’Reilly Conferences can learn from that.)

The Oakland Convention Center was a good venue for this conference, though the attached Oakland Marriott hotel is $$$$ and fond of surcharges, like $33/day for parking, $5 draught beer and $3.75 for a bottle of water in-room.

The keynotes and one track per day were recorded and are available for $99 at Linux Pro Magazine Streaming.

StoneCircle Productions was the conference organizer.

Conference Notes

Monday

Although I live in San Jose, Oakland is far enough away that I’ve never been there. Oakland has a compact downtown full of historical-era buildings, and Alameda is also nice, but things get less pretty at night.

I went to the Lucene tutorial on Monday.

Lunch Conversations

- awesome views of Bay Area past Golden Gate bridge from 21st floor
- FAST pretty good indexing and search solution, but bought by Microsoft recently (going to continue linux support or not?)
- FAST has FQL (users pronounce it fecal) query language
- 150 FAST servers replaced by 40 lucene servers by 1 company
- FAST4 to FAST5 upgrade tough, similar to port to say lucene, forced upgrades for support
- linguistics is 60% of value of Fast according to Monster, 13 languages supported
- “bad stems” can be a nightmare
- SOLR gives you 90% of what you would need to program in java, built on top of Lucene
- Open Source search is not really about price, but about control and flexibility

Monday Afternoon – Lucene Tutorial

- user-assigned document id not mandatory, but great idea for many reasons, including after an index-rebuild
- lucene-assigned id only valid for that snapshot (life of score doc)
- parameter to keep or delete old index directory
- StringBuilder is more efficient than strcat
- populating title column is a good idea
- results boosting handy for ecommerce, specials, etc.
- LUKE – handy tool for index statistics, etc.
- Searcher class, snapshot in time, won’t see new merges
- contrib/ has more analyzers
- snowball stemmers
- use 1 tokenizer and 0 or more token filters
- precision-recall curve ??
- n-grams and shingles (”the president”, “United states”)
- pre-2.9 lucene, numbers and dates really strings
- 2.9 NumericField builds tri structure, help optimize range queries
- SOLR analysis tool apache-solr
- relevance feedback with MoreLikeThis

Monday BoFs

Couchdb

- “ground computing”
- “offline by default”
- now an ubuntu service
- mozilla raindrop to combine chat client msgs
- lockless
- append-only btree
- rsyncable since append-only, also replication
- checksums everywhere
- windows not first class yet, mozilla improving it

@mozilla

- browsercouch
- don’t like sql
- brasstacks test tool storage
- store now, index later
- replicate to handle large indexing load
- testbot ci

Marklogic

- commercial
- xml-centric
- great for articles, books
- transactional
- search-centric
- structure-aware
- schema-free
- xquery-driven
- extremely fast, largest 200 TB xml, 166 on hosts
- clustered
- database server
- 180 clients, 150 employees
- markmail.org demo contains 42 million email messages, very impressive performance with 5 views in almost realtime. Search is distributed across 160 nodes.

JCR in 15 minutes

- Bertrand Del
- JCR is JackRabbit,
a fully conforming implementation of the Content Repository for Java Technology API (JCR). A content repository is a hierarchical content store with support for structured and unstructured content, full text search, versioning, transactions, observation, and more.
- the ultimate content store
- content repo, union of database and filesystem, best of both worlds
- full-text search combined with structured search

Solr Flair

- information forage
- “resume-driven design”

Lucene Numerics

- available in 1.4
- tune by modifying precisionStep

HBASE

One bewildered attendee wished for a NoSQL product matrix, so I added that to the wikipedia NoSQL page.

Wednesday Sessions

Becoming a Pig Developer, Alan Gates

- Apache Pig is a sub-project of Apache Hadoop.
- this talk was really how to use PIG as an end-user, not to become a Pig project developer

Apache Hadoop in the Cloud, Tom White

- general comments on using EC2 with Hadoop mostly

Practical HBase, Michael Stack

- Apache HBase is the Apache Hadoop database, similar to BigTable.
- HBASE usage

mod_jk / mod_proxy and others, Jean-Frederic Clere and 2 others

- mod_jk, mod_proxy, mod_serf and mod_cluster original topics
- mostly focused on mod_jk, mod_proxy and isapi_redirect
- good talk by 3 long-term project contributors
- jk is kind of Java-centric, with support for Apache JServ Protocol (AJP) only available in Java back-end servers for now, like Tomcat
- isapi_redirect is primary way to do redirects on Windows IIS
- survey of audience showed several mod_proxy users, maybe one intentional mod_jk user

