Results of our November Infrastructure Sprint planning. Total of 75 points in our backlog for the next 18 days. This planning process feels a little awkward at first, but then it just clicks and seems natural.
SF District 6 - Vote in Rob Black or Matt Drake
2 min read
I know that many folks in my vox neighborhood are registered to vote in District 6. If you are I'd recommend that you give your vote to Rob Black orand Matt Drake and not mark any portion of the ballot for Chris Daly.
I've lived in this neighborhood for seven years, six of which have been under the leadership of District Supervisor Chris Daly who I voted for in the past. Back then he had ideals and seeked to right injustices. Now it seems that he's gotten so caught up in his own hype that he's ineffective and become that which he abhors -- a self-centered politician.
Luckily there are two great alternatives. Rob Black has gotten many an endorsement from people that want to see true progress in District Six. He's a good guy leading a low key campaign -- lots of house parties and person to person campaigning. Since he's the front-runner he's also getting support from every anti-Daly group which has resulted in some nasty independent advertisements. In spite of that he's quirky smart and just the kind of leader that San Francisco can use.
The other candidate that I can get behind is Matt Drake. I like that he has a science and law background which is unusual for a politician. He has some great ideas on tidal power and I believe he would take an empirical approach to dealing with District 6's problems of crime, business climate, and quality of life.
As far blogs go, here's the rundown:
- Chris Daly - faux blog on the taxpayer's dime, weird blog on the campaign site (only comments on the current entry? huh?)
- Rob Black - Hasn't updated since August, uses ... Wordpress.
- Matt Drake - Most prolific of the bunch on his Blogspot blog.
So, please read up on these great candidates. Please vote for both of them, since you can with Ranked Choice voting. And leave Daly off the list because we can't survive another term with him at the helm.
More about Hyperic HQ
1 min read
Hyperic is quite nice. Have a look at this built-in that can alert and graph commits per second.
Life At Hi5
2 min read
So far so good. On the right you'll find a leftover from the previous occupant of my space. It's been over 2 years since my last job change, so I forgot about how much work it is to get integrated into a new environment. Adding 30+ IM contacts, updating the address book, setting up the laptop, getting e-mail just so, etc.
Adding to that is jumping into a very different environment. There's lots to like and lots to learn. So far I'm getting up to speed on:
- Perforce (instead of subversion, cvