Sat, 17 Oct 2009
Hadoop Talk - SkillsMatter 2009
After an embarrassing tale of misunderstanding, wrong locations and blind
luck I recently ended up at the Introduction
to data processing with Hadoop and Pig talk over at SkillsMatter - and
it was excellent.
For those that don't know about Hadoop, it's an OpenSource Java framework for data-intensive distributed applications. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers. I was aware of the basics but even in an hour I learned enough to know where to look for more details. Pig on the other hand is (to me) like SQL but for Hadoop, it's a lot easier to use than writing your own Java apps and simpler (and actually possible) for non-developers to read than the reams of classes required for custom jobs.
The speaker was excellent, the presentation was well timed, fluid, concise, paced just the way I like it and other than the question session the evening was very enjoyable. You can find the Hadoop slides online.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2009/10/17 19:17 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 27 Sep 2009
DJUGL September 2009
Despite the fact a large percentage of the DJUGL meetups have occurred in the building I work
in I've been very lax in attending one, and it's been my loss.
The crowd was friendly, the pizza and diet coke plentiful and the speakers enjoyable, and I've got every intension of making the next meeting - especially if it's in the same building.
Gareth Rushgrove started the talks with a subject very dear to my heart, deployment. The talk went quite quickly with an intro to Fabric and a live demo of a deployment. The demo went as most demos do but fabric itself looks interesting, especially when you consider that our websites are written in Python. Unfortunately the two different versions (with different goals) and the fact that a new owner's pushing the development now means it's not something I can drop in right now with any degree of comfort. I'd like other people to find the rough edges first so for now I'll stick with the plan of getting Capistrano involve id in one of our more self contained projects alongside puppet.
Although I disagreed with little bits here and there it's always nice to hear a developers point of view on this stuff.
Ben Firshman was up next with a selection of talks, the Celery distributed task queue (very nice API but passes pickled python objects so only good for Python at each end projects), a rewrite of MPTT (a topic of which I know nothing) and some highlights about py.test (a quite nice Python test framework). I've been lucky enough to work with Ben over the last few months and he's someone to keep an eye on technically.
This was the last DJUGL organised by Robert Lofthouse, he's passed the baton on to Gareth, and from the people I met at the event, and he can pass it on proud of the group he's put together.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2009/09/27 18:53 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 17 Sep 2009
Ubuntu Security Talk - Skills Matter September 2009
A couple of days ago I had the chance to attend a talk on PAM and AppArmor at
Skills Matter. To be honest it wasn't what I expected, the subject level
was very beginner focused, PAM only received scant coverage and the other
tools were all old hands like a port scan with nmap or basic IP Tables
rules.
The evenings highlight for me was the coverage of AppArmor, both because it's a very neat tech that seems orders of magnitude easier to use then SELinux and secondly because the last time I saw it mentioned was when Crispin Cowan spoke at GLLUG. It's great to see it in a mainline distro and I've added it back on to my experiment with list.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2009/09/17 22:06 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 30 Aug 2009
FrOSCon 2009
Last weekend I joined the hordes and worked my way from London to Seigburg
for FrOSCon 2009. Along the way I
experienced an airport evacuation due to fire alarm, a delayed flight,
four trains (one in the wrong direction) and numerous kindly old
German ladies that took pity on me and gradually got me in the right
direction. And it was worth every second.
I'd never really considered going to FrOSCon before, the percentage of talks given in German is quite high and I don't speak a word of the language but this year there was an excellent line up of speakers (all presenting in English) in the OpenSQLCamp room. As I'm getting more and more MySQL requests at work I thought it'd be a handy thing to go along and learn from.
In general it reminded me of the earlier FOSDEMs in tone, especially with the selection of project based developer rooms. The only annoyance was that so many sysadmin related talks, with excellent attention grabbing titles, were in German only. I plan on working my way through the slides in the hope that I can get at least a basic idea of their subject matter.