Thursday Sessions

“Apache Lucene and Apache Solr Performance Tuning with Mark Miller” was packed, so moving along to a different room …

Scalable Internet Architectures, Theo Schlossnagle

- amazing and thought-provoking talk, also one of the most popular
- think about performance from network packet level to application level
- carp, vrrp, whackamole
- alterdns, neustar
- dynact
- anycast (shared IP), geoip (but need actually accurate database)
- activemq, rabbitmq instead of Spread
- “memcached is the worst thing that ever happened to our industry – it solves a problem, just not the original problem”

- many apps today are so poorly designed that network issues never become scalability concerns – ie. RoR applications
- max out at 500 requests per second across 40 boxes – RoR
- firebug and yslow have been fantastic at making front-end engineers aware of networking performance
- 10 gb nics suck
- instead of one big 20 Gbps loadbalancer, use anycast from core router to 5x 4 gpbs cheaper load balancers
- spiky load or DDoS – announce a /32 to separate load balancer, use symmetric return path

- jms, aqmp, spread

durable message queues

- activemq (java)
- openamq (c) – hard to use
- rabbitmq (erlang) – nice except in durable mode because erlang disk io blows

- most common protocol Stomp is awful and slow (hard to read 100k messages per second) and not binary, but lots of clients exist.

- activemq and stomp is a good start.
- rabbitmq and native connectors are better, but no perl client.

- PCI compliance requires a stateful firewall. Hard to do 1.5 million packets per second traffic for most medium-sized data centers, need to use a CDN to distribute static requests and distribute the packets somewhere else
- leaving trailing / off causes 302, doubles traffic
- Slides
- read/write ratio is 1 … likely IM or email?
- went over some networking details with Paul L. afterwards

Recent Developments in SSL and Browsers, Rick Andrews, Thawte

- 1.6 billion OCSP requests per day, need good infrastructure to support that
- intermediate CA allows root CA to be offline – chained hierarchy – SSLCertificateChainFile,
needs intermediate certificates before cross-certificates, some clients need in proper order
- EV hierarchy more complex. wanted new EV root, but older browsers don’t know about it.
- browser ubiquity problem with any new feature, hash or crypto algorithm
- logotypes – trademark and copyright issues with using other companies’ logos in a product
- Verisign does not have apache httpd committers, but should
- 1 attendee wanted to sign JavaScript files, but what does it mean if most sites link to 10 advertising and tracking scripts? what do you tell the user if 1 JS is not signed?

Subversion Meetup

Organizers didn’t show up, so spent 10 minutes talking to a handful of end-users about subversion gripes and moved along to …

Hadoop Meetup

Zookeeper

- zk is persistent to disk
- can run on one node, but 3 is minimum non-toy
- zk is popular in academia now for some reason
- avoid split-brain partitioning between 2 data centers – bad
- very recent merge to fix -368, not ready for production yet
- people using it for a message queue, perhaps more reliable than many other Open Source ones
- need 1 zk node for testing, but 3 zk nodes for non-trivial implementation

Scribe

- github
- 4x to 5x compression with lzo. similar disk bw improvement

A local owner of a gelato store handed out 6 free samples from a portable gelato freezer.

Friday Sessions

Building Intelligent Search Applications with the Lucene Ecosystem, Ted Dunnin

- some matrix math
- using his matrix math optimization, a perl program on 1 server was faster than Mahout running on a $250k cluster
- tdunning.blogspot.com

- the original LLR in NLP paper
“Accurate Methods for the Statistics of Surprise and Coincidence” check on citeseer
- Mahout project
tdunning [at] apache.org

Realtime Search, Jason Rutherglen

- many technical issues prevent Lucene from being able to do realtime search
- lots of patches done, lots to do
- audience member thanked author for great work so far

Closing Plenary: Brian Behlendorf on Open Source and Charity

Talked to Alex Karasulu a little after the final presentation. He’s a committer on the Apache Directory project. He suggested adding dbm to the NoSQL product matrix. Wants a MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM to run his Java apps.

Conference Schedule Grid

Posted in Conferences, MySQL, Open Source, Perl, Tech, Toys, Travel, i18n | 1 Comment »

Zend PHP Conference 2009

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

The Zend PHP Conference was downtown at the San Jose Convention Center, so I went to that this week.

