Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
I spent much of yesterday playing with KSM (Kernel Shared Memory, or Kernel Samepage Merging depending on which universe you come from). Unix kernels store memory in “pages” which are moved in and out of memory as a single block. On most Linux architectures pages are 4,096 bytes long. KSM is a Linux Kernel feature…
The first public commit to what would become OpenStack Nova was made ten years ago today — at Thu May 27 23:05:26 2010 PDT to be exact. So first off, happy tenth birthday to Nova! A lot has happened in that time — OpenStack has gone from being two separate Open Source projects to a…
This is the third in a series of posts documenting my adventures in making bread during the COVID-19 shutdown. I’d like to imagine I was running science experiments in making bread on my kids, but really all I was trying to do was eat some toast. I’m not sure what it was like in other…
This is the second in a series of posts documenting my adventures in making bread during the COVID-19 shutdown. Yes I know all the cool kids made bread for themselves during the shutdown, but I did it too! So here we were, in the middle of a pandemic which closed bakeries and cancelled almost all…
My dad asked me to document some of my baking experiments from the recent natural disasters, which I wanted to do anyway so that I could remember the recipes. Its taken me a while to get around to though, because animated GIFs on reddit are a terrible medium for recipe storage, and because I’ve been…
Today I wandered into a bit of a rat hole discovering how to export data from OpenStack Cinder volumes when you don’t have admin permissions, and I thought it was worth documenting here so I remember it for next time. Let’s assume that you have a Cinder volume named “child1”, which is a 64gb volume…
Winner of both a Hugo, Locus and a Nebula, this book is about a mathematical prodigy battling her way into a career as an astronaut in a post-apolocalyptic 1950s America. Along the way she has to take on the embedded sexism of America in the 50s, as well as her own mild racism. Worse, she…
I have a need at the moment to know where my users are in the world. This helps me to identify what compute resources to serve their request with in order to reduce the latency they experience. So how do you do that thing with Google Cloud? The first step is to setup a series…
This post is an attempt to collect a set of general hints and tips for resumes and interviews. It is not concrete truth though, like all things this process is subjective and will differ from place to place. It originally started as a Google doc shared around a previous workplace during some layoffs, but it…
Terraform is a useful tool for deploying cloud resources. This post isn’t an introduction to terraform, so I’ll assume you already know and love it. If you want more, then this getting started guide would be a sensible start. At its most basic level, terraform deploys cloud resources and stores information about those resources in…