A large percentage of the sessions were recorded and I'm looking forward to catching up on the sessions where I was already booked or engaging in the hallway track. The only annoyance was that so many sysadmin related talks, with excellent titles, were in German only. I plan on working my way through the slides in the hope that I can get at least a basic idea of their subject matter.
Speaker highlights for me were Dag Wieers and Simon Wardley, both are very entertaining, highly practised speakers that grab the audience and don't let go. I especially like watching the audience in swardleys cloud computing talks as they gradually come to see how it's going to impact all of us eventually. If he was paired with someone in the mobile space with the same kind of eloquence we'd have a nice road map of the tech future.
Although the English language talks were a little thin on the ground during the second day the organisers did an excellent job (although the newbies like me could have done a few pointers about things like the BBQ, do we buy tickets? Pay at the counter?) and with a little luck I'll have the money to go back again next year.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2009/08/30 11:00 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 27 Aug 2009
NW Rug - Capistrano Talks
I recently headed up to the August NWRug in
Manchester, firstly because it's been a while since I've seen Will Jessop, the organiser (and more
importantly a mate) and secondly because I was interested in Capistrano.
While we use puppet at work for the more strategic stuff, such as ensuring machines start off with a well-defined configuration, I've been in need of something to perform sets of tasks against defined groups of servers. While I've been using the time honoured pattern of wrapping our inventory commands in ssh loops I've started to have more complex needs. While we're not using Ruby or Rails Cap looks like it should be able to fulfil a lot of my need for immediate action (something that puppet isn't good at).
While the first talk of the evening was about the basics of Cap the second was much more interesting to me. It was an advanced talk given by (I think) the current maintainer. He did an excellent job of explaining some of the less common features and how they related to the Unix philosophy - such as streams and pipes. The speaker obviously knew his stuff and it's given me the push I need to hopefully spend some time in the future looking at the software. If his slides go up they are well worth a read.
The group were a friendly bunch, the venue was nice and the talks educational. If it wasn't for the train cost and the time spent travelling I'd be more than willing to attend more of their meetings.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2009/08/27 18:38 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 02 Jul 2009
EuroPython 2009 - Wrap up Post
Over the last week I've been up in Birmingham catching up with some old
friends and attending some talks at the little get together of around 450
Pythonistas that was EuroPython
2009.
This was my second Python conference. The first was PyCon 2008, which was so well organised (by many of the same team as this years EuroPython) that I was inspired to come back. And I wasn't disappointed. There were a lot of very good talks, some that have planted seeds that I'll have to come back and try to find the time to look at and some that showed me things I plan on using in the very near future (such as py.test).
The atmosphere was topnotch. Everyone seemed friendly, the speakers were approachable and after spending the evening with so many people working on so many things it was a pleasure to get back to the room and make sure I actually did something technical before bed.
It's a wonderful feeling to come away from a conference feeling motivated to try new technologies and all I need to do now is actually schedule some time actually write some Python code...
The organisers did a great job and I'll be back next year.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2009/07/02 21:13 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 01 Mar 2009
London PM Moose Talks - Feb 2009
I wasn't able to get to the actual talks but luckily the Moose talk slides are now all
online (apart from Moose for Ruby programmers which has instead been
expanded in to a blog post). By all reports it was another excellent night
and I'll have to keep the evening free for the next one.
Now I've read the slides and heard so much positive feedback I think it's time I tried Moose for a couple of projects. The initial install is still a little daunting due to the sheer number of modules it pulls in (although my main dev machine has most of CPAN installed anyway) but the benefits it seems to bring (I especially like the look of MooseX::Getopt) may be well worth the trade off.
If you're not familiar with Moose have a look at the slides, it's great to see a lot of the Perl6 promise here to use right now.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2009/03/01 23:03 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 30 Jan 2009
LOSUG - Jan 09 Wrap Up
I'm going to try and get to more LOSUG meetings this year and the January presentation by MC
Brown has done nothing to put me off. Although some of the audience tried
their best...
