Made by Mikal – Page 40

Watch on the Rhine

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 5, 2012
Post category:Book

If you knew you were in deep trouble, had the technology to rejuvenate any soldier you wanted, and happened to be a late nineties Germany desperate for cannon fodder, would you return the SS to service? A harsh reality is that they're some of the only soldiers you have left with real combat experience, even if their politics is abhorrent. This book has an interesting underlying concept, but to a certain extent its ruined by the politics of the authors -- any concern for anything other that military strength is dismissed as another example of rampant nimbyism. However, the book tells a good story and made me think about some stuff I wouldn't have otherwise thought about, while being entertaining. So, overall a success I guess. [isbn: 9781416521204]

Bodyguard

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 30, 2012
Post category:Book

While it isn't immediately obvious, this book is quite similar to Johnny Mnemonic. The brain damage aspect is played up a bit, and gets repetitive, but the overall story is interesting and fun, even if the ending is a bit obvious from about half way through. [isbn: 044100105x]

A first pass at glance replication

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 11, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

A few weeks back I was tasked with turning up a new OpenStack region. This region couldn't share anything with existing regions because the plan was to test pre-release versions of OpenStack there, and if we shared something like glance then we would either have to endanger glance for all regions during testing, or not test glance. However, our users already have a favorite set of images uploaded to glance, and I really wanted to make it as easy as possible for them to use the new region -- I wanted all of their images to magically just appear there. What I needed was some form of glance replication. I'd sat in on the glance replication session at the Folsom OpenStack Design Summit. The NeCTAR use case at the bottom is exactly what I wanted, so its reassuring that other people wanted something like that too. However, no one was working on this feature. So I wrote it. In fact, because of the code review process I wrote it twice, but let's not dwell on that too much. So, as of change id I7dabbd6671ec75a0052db58312054f611707bdcf there is a very simple replicator script in glance/bin. Its not perfect, and I expect it…

Got Something to Say? The LCA 2013 CFP Opens Soon!

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 22, 2012
Post category:Conference

The call for presentations opens on 1 June, which is only 11 days away! So if you're thinking of speaking at the conference (a presentation, tutorial, or miniconference), now would be a good time to start thinking about what you're going to say. While you're thinking, please spare a thought for our web team, who are bringing up the entire zookeepr instance so that the CFP will work properly. We've been getting heaps of stuff done over the past few months. We've had a "ghosts" meeting (a meeting with former LCA directors), found conference and social venues, and are gearing up for the Call For Presentations. We've signed a contract for the keynote venue, which I think you will all really enjoy. We have also locked in our booking for the lecture theatres, which is now working its way through the ANU process. For social events, we've got a great venue for the penguin dinner, and have shortlisted venues for the speakers' dinner and the professional delegates' networking session. We're taking a bit of extra time here because we want venues that are special, and not just the ones which first came to mind. The ghosts meeting went really well…

Catching Fire

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 11, 2012
Post category:Book

This is the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy after the first book of the same name. This book is very similar to the first in terms of style, although I think the start is a lot slower. Once you plow through the first 150 pages or so the book rapidly improves though, and I was happy with where it went overall. Good teen fiction. [isbn: 9781407109367;1407109367]

Jupiter

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 23, 2012
Post category:Book

This is the first book of Ben Bova's that I've read. Before that I've only read "The Nonmetallic Isaac or It's a Wonderful Life" in Foundation's Friends. I bought this book randomly because I had run out of things to read on a business trip, and I don't regret it. The book is well paced, interesting and fun to read. It also explores alien life in a way which is particularly believable (unlike many other SF books I encounter). This book reminds me of Dragon's Egg without being so hard-SFy. A very good book. [isbn: 9780812579413;0812579410]

The Hunger Games

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 17, 2012
Post category:Book

I picked this up in the US really cheap because I had run out of books to read on this trip. This book is pretty heavily hyped at the moment, but that's also why I got the book for $6 at a book store, so I can't complain. The book is an easy read, and fun. Its obviously aimed at teenagers, but I don't mind teen fiction as a genre and I read this book in a little over a day. The story line is similar to The Survivor in Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow, but is distinct enough to not be plagiarism. I enjoyed this book. [isbn: 9780439023528]

The Android’s Dream

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 15, 2012
Post category:Book

This is a Scalzi book, so its clever and funny, and has possibly one of the best first sentences I have read ever. It is a light read, and I finished all of it apart from the last 50 pages or so on a single flight. Scalzi also plays again with the idea of transferring consciousness, which is something which he deals with a lot in the Old Man's War series. I liked this book. [isbn: 9780765348289]

Logos Run

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 15, 2012
Post category:Book

This is the continuation from Runner, and continues the story of the attempt to re-enable the star gates. It has the comicly incompetent Technosociety once again, as well as series of genetically engineered protagonists. I am bothered by why the star gate power supplies cause people to fall ill -- you'd think in a highly advanced society capable of building star gates they might have spent some time on shielding. Or did the shielding somehow fail on all the power sources sometime over the thousands of years of decay? The has a disappointing ending, but was a fun read until then. I find it hard to suspend disbelief about how the AIs present themselves, but apart from that the book was solid. This one is probably not as good as the first. [isbn: 0441015360; 9780441015368]

Folsom Dev Summit sessions

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 11, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

I thought I should write up the dev summit sessions I am hosting now that the program is starting to look solid. This is mostly for my own benefit, so I have a solid understanding of where to start these sessions off. Both are short brainstorm sessions, so I am not intending to produce slide decks or anything like that. I just want to make sure there is something to kick discussion off. Image caching, where to from here (nova hypervisors) As of essex libvirt has an image cache to speed startup of new instances. This cache stores images direct from glance, as well as resized images. There is a periodic task which cleans up images in the cache which are no longer needed. The periodic task can also optionally detect images which have become corrupted on disk. So first off, do we want to implement this for other hypervisors as well? As mentioned in a recent blog post I'd like to see the image cache manager become common code and have all the hypervisors deal with this in exactly the same manner -- that makes it easier to document, and means that on-call operations people don't need to determine…