It was a well-organized, fun-sized conference – just big enough to use half the convention center, which made it easy to get around without a lot of walking between session rooms.

There was also an official, parallel unconference in 2 rooms priced at $199 for non-conference attendees.

The talks were high-quality, the food was great, and wifi worked everywhere. What more could one ask for? Well, a few more power strips next time, perhaps.

I was impressed with the number of attendees from Europe, Australia – and Utah!

I went to Matthew Weier O’Phinney’s tutorials on Monday. He’s the Project Manger for the Zend Framework, including design and supervision of the framework programmers. He’s an excellent speaker and really knows his stuff. Both his Intro to Zend Framework, and Ajax with Zend Framework tutorials were excellent.

My favorite talk of the conference was Eric Farrar’s talk on Mobile Data Synchronization. His slides went through many of the pitfalls of data synchronization, then actually provided a solution: use Sybase’s mobilLink, which is free to use with MySQL and SQLAnywhere. He said a team of 24 has been working for 10 years on that, and it is deployed in millions of devices. He works on the ultraliteweb project.

A Digg sysadmin did an interesting operations talk on the evolution of the Digg data center over the past few years. They’re up to 800 servers in 2 Equinix locations now, and use pre-cabled racks of servers from Penguin Computing. Software-wise, they like Cassandra key-value pair, clusto and puppet. They tried some commercial software in 2007, and didn’t enjoy the experience.

I had some great lunch break talks with other folks. One guy from Ohio was getting interesting SEO results by serving raw XML to clients, and having client-side JavaScript provide styling for human users.

I talked to a couple folks about their experiences using MySQL NDB Cluster in production. They both said it’s flaky, with one having already abandoned it for regular MySQL database with Innodb. He was also using RightScale and Amazon for document processing, and was happy with that combo.

There were about 20 exhibitors in 2 aisles, so easy to talk to all of them.

I got personal demos of RightScale’s cloud admin app, Zend Studio IDE, and BCDSoftware’s WebSmart PHP code generator.

WebSmart PHP is a $4600 code generator for ex-RPG and COBOL programmers. It provides a basic IDE, but the interesting part is that whatever you might want to do is either documented in hundreds of online technote examples, or available by contacting their unlimited support department.

Some of the unconference talks I went to included improving cookie security by embedding the SSL session id, and part of the continuous integration session (they talked about Hudson and CruiseControl, but not BuildBot).

The unconference talk on PHP and queues was quite good, with an overview of Amazon Simple Queues (good), Gearman (no persistence), beanstalkd (rave), and custom PHP and C queues (don’t roll your own unless you want long-term job security.)

The closing keynote was what I was mainly at the conference for … the PHP Frameworks Shoot-out with the framework project leaders.

Here’s my notes from my perspective as a listener. Please email me with any corrections.

Agavi
- David
- borrow from Symfony PHPunit code
- would use Symfony as alternate
- CI ORM is a pointless reimplementation, Rails programmers are morons shaped by pragmatism of Rails model
- hates complexity of validation code, context from Majove too many interdependencies
- 5.3 nice to have universal exception handling fw
- believes 5.3 is a major new release not comparable to 5.1 or 5.2 that frameworks need to support
- bigger the team and complexity, better agavi is because more structure

CakePHP
- Nate Abele
- hates long class names
- hates ACL system needs to be redocumented or cleaned up
- PHP 4 at this point, next release on 5.3

CodeIgniter
- Ed Finkel
- Symfony generates too many files, brain hurts; input filtering in ZF overcomplicated
- hates complex routing, unlike Limonade
- CI is not recommended for complex systems

Symfony
- Fabien Potencier
- French
- full stack
- secure by default
- would use Django and ZF
- hates 1.1 form framework complexity that users painpoint
- 5.3 is nice, but no plans to port to 5.3 because of large users update cycle time

Zend Framework
- Matthew Weier O’Phinney
- ZF routing from Rails, lots of stealing
- would use CodeIgniter
- hates heavy-weight dispatch cycle in ZF, to be rewritten in 2.0
- 5.3 ZF already testing with it, backwards compatible to 5.2.

The sessions that had an audio recording will be released as podcasts, one per week, and hosted on devzone.zend.com.

Thanks to Zend for organizing a great conference.