First up - the good. The actual presentation, MySQL/DTrace and Memcached, was very well done. The speaker was funny, well rehearsed and knew his material extremely well. The MySQL DTrace probes are made to be used in demos and are very enticing.
Now for the bad. The talks technical coverage was quite light on the MySQL/DTrace part and the memcache section was painful. Big parts of the audience just didn't seem to get the idea. The speaker had to constantly backtrack to keep more than a handful of us with him. I had to resist the urge to join in and ask questions like 'how do you do joins?' just to see how big the vein on his forehead would get.
Still, the speaker must have been good as I've already played with the OpenSolaris Live CD they gave away. I'm looking forward to next month.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2009/01/30 21:17 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 22 Jan 2009
LOSUG 2009 - A MySQL Must See
LOSUG is one of
Londons best kept tech secrets. It's hosted in a nice venue, often has a very
knowledgeable audience full of Sun engineers and this month will be covering
MySQL/DTrace and Memcached.
If you're a sysadmin or a developer interested in getting more, or better, metrics and understanding of how and what your system is doing make sure you book a place.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2009/01/22 18:50 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 08 Nov 2008
Events - November 2008
It's actually a good month for dynamic language fans in London as we've got
both the London Perl Workshop and the inaugural Ruby Manor - both
of which I'll be attending.
Although, as a sysadmin, I feel a little bad about not making it to the Linux 2008 event (organised by the UKUUG) I couldn't really justify the time and cost this year. The talks were a decent selection but not enough to get me up to Manchester on my own budget for a weekend. I'll have to keep an eye out for next years LISA event in London to make up for it.
Last but not least - the FOSDEM 2009 dates have been announced (for the second time). Assuming they don't change during the week I'll be booking those before Xmas. Roll on February!
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2008/11/08 13:06 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 08 Oct 2008
October London Python UG
I made it along to my first ever London Python User Group tonight, and from
what the regulars said about the turn out so did a lot of other people.
Over 50 people in attendance is very respectable.
The first talk was a bit of a let down, it felt really long, quite slow moving and could have been much better as a lightning talk. Shame it was the best part of over an hour. Luckily the lightning talks themselves were good. Even though I'd seen a couple of them before at PyCon UK. PySmell, which is actually an IDE intellisense / auto-completion helper rather than anything to do with refactoring, is interesting (and you can read the slides online) and Metaclasses in Five Minutes (which took seven minutes) were both highlights of the evening.
ThoughtWorks have very nice offices in London (with a great view) and I'm looking forward to the next one. Kudos to Simon Brunning for organising it and let's hope Leon has the same turn out for tomorrows London.pm tech meet.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2008/10/08 21:48 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 05 Oct 2008
PyCon UK - 2008
At $DAYJOB I'm working with a strong team of Python (and Django)
developers so over the last couple of months my interest in the language
has grown. Thanks to YAPC::EU not being very exciting this year I had a
spare slot in my "conference schedule" and went to the highly
recommended (by me and previous attendees I'd spoken to) PyCon UK. I'm glad I did.
I was more than a little out of my depth in most of the talks but a lot of the speakers were excellent, especially Raymond Hettinger - who I ended up stalking (by accident) and seeing all of his talks. The technical level required of the audience was quite varied but I ended up going to a lot of the more technically indepth sessions as they just seemed more interesting. The downside is that I lacked the ability to filter module based talks in the same way I can at Perl Conferences and that I learned (the hard way) that Python has many test frameworks, modules and harnesses.
The venue itself was fine, large, easy to get around and had restaurants and pubs near enough that you could make a dash outside for lunch. The keynotes were both very interesting - Mark Shuttleworth and Ted Leung both gave their view (in different ways) on where Python is, was and should be. As a (mostly) Perl guy I was a little surprised by how little it even got mentioned - twice by my count and each time it was as an afterthought. In a way this is reassuring, it fits in with my own views and encourages me to learn a new dynamic language (Python and Ruby are both interesting in different ways).
