Dieter_be's spot on the web

I recently did two talks, for which the videos are now online.

• Uzbl lightningtalk @ fosdem 2010
• Open Source Monitoring tools lightning talk @ Kangaroot showcase 2009. This one is password protected. If you were a participant, you should have received the pass

If all goes well, I'll be at ArchCon this summer, where I'll be doing these talks:

• AIF: The Arch Installation Framework
• Uzbl – web interface tools which adhere to the unix philosophy. Whereas in the fosdem talk I had to focus a lot of information into a short timeslot, here I'll elaborate a bit more

We're not sure yet if those talks will get videotaped.

Implementation for Facebook usr bin crash puzzle. (how/why)

I haven't touched the code for a few months, but better to put it online then to let it rot.
http://github.com/Dieterbe/facebookpuzzles/

2 branches:

• master: basically what I submitted to FB, and what just works
• withpruning: an attempt for futher optimalisation (it only improves the runtime in some cases) but I didn't finish that version and there's a bug in it somewhere

In the repo you'll also find various test input files supplied by the community on the forums and a script to benchmark the implementation on all inputfiles.

In november last year, I was contacted by Facebook HR.
They found my background interesting and thought I might be a good
fit for an "application operations engineer" position in Palo Alto, California. (it is
basically the link between their infrastructure engineering and operations/support
teams).

I'll be at fosdem - 10th edition - again this year.

I'll be presenting a lightning talk about uzbl.
Also, Arch Linux guys Roman, JGC, Thomas and me will hang out at the distro miniconf. We might join the infrastructure round-table panel, but there is no concrete information yet.

More stuff I'm looking forward to:

• Arch Linux team interview @ OSNews
• Uzbl @ LWN.net

Apologies for only informing you about the second article now. I assumed most of you follow LWN (you probably should) or found the article anyway.
Of all the articles written about uzbl, no one came close to the quality of Koens work. So even though it's a bit dated it's still worth a read.

When you use rrdtool, it can happen that you first create your databases, then collect a whole bunch of data and decide later you want more accuracy/longer periods.

You probably know you can resize primary partitions by deleting them and recreating them, keeping the starting block the same but using a higher block as ending point. You can then increase the filesystem.
But what about logical partitions? A while back I had to resize an ext3 logical partition which ended at the end of the last logical partition. I learned some usefull stuff but I only made some quick scratch notes and I don't remember all details so:
Do not expect a nice tutorial here, it's more of a commented dump of my scratch notes and some vague memories.
The information in this post is not 100% accurate
I wondered if I could just drop and recreate the extended partition (and if needed, recreating all contained logical partitions, the last one being bigger of course) but nowhere I could find information about that.

So I'm back from the 3-day maemo summit in Amsterdam. It was very nice. Very well organized, and Nokia definitely invested enough in catering, fancy-suited people and such to please all 400 of us. I met several interesting people, both from the community, as well as Nokia guys.
The talks were diverse, but interesting (duh?). I will especially remember the kickoff with its fancy visual effects and loud music that set the mood straight for the entire weekend.
The best moment was, of course, when it was announced that every summit participant would receive a n900. Uncontrolled hapiness all around.

I have been looking for the "perfect mobile companion device" already for a while. Basically I want a "pocket PC that can do as much as possible over which i have as much control as possible so I can do things my way, but still fits in a pocket and which can do gsm and such"
So, something like a netbook, but really portable, and that can also do telephony stuff.
Nokia's recently announced n900 seems to be very close to what I'm looking for.

Xfce/Gnu/Linux works amazingly well on my moms workstation, with one exception: opening files automatically with the correct program.

The two biggest culprits are:

• Gtk's "open file with" dialog: if any Gtk program doesn't know how to open a file it brings up this dialog that is horrible to use. You can search through your entire VFS for the right executable. No thumbnails, no usage of .desktop files, $PATH, autocompletion and not even limiting the scope to directories such as /usr/bin
• Mozilla software such as Firefox and Thunderbird: they only seem to differentiate files by their mimetype, not by extension. There are add-ons to make it easier to edit these preferences, but eventually you're in a dead end because you get files with correct extensions but unuseful mimetimes (application/octet-stream)

Luckily the fd.o guys have come up with .desktop files.

Inspired by Snippy and snippits, I wrote a simple tool called snip.
It helps you to automatically fill in text for you (which can be dynamically created) and/or to perform custom keypresses and operations.

I'm starting to keep track of some things I want. I've picked Amazon because they have many items in their database.
wishlist

Froscon was great.