Posted in Business, Conferences, Linux, MySQL, Open Source, Tech, User Groups, i18n | No Comments »

Defcon 17, Las Vegas

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

Estimates are about 8,000 people showed up for Defcon 17. The Riviera corridors were gridlocked at times – foreboding for next year.

Everybody was carrying a netbook, often with 500 mA USB wifi cards and 12″ external antenna. I can’t believe how many people had powered-on iPhones and Windows notebooks in a “hostile network environment.”

Some favorite talks were:

Metaphish (Spearphishing with Metasploit, PDFs and Tor) – blended attacks are the future.
Passwords – remarkable what a student can do with a couple home PCs and a little time. The recent FOSS dev sites disclosures provide lots of data to analyze.
Clobbering the Cloud – lots of low-hanging fruit in cloud services.

cnn.com: story on conference

Posted in Business, Conferences, Linux, Open Source, Perl, Psychology, Tech, Toys, Travel | No Comments »

OSCON 2009 – San Jose

Friday, July 24th, 2009

For the first time in a decade, the O’Reilly Perl and Open Source Conference (OSCON) was held San Jose again for 2009.

(I have heard that the City of San Jose Business Development office is very, very accommodating towards conferences these days.)

There was great attendance, and plenty to see with about 15 simultaneous tracks, lots of BoFs, and an active exhibits area.

One of the changes this year was more OS talks, including some for linux and FreeBSD. This is a welcome change, though many kernel hackers won’t travel to the USA, for various legal issues.

My favorites were:

talk – YAML by Ingy. YAML is a serialization standard for all programming languages and is a superset of JSON, in that YAML supports types and references. The Perl module is YAML.pm. Although it is a “serialization standard”, best results are obtained when both sides of the exchange are controlled by the programmer (ie. different word sizes or floating point standards will likely cause issues.)
Perl lightning talk – Esthetic Randomness by Joseph Brenner. Joseph likes to post-process random output before display to get a more desirable appearance. He’s kind of goth-looking, so the overall subject and delivery made it an interesting 5 minutes.
BoF – MySQL social with Monty, Percona (now 25 employees!) and Mark C.
exhibit – Haiku OS (the Open Source BeOS clone) demo. 2 developers, now at Google, reimplemented BFS from the textbook. Haiku can run with 64 MB RAM. Posix compatible, so the gcc toolchain works. The ARM port is a GSoC project. The video support comes from from ffmpeg, xiph, etc.

Regarding the MySQL BoFs, I think they can be summarized like this: the community is not going to wait for MySQL AB/Sun/Oracle to dick around any further.

Monty Program AB, Percona and Drizzle are going to have forks regardless of what Oracle does. Either the official MySQL documentation will be freed, or rewritten by Monty Program AB and Drizzle.

Typo3 CMS also had a community booth. They are the #1 European CMS with support for 38 languages.

I didn’t see much use for the “OSCamp” attendee-organized tracks personally. Whereas at the MySQL Conference the Percona Performance Conference was necessary to fix the broken speaker selection process that was weighed towards MySQL/Sun staff instead of productive community contributors, that wasn’t an issue this time around.

The talk on Perl and Unicode was pedantic (focusing on UTF-8 bit patterns, presumably for those needing to detect and fix corruption) but comprehensive, as Tom Christiansen was in attendance to provide up-to-the-minute comments and tips. perluniintro is very helpful.

The PHP Best Practices talk was informative, as the 2 presenters have worked as PHP programming consultants and seen how projects go wrong. They tend to use whatever PHP framework the client is using, and have nothing glowing to say about any particular one.

I’d say that the world of PHP frameworks (dozens) is even more fragmented than Perl (Catalyst, Mason, embperl, CGI::Application are the major ones), which is indeed astonishing. And ironic – since PHP is itself a templating language.

Stonehenge Consulting threw another of their famous drunkfests at a local bar for those wearing their neon yellow t-shirts. If you want to get hammered for free, this is always the spot.

I talked to Randy Ray a little about what can be done with svlug.pm considering that the South Bay is suburban and thus less centralized than a dense city. Stay tuned.

Other Perl lightning talks included:

Larry Wall’s son talking about black holes
Scott Smith talking about Getopt::Complete, which can do svn command-line style nested args
connie willis bellwether talked about Flocks and the hive mind as defined by 3 rules.
Don’t Blame Perl – It’s the programmer’s problem if they don’t use modules, scoping, comments, brevity, objects.
Cool Perl6 – hyperoperators (work on arrays) with a card game sample using extended-ASCII symbols.
svn is not totally useless – it pointed the world towards git.