I should probably note that There won't be a PyCon UK in 2009 - instead the organisers are doing PyCon Europe 2009. And based on how good a time I had this year I'll be there.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2008/10/05 22:31 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Google Dev Day - London 2008
I recently went to the London 2008 Google Dev Day (the title of my post
doesn't lie!) and while it was lovely to be near that hallowed grass (only
half of which was actually down) the talks themselves left a lot to be
desired - actual technical content.
I'm not sure if I'm the wrong audience in that I've already looked at the front pages and the code samples but I hoped, given the word developer in the events title, that it'd be a bit more tech heavy.
The actual talks were mostly well presented but they lacked any real depth on the subjects, most of them contained very similar material to the actual API introductions. It was nice catching up with some ex- coworkers though and, if nothing else, I've been inspired to look at the Google Visualisation APIs a lot more. When I get some spare time. Still, here's something to tick off on my PiP.
You can also view the Google Dev Day Videos on YouTube.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2008/10/05 21:56 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 12 Aug 2008
YAPC::EU 2008 - Not for me
Since I've been asked where about at the conference I am I should probably
mention that I'm not attending YAPC::EU this year.
Despite the excellent job the organisers did last year at the Nordic Perl
Workshop a combination of factors stopped me going back to Copenhagen.
The first one (and it's shallow but true) is that I've been there now. I like conferences in places I've never been before. If I'm going to spend a chunk of my own cash on travel I want to grab an extra day or two and have a wonder around. While Copenhagen was nice I did most of the city (and the mermaid, the river boat and got very sunburnt) last time I was there.
The second reason is there just ain't many interesting talks. While there are a handful I'm eagerly awaiting the slides from they are spread out over the entire conference. There are a number I've seen, a bunch I've no interest in (some in topics I already have a grounding in, some by people I can't watch for an hour) and only a few that I'd get out of bed early for. And we're not talking before ten am even for those. I don't think it's a perl wide problem - YAPC::Asia had a very interesting line this year and I'm sorry I missed it.
Add those two together and I can't really justify the time or money. So I've saved this years YAPC money and spent it on PyCon UK 2008 instead. It doesn't require me to suffer through an airport, I'm pretty sure I'll know almost nothing about any of the sessions beyond what I've seen on reddit and similar sites and, considering that work is all python on new projects it can't hurt for me to pick up some of the same technologies that our developers use.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2008/08/12 15:35 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 11 Jul 2008
Replacing The Opening Talk at Conferences
Over the last couple of years (apart from this year oddly enough) I've
been to a fair few tech conferences and one of the most annoying things
about them (especially YAPCs) are the opening talks. If you're lucky you
get a good keynote. Otherwise you get either a bad sponsor session or
even, don't be afraid - you don't have to attend, a "Getting the most
out of a YAPC" talk.
So now I've whinged about it what's my suggestion to fix it? Have a short session where each speaker who's presenting at the conference gives a brief peek (and a chance to hook people in) to their talk.
This should be no more than a minute or two, 3-6 slides at most, all using the same laptop and lined up in the front row of the audience to keep it smooth and fast. Although a lot of people already know what they want to see doing this will help people to spot the speakers who have an... "incompatible with the audience" presentation style and may even change their mind about what to see.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2008/07/11 22:19 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 17 Jan 2008
OpenSolaris User Group - Jan 08
I attended the Advances
in OpenSolaris Network Administration talk hosted by LOSUG over at London
Bridge last night. And no one mentioned MySQL.
I came out of the session with a couple of pages of notes but two things really stuck out - the talk covered the new developments as a sequential feature list rather than showing you something cool or interesting and then explaining how the new technologies made it possible. A couple of slides had command lines on them to illustrate a point but they were little tweaks and changes rather than something that made you sit back and say "I want that." This is in no way uncommon but it is often an opportunity wasted.