• It was smaller then I thought, I especially assumed more activity in the devrooms (I'm too used to fosdem which is much bigger), but hey nice conference anyway.
• It was great to meet (some of) my Arch Linux colleagues. Mostly the guys from Germany showed up, and Roman who is from Ukraine.
• We all got an Arch t-shirt/polo of which we could pick the color ourselves. Woohoo. Thanks donators.
• A few people also told me they had tried / were using uzbl (my browser project) so that was really cool.
• I had an interesting chat with Thomas Lange, the author of FAI (a tool to automatically mass-install systems, mostly Debian). I've used it in the past, liked it and was somewhat inspired by it when building AIF. (but some design goals are different).

Here is a picture of my "Arch releng partner" Gerhard (right) and I (left). We've done a lot of work together and it was great to talk face to face for once. Here we're showing (proudly) an Arch Linux Froscon disc (which is a slightly modified version of the 2009.08 core images):

Team photo:

Image gallery

Fbcmd is pretty cool.
I quickly hacked this script together which pulls all photo albums from friends on facebook, so I have them available where I want. (It should also pull your own albums, but I don't have any so I can't check that)

So, the Arch Linux 2009.08 release is now behind us, nicely on schedule.
I hope people will like AIF because it was a lot of work and we didn't receive much feedback. I personally like it to apply my fancy backup restoration approach.
But I'm sure if more people would look at the code we would find quite some design and implementation things that could be improved. (With uzbl I was amazed how much difference it can make if many people all have ideas and opinions about every little detail)

Later this week I'm off to the Counting Cows festival in France, and the week after that (august 22-23) I'm going to FrOSCon in Germany where I will meet some of my Arch Linux colleagues in real life, which I'm really looking forward to.

If anyone wants a ride to froscon let me know. But note I'll try to maximize my time there (leave saturday early and come back late on sunday. I even took a day off on monday so I might stay a day longer if I find more interested people to hang out there)

We're working hard on a new Arch release. (should be done by froscon)

Amongst the slew of fixes and improvements there are also some cool new things I'm working on.
First of all, I worked more on the automatic installations. Now you can easily install an LVM based Arch system on top of dm_crypt for example.
You type this command:

aif -p automatic -c /usr/share/aif/examples/fancy-install-on-sda

Another thing I started working on is a very simple test suite.
Basically, when launching a test, the following steps are invoked

• installation of an arch system with aif's automatic procedure using a certain config file
• installation of a verification script onto the target system and configuration of the target to run the script on boot (DAEMONS variable in /etc/rc.conf)
• if aif ended succesfully: automatic reboot.. and tada!

The verification script will check things like availability (and size) of LVM volumes, amount of swap space, keyboard layout, network and so on.
Here's a picture of a rough first version:

Stay tuned!

While setting up Zenoss and reading Mysql documentation about status variables I learned:

• All select_* variables ("Select statistics" graph in Zenoss) are actually about joins, not (all) selects. This also explains why there is no clear relation to com_select (which shows the amount of selects). ("Command statistics:selects" graph in Zenoss)
• Com_select does not denote all incoming select commands. If you have a hit on your query cache, com_select is not incremented. So I thought we were doing less qps while in fact we were just getting more cache hits. Qcache_hits gets incremented on cache hits (but is not monitored by Zenoss)

I've been playing with Zenoss (2.4) for the first time. Here are my thoughts:

I need a browser that is fast, not bloated, stores my data (bookmarks, history, account settings, preferences, ...) in simple text files that I can keep under version control, something that does not reinvent the wheel, something that I can control.

Well, I could not find it.
So I started the uzbl browser project.

I wanted to know how responsive dmenu and awk, sort, uniq are on a 50MB file (625000 entries of 80 1-byte chars each).

generate file:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Creating dummy file of 50MB in size (625000 entries of 80chars)"
echo "Note: this takes about an hour and a half"
entries_per_iteration=1000
for i in `seq 1 625`
do
        echo "Iteration $i of 625 ( $entries_per_iteration each )"
        for j in `seq 1 $entries_per_iteration`
        do

Yesterday I finished the first working version of AIF's automatic procedure, along with a sample config for a basic install..

For me personally this means I can start working on the next step towards my goal of having all my systems "metadata" centrally stored (along with my real "data"), and the possibility to reconstruct all my systems in a deployment-meets-backup-restore fashion ( see http://dieter.plaetinck.be/rethinking_the_backup_paradigm_a_higher-level... )

The last few weeks I/we've been quite busy fixing up many things related to aif and the arch release stuff in general. The kernel guys are now at 2.6.29-rc8, so a stable release won't be long anymore and I want to get as much things fixed before 2.6.29 is out, so we can release soon after. (with /arch/setup and /arch/quickinst replaced by aif)

Misc notes:

• Working together with Aaron and Gerhard is great. Our interests and knowledge are diverse, so we each have our place in the releng team, but there is some overlap too. This works out great. Input from them (and the other developers) often brings fixes for stupid things that I've spent too much time on and was still looking over.
• I'm also a "real" Arch developer (this actually means package maintainer) now: I maintain 1 package :)
• The 2009.02 release was a success. I was suprised by the amount of attention it got (maybe because we were the first distro to ship a release that supports ext4). I realised that all those delays to fix some (imho) details was probably the best move after all.
• I've been looking at nixOS, which is a very interesting project. The way I see it, they combine the "functional description" part (which is on many systems handled by puppet/cfengine/kickstart/aif/...) right into their OS core. That, and some other features. It was a bit too unstable when I tried it though.