The closing talk on linux economics seemed to be an eye-opener for the audience. Most cell carriers and OEMs are at a severe disadvantage to Apple in the apps market, so they may need linux (or Haiku) to mount any kind of response that makes financial sense.

In the conference wrap-up segment, Allison Randal and an O’Reilly rep fielded questions from the audience and answered in “Twitter mode” – single sentences less than 140 characters in length.

OSCON 2009 Speaker Presentation Files
youtube.com: oscon 2009 video clips
wikipedia: Monty Program AB
mtocker: Understanding the MySQL forks

Posted in Business, Conferences, Linux, MySQL, OSCON, Open Source, Perl, Psychology, Tech, Toys, User Groups, i18n | No Comments »

MySQL Conference 2009

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

The MySQL Conference was, as usual for the past few years, at the Santa Clara Convention Center (home of the $14 bistro burger.)

And once again, MySQL got bought by another company. Last year Sun, this year Oracle.

I found out about the Oracle buy while eating lunch with a DBA from Utah who was there to write the MySQL certification test and investigate MySQL as a cheaper replacement for … Oracle.

This year there were actually 3 simultaneous conferences – O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo, MySQL Camp (free) and the Percona Performance Conference (free) – 10 simultaneous tracks from 8:30 am to about 9 pm. Julian Cash was also doing creative photography next to MySQL Camp.

Storage-class Memory (NOR Flash)

Last year’s Expo theme seemed to be “3rd party commercial storage engines” (Kickfire, Tokutek, etc.) This year’s theme probably was “enterprise storage-class memory” – and likely the most exciting thing there.

Storage-class memory is NOR flash memory that is mapped to memory space using a Hypertransport controller, unlike SSD which is NAND memory mapped to IO space.

Virident and Schooner demoed Sun and Intel quad-cpu MySQL and Memcached appliances with 2 processor slots attached to 512 MB of NOR flash. When NOR flash density is improved, that will become 1 TB.

Virident, with an office in Milpitas, said that Innodb operations are 70x faster than hard drives because of Hypertransport, optimization of Innodb for byte accesses instead of blocks, and removal of usermode-kernelmode transitions. (MyISAM not optimized yet.) The Virident appliance prices range from around $15K to $45K per appliance. Demo machines and other testing arrangements are available according to the sales rep.

Schooner has a relationship with IBM support to provide on-site service.

mysqld

Regarding the MySQL software, I saw more progress and excitement from 3rd parties than MySQL AB.

The Google V3 patch and Percona patches plus XFS and tcmallloc on linux appear to finally provide good overall performance and adequate multi-core performance to 16 cores for Innodb. Mark Callaghan from Google talked about these at his Cloud talk, then did his usual shout-out to Heikki and Ken Jacobs of Oracle to pick up the ball and run with it.

MySQL Workbench Client Program

MySQL Workbench comes in two versions, no charge and SE. Both versions can print professional-looking schema diagrams from create table statements, and SE can make a remote connection.

(I asked the developers to add a legend of symbols used.)

SE also has a roles feature that a DBA can use like macros to populate the usual user, db and host tables.

Replication and Storage BOF

I attended the Replication and Backup BOF, hosted by Mats Kindahl and Charles Bell from Mysql. It was a strange experience … the MySQL employees had a rosy view of their world (belief in replication working perfectly “guaranteed” and mysqldump being fast and safe, and unaware of potential problems of “FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK” and Innodb), and myself and other experienced users had a very different viewpoint (replication requiring periodic checksumming and snapshots being the slowest acceptable backup method.)

But then again, Innodb sells Innobackup, so no urgency to quiesce it for snapshots, I guess.

Open Storage BOF

Raymond Austin, Sun Workgroup Storage, organized this BOF to request wishlists from MySQL DBAs. It took a while to convey that most DBAs don’t normally run MySQL on NFS. Most of the discussion revolved around: desire for ZFS to provide backward compatibility forever, storage hardware should have checksums everywhere, double parity (RAID6), and reasonable drive controller UER error propagation and control (ie. don’t trash the array upon 1 error in the middle of a rebuild.)

Drizzle BOF

Drizzle is a project to prune MySQL to an essential core for users who want performance more than features, while building a development community that MySQL AB did not encourage hard enough.

Brian Aker did the initial setup of Drizzle.

