This book is useful. When the Earth is invaded by evil aliens intent on stripping us of our heavy metals, I now know how to fight back using just Maple Syrup and a Death Star I just happen to have hanging around. That’s education right there. This book is delightfully not sexist compared with some…
A Talent for War
This is my first McDevitt book, and it was a pleasant surprise. A bit of a mystery novel, but set in the far future. Well written, interesting and fun. I enjoyed it. Title: A Talent For War Author: Jack McDevitt Genre: Fiction Publisher: Penguin Release Date: June 29, 2004 Pages: 320 The acclaimed classic novel…
Just storing this here — how to fix the keyboard bindings on MacOS
Just in case I am ever trapped again, these instructions made the Mac work like every other keyboard ever.
The Long Earth
Lana put me onto this book while on a trip to Texas, and I have to say I like it. This is very unlike the other Terry Pratchett books I’ve read, in that whilst it is occasionally amusing, it isn’t really an attempt at humor. It is instead a relatively methodical examination of the impact…
Comparing alembic with sqlalchemy migrate
In the last few days there has been a discussion on the openstack-dev mailing list about converting nova to alembic. Nova currently uses sqlalchemy migrate for its schema migrations. I would consider myself a sceptic of this change, but I want to be a well educated sceptic so I thought I should take a look…
On Continuous Integration testing for Nova DB
To quote Homer Simpson: “All my life I’ve had one dream, to achieve my many goals.”. One of my more recent goals is a desire to have real continuous integration testing for database migrations in Nova. You see, at the moment, database migrations can easily make upgrades painful for deployers, normally by taking a very…
Starship Troopers
I saw the movie a few years ago, and so I read this book on a whim. Its very different to the movie. The book is interesting, although it does have a tendency to slide into rants about the moral responsibilities which come with having an electoral franchise. The book is also very pro military…
Call for presentations for the linux.conf.au 2014 OpenStack mini-conference
I’ve just emailed this out to the relevant lists, but I figured it can’t hurt to post it here as well… linux.conf.au will be hosting the second OpenStack mini-conference to run in Australia. The first one was well attended, and this mini-conference will be the first OpenStack conference to be held on Australia’s west coast….
Exploring a single database migration
Yesterday I was having some troubles with a database migration download step, and a Joshua Hesketh suggested I step through the migrations one at a time and see what they were doing to my sqlite test database. That’s a great idea, but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me how to do it. Now that I’ve…
Nova database continuous integration
I’ve had some opportunity recently to spend a little quality time off line, and I spent some of that time working on a side project I’ve wanted to do for a while — continuous integration testing of nova database migrations. Now, the code isn’t perfect at the moment, but I think its an interesting direction…