I'm particulary interested in:

• The out-of-the-box concepts of Exherbo. I hope to see more things like this.
• Various talks at OpenSuse about distribution development, their build service, etc.
• tools such as func and puppet.
• syslinux, upstart, ext4 etc.
• Some mysql stuff and the filesystem i/o from a db perspective talk.

I don't think I've ever seen so much anxiety/impatience/hope/buzz for a new Arch Linux release. (this is because of 2.6.28 with ext4 support).
The last release was 6 months ago, which is not so good.. also the arch-installer project has been slacking for a while. But the Arch devs have been very busy and many things going on. You know how it goes...

That's why some new people have stepped up to help out on a new release:

At my new job, I'm writing a quite full-featured web application.
I've choosen to use CakePHP.
Why? Well, it may be 2 years since I last used it, but I've followed the project and it's planet, and it seems to have matured and gained even more monumentum.
I want to use something that is widely used so there is plenty of stuff available for it, it's RAD, it's flexible and powerful.
I noticed things such as CLI support and documentation have improved tremendously too.

However, I find that still, the recommended (or at least "most commonly used") practices are not as efficient as they could be, and that emphasis is placed on the wrong aspects.
See, even though the bake tool has come a long way since I last used it, it's still used to "generate some standard models/controllers/views" and the developer can take it from there [further editing the resulting files himself].
Finetuning generated code by editing the templates (in fact, only views have templates; the php code of models and controllers is hardcoded in the scripts that generate them), is still an obscure practice...
Also, there are very few commandline switches (Right now you can choose your app dir, whether you want to bake a model,controller or view, and it's name.)
All other things (validation rules, associatons, index/view/edit/add actions/views, which components, overwrite yes/no etc) are all handled interactively.
There are also some smaller enoyances such as when you specify one option like the name of the model, it assumes you don't want interactivity and produces a model containing nothing more then the class definition and the membervariable $name, which is usually worthless.
One thing that is pretty neat though, If you update $this->recursive in a model, the baked views will contain stuff for the associated things. But so much more could be done...

What better way to launch the new year then starting to work as a System Engineer/Developer for a consulting firm where everyone breathes Linux and Open Source?
Next week I'll start at Kangaroot. Woohoo.

My holidays present for Arch devs and users: AIF alpha-0.6 !

* Changes since alpha 0.5:

When you're stuck on a problem, or not even stuck but you just want to boost your creative/out-of-the-box thinking...
Take a shower. When I'm thinking about a problem and I take a shower, the ideas and thoughts just start popping up, one after each other, or sometimes even two at the same time. It's amazing. And it works every time.

The adventure at Netlog didn't work out entirely, so I'm looking for a new challenge!

My new ideal (slightly utopic) job would be:

• Conceptual engineering while still being close to the technical side as well, most notably system engineering and development.
• Innovative: go where no one has gone before.
• Integrated in the open-source world. (Bonus points for companies where open source is key in their business model)

To get a detailed overview of my interests and skills, I refer to:

• My Linkedin profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dieterplaetinck
• My Curriculum Vitae. EN / NL

Recently I started thinking about writing my own automatic installer that would set up my system exactly the way I want.
(See http://dieter.plaetinck.be/rethinking_the_backup_paradigm_a_higher-level...)

I looked at the official Arch install scripts to see if I could reuse parts of their code, but unfortunately the code was just one big chunk of bash code with the main program and "flow control" (you must first do this step, then that), UI-code (dialogs etc) and backend logic (create filesystems, ...) all mangled up and mixed very closely together.
Functionality-wise the installer works fine, but I guess the code behind it is the result of years of adding features and quick fixes without refactoring, making it impossible to reuse any of the code.

So I started to write AIF: the Arch Linux Installation Framework

I recently had to rename a repo on my Github account. Github has made this very easy but it's just one side of the issue. Obviously you must also update any references to this remote in other clones, otherwise pushes, fetches etc won't work anymore.

You can do this in two ways:

• open .git/config and modify the url for the remote manually
• git remote rm origin && git remote add origin git@github.com:$user/$project.git

That's it! All will work fine again.