Jay Pipes talked about anybody was welcome to contribute, whether working on the website, writing client programs, or C/C++ on the server. Just don’t add locks, and ensure the server is modular and scales connection-wise.

In the expo area I talked to Matt Gentry from iDashboards.com. They’re a Detroit company that creates BI dashboards for clients. Funnily enough, his clients most often request speedometer displays, often 4 across, which consume the most display area without providing any more information.

blip.tv: Keynote Videos
filefrag
sf.net: oprofile
performancewiki.com: oprofile
ibm developerworks: Smashing performance with OProfile
Alex’s Notes from Percona performance Conference

Posted in Conferences, Linux, MySQL, Open Source, Oracle, Perl, Tech, Toys | No Comments »

Bioteam Sun Grid Engine Class

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

Sun Grid Engine Logo I attended an excellent class on Sun Grid Engine (SGE) Cluster Administration at the Santa Clara Hyatt. The instructor was Chris Dagdigian, from BioTeam, and the sponsor was UnivaUD.

This was a one-day version of his two-day class, so things moved pretty fast.

Chris is very familiar with SGE use cases applied across a number of different industries, and how SGE differs from LSF.

Since a few attendees worked in EDA, Chris also provided useful information specific to EDA, such as SGE resource configuration and retrying license checkout requests in epilog scripts for FlexLM.

LSF has had a mature public programming API for a long time, while SGE has a limited API named DRMAA for job submission and limited administration – so you’re stuck writing wrappers for the command-line utilities.

LSF is also queue-oriented, while SGE is more policy-oriented. So an LSF configuration can have 10x as many queues as SGE (not better, just different.)

The SGE “lab” was available on 10 Amazon EC2 Extra Large instances, one for each person (BYON = Bring Your Own Netbook).

I found it useful to quickly try the command-line tools as Chris talked about them. In a full 2-day class, you would also install, configure and do reporting.

(He said I was one of the few qmon fans. Most people just use the qmon Motif/X11 GUI for cluster monitoring, but I also do most administration with it.)

Chris said that SGE releases now alternate between feature and performance enhancement versions.

SGE performance has been improved on large systems by tuning for the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas (TACC) Ranger cluster, which has 580 teraflops and 63,000 cores. (It had a Top500 supercomputer ranking of #4.)

Although scheduling improvements have resulted, some of the command-line tools default behavior have been neutered to reduce load, so you will need to add more options to get the same result now.

It’s still early days to see how batch computing and cloud computing (Amazon EC2, Hadoop, etc.) will coexist. With on-demand scheduling, SGE could possibly be used to farm out Internet web request jobs to Amazon EC2, but the job submission overhead would have to be measured.

Chris is also a storage geek, so offered some advice on cluster storage. He insists on RAID6/double parity for storage hardware.

He mentioned the Nexsan SATAbeast devices, which support RAID6 and use 40% less power by spinning down drives (called AutoMAID).

The meeting room was nice, cozy enough for about 10 people, with reliable WiFi and a gourmet Mexican/American lunch.

Thanks to BioTeam and UnivaUD for organizing and hosting this event.

If you’re using SGE and need training, contact Chris and tell him what industry you’re in to get a class tailored to your requirements.

wikipedia: Platform LSF
Jonathon Schwartz’s blog entry on Ranger

Posted in Conferences, Linux, Open Source, Tech | No Comments »

AOPA Expo 2008 in San Jose

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

I found out about AOPA Expo 2008 at the last minute on avweb.com, and spent half a day there Saturday.

First of all, sorry to out-of-town attendees for the showery weather today. San Jose is normally sunny, but not in winter.

The Expo was 3 days (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) for $55/day including seminars and exhibits.

Exhibits Hall

The Exhibits Hall was twice as big as I expected and a lot of fun. I’m used to sparse IT conference exhibits, but aviation exhibits are a welcome relief with lots of hardware: aircraft, wrap-around simulators, parts, interior fabrics – you name it.

I only had time to spend an hour looking at the exhibits, but could easily spend a day going booth-to-booth and trying everything out.

The Cessna 162 Skycatcher in purple was on display, as well as the DJet (and a Williams engine static display) and Epic.

Frasca had a wrap-around simulator, and there was a very nice glass cockpit Cessna 172 simulator with 3 almost 180 degrees of displays. It’s available for rent in Hayward for $65/hour.

Rolls-Royce had 2 engines on display, the A300 used in the Robinson R66 helicopter and a prototype for the A400.