This leads to my the second point, a lot of the topics covered were about incremental improvements and addressing concerns from previous versions of Solaris. While these are probably great things if you are stuck with older Solaris installs and looking for a way out the ability to sniff loopback traffic and rename nics didn't really inspire me much, we've had those abilities in the Free and Open worlds for a fair while now.
I should also note that I -really- dislike the term "vanity naming" when it comes to changing the name of a network interface. It just makes the process sound so pointless and frivolous.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2008/01/17 20:33 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 06 May 2007
WOOT 2007
The Workshop On
Offensive Technologies (WOOT 07) might be the
most interesting new conference this year. If it plays its cards right
it'll be a good mix of the more underground groups, infosec professionals
and security think tanks. We need more events like this in the UK.
Don't know how nice I'll have to be to management to try and get a ticket but it'll probably be worth it.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2007/05/06 11:39 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 26 Mar 2007
Flu, The Puppet Muppets and NPW 2007
I've been in bed for most of the last week and a half (apart from two very
short staffed days in the office) with the cold / flu bug that seems to
stalk through our office on permanent rotation. Apart from the general
feeling ill and lots of sleeping I missed a GLLUG and the first London
Puppet Muppets meeting. But I did decide to go to the 2007 Nordic Perl
Workshop, an event I've managed to miss for the last three years.
I've never been to any of the Scandaweigan countries so I'm both looking forward to having a look around and the conference itself. I expect to see many trees and much snow. The perl in financial institutes talks and Flexible Business Rules with Brick (brian d foy) look very interesting. And I get to meet up with The Hukins as well, (who needs both an easy to link to web page and a blog dammit) just not in any vegetarian restaurants.
Now I just need to do the actual bookings and not get distracted before the event starts...
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2007/03/26 21:23 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Google - Second London OpenSource Jam
I recently went to the second Google
London OpenSource Jam over at Belgrave House. I've been aware of some
of the London Google evenings but I've never made the effort to go, how
ever there were a couple of people I've not seen for ages on the attendee
list for this one so I decided to sign up.
I don't know exactly what I was expecting but what I got was more than a little weird, part pre-2000 dotcom and part group hug; it wasn't really my kind of event. The whole venue seemed to be baiting the bubble busters. A couple of people gave lightning talks about topics close to their hearts, free beer and pizza were made (copiously) available (my kool-aid detector was overwhelmed by the whole place so I stayed away from both) and lots of nattering in small groups followed.
I had a good time but I mostly spent the evening catching up with people I've not seen in a while; I don't speak at these kind of events - people still complain about the first time. I think I'd have been in and out damn quickly if I hadn't known any of the other attendees, it did feel like quite an established group (even though it was the first time for most of the people present, a lot of us cross paths at other tech nights). I met a couple of people I know from mailing lists but have never met in person, scared a Thoughtworker (I used to spend more time than I should researching potential speakers) and then left a bundle of Lonix and GLLUG people in the pub near closing time. A mostly fun night.
On a tangent, the fact that there were still five or so places available on the evening itself surprised me. I've always assumed a Google sponsored evening would fill out within minutes of being announced. Having seen Google booths at a number of conferences over the last couple of years they don't really seem to get the whole wider community thing; I'm not saying they don't do anything for us but they always seem like your great uncle trying to be cool with the kids. Giving out glowing badges and asking people if they want to enlist isn't playing well with others.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2007/03/26 21:00 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 10 Mar 2007
First Puppet London Users Meet - Thursday, March 22
I'm a lurker on the
Puppet mailing
list and after some discussions John Arundel has stepped up and done the
organising for the first
Puppet London Users Meet - Thursday, March 22. I'm not using Puppet
yet but I'm thinking of heading along to hear peoples adoption stories.
I've also been thinking about the lack of a sysadmin community in London since GLLUG became a lot more newbie friendly and SAGE-WISE faded out. If you're a sysadmin in London interested in meeting some of your peers come along and say "Hi", this might be the start of a beautiful friendship^Wuser group.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2007/03/10 00:30 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