Noticeably absent … Eclipse did not have a booth.

I listened to 2 seminars from trainers that I haven’t seen live before, and really wanted to: John and Martha King and Mike Busch.

Pilot Risk Management, John and Martha King

John and Martha King talked about managing flying risks in a systematic fashion.

It took John a minute to warm up, then he sounded just like his pilot training tapes.

They calculate that small-time GA flying is about as risky as motorcycle operation in the US. Half the audience personally knew a pilot killed in GA.

John then went into 3 war stories: IFR letdown in a Cessna 210 with no electricity due to ignoring maintenance near St. Paul in icing, poor takeoff decision at max. weight at a high DA airport (Lone Pine, 3680′), and an unlighted flight from Big Island to Oahu over the ocean at nite (forgot to pre-flight lights for a nite flight.)

They recommend using checklist nmenonics like PAVE CARE for reducing risks.

Pilot
Aircraft
enVironment
External Pressures

Consequences
Alternatives
Reality
External Pressures

Airplane Maintenance Management, Mike Busch

Mike Busch gave an awesome talk on airplane maintenance management.

Mike is an aviation maintenance author, trainer and businessman who is famous in the GA aviation community.

His latest venture is savvymx.com, which provides professional maintenance management for owners. They represent dozens of aircraft already.

(I’ve attempted to paraphrase what Mike said below, but any errors or omissions are my fault.)

40 years ago in GA’s hayday, there was an authorized Cessna, Piper or Beech service center on every field with specialist mechanics and a building full of parts on the shelf. Now GA maintenance facilities are merely a shadow of that, unless you’re talking jets.

He recommends 5 rules/secrets for affordable maintenance:

Interview your mechanic/shop like you’re hiring an employee
Inspection, Discrepancies, Approval in writing
Don’t fix what’s not broken
Pilot needs to troubleshoot before mechanic can fix anything
one other …

The aircraft owner is the manager, the mechanic takes orders, and there must be a business-like relationship. Otherwise, find another shop.

However, while giving his SavvyAviation talks, he’s noticed that some people either don’t want to make the time, effort or be assertive enough to actually do the mgmt. needed.

95% of aircraft components can and should be maintained on-condition, meaning periodically inspected and replaced as needed. Examples are tires, some actuators, etc.

The remaining 5% are things maintained on a time-based schedule, like magnetos and hoses which are difficult to inspect.

When approving aircraft repairs, terminology is very important. The terms repair, overhaul and rebuild mean very different things. Normally what one wants is a repair (fix just what’s broken directly and as cheaply as possible), and not an overhaul (blindly follow an overhaul checklist from beginning to end and change and test everything, broken or not.)

He says that TBO is a psychological limit, not a maintenance one. His P210 is currently 1100 hours past TBO, FWIW.

Mike recommends using the most direct method for monitoring and troubleshooting aircraft: engine monitors, oil and filter analysis, borescope. He calls this “21st century analysis”, while old techniques like magneto RPM-drop and cylinder compression tests are “Orville and Wilbur Wright analysis.”

He uses Blackstone Laboratories for oil analysis. Unfortunately, many shops don’t have borescopes, and even when they do, nobody with training to interpret the image, since studying borescopes is not required for A&P.

In newer airplanes, there is no separation between airframe and electronics, so you need a shop that can handle integrated maintenance, like Woodgreen in SoCal.

He used a black Asus EEE PC to show his slides.

Aviation Mentor: Expose (review of this show)
Robinson R66: a preview by Philip Greenspun, Feb. 2008
flyingmag.com: Learning to Use an IFR Rating

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OSCON 2008, Portland

Friday, July 25th, 2008

I attended the O’Reilly Open Source Conference, once again in Portland, Oregon.

Overall my impression was that the talks and vibe were oriented towards Web 2.0 primarily.

I would say that the talks were not as strong as previous years, but it’s easy to compensate for that with the “hallway track” and access to the original Open Source authors.

Several attendees used the EEE sub-notebook computer, and were happy with it as a email/browser tool.

Wednesday

PHP Taint Tool: It Ain’t a Parser

- CS’y effort at PHP parser for code analysis, reminds me of early days of Perl’s B tools
- not suitable for end-users

Write Beautiful Code (in PHP), Laura Thomson, Mozilla

- good general background on good programming practises
- not a lot of specifics about PHP, but available for questions

Hypertable, Doug Judd, Zevents

- HyperTable is a clone of Google’s BigTable, from public paper
- room was packed, some turned away
- still alpha, maybe beta in August
- preferred distributed filesystem is HDFS, works with others
- I recommend reading web site and then looking at the curt slides
- plans to do benchmarks with same hardware as Google has published.

Open Source Virtualization for People Who Feel Guilty About Using VMware So Much, andy michelle, EDA

- cute talk about VirtualBox, Xen and VMware
- Xen has weird nomenclature compared to other tools
- VMware wins on tools and polish
- showed screenshots of unreleased and alpha mgmt. tools.

Barely Legal XXX Perl, Jos Boumans, RIPE

- stunning and twisted example of overloading, short-circuiting, import-faking, whatever it takes to make a loaded module do something other than intended
- illustrates great flexibility of perl, for good or ill
- could be useful for things like testing harnesses, etc.
- motivated to win bet of $100 or 1 vertical meter of beer
- said it took 3 or 4 hours to complete.

I walked around the exhibits area.

Got a demo of Atlassian’s continuous integration (CI) tool, Bamboo. They’re also the vendors of JIRA issue tracker and Confluence wiki, which I’ve used before.

One company had a public Wii game happening.

Thursday

Scaling Databases with DBIx::Router, Perrin Harkins

Ultimate Perl Code Profiling, Tim Bunce (Shopzilla)

- talk and screenshots about NYT perl profiler

The New York Times Perl Profiler

Top 10 Scalability Mistakes, John Coggeshall (Automotive Computer Services)

- good overview of writing high-performance, maintainable Internet systems
- interesting opinion that scalability is not just about increasing performance. scalability can be about scaling up or down, performance or maintainability, etc.
- recommended php.ini settings list

Perl Lightning Talks

- popular with audience, attendees seemed to like all the talks
- Mail::ESMTP looks very interesting for testing and production

Code is Easy, People are Hard: Developing Meebo’s Interview Process, Elaine Wherry (meebo)

- struggled to find time, right approach to interview new candidates in 1996, likely at behest of VCs
- external recruiters hit-and-miss, conferences and jobs email link useless
- phase where non-founder employees doing interviews wanted a founder involved in interview process
- trying to preserve culture (finger rockets, social networking, 2 female founders, etc.)
- came up with process involving reading resumes, phone screens, and office “sim” that adds a new candidate within 3-6 weeks
- “sim” has 3 versions: office manager (plan to erect a meebo office sign), front-end engineer (write a JavaScript app), and back-end engineer (write a server) in 4 hours
- current goal is to keep interview time down to 8 hours per candidate over 10 days
- now up to about 40 employees
- my feeling was that their hiring process started off clueless due to inexperienced mgmt. and is still oriented towards junior engineers. Silicon Valley is full of expert engineers and it doesn’t take 8 hours to interview them.

BOF

mysql-sandbox

Giuseppe Maxia discussed and demoed his very useful mysql-sandbox utility for managing several versions and instances of MySQL on the same machine.

He wrote it for his testing work at MySQL AB. Very well received by attendees. This is a great example of what I call “anti-virtualization” – using ports instead of resource-intensive VMs.

MySQL Conference 2008 Presentation

State of the Onion Address, Larry Wall

- talk about Perl6, random anecdotes, etc.

Friday

Open Voices, Jim Zemlin (The Linux Foundation), Keith Bergelt (Open Invention Network), Karen Sandler (Software Freedom Law Center), Phil Robb (Hewlett Packard)

- panel discussion of various free software efforts, some little-known

An Illustrated History of Failure, Paul Fenwick (Perl Training Australia)

Paul gave an interesting talk on notable Software Failures and estimated a price tag for each. I had heard news reports of many of them, but it was interesting to hear an updated analysis of what really happened behind the scenes.

Thanks to Google for sponsoring the fairly good almost-gourmet lunches. Sure beats the O’Reilly lunchbags from the dot bomb days. (Everybody I know bailed and found a subway shop back then.)

Notes

- Burgerville popular with attendees, can upgrade combos to a shake.
- Red Lion hotel has a small cardio gym with 1 universal machine, no free weights, open til 11 pm
- WiFi password changed weekly, in middle of remodel, lobby just finished.
- There is a 24-Hour Fitness that is actually open 24 hours near downtown Portland. Has basketball court and 2-lane pool. $15 for non-member visitors.

OSCON 2008 Presentations

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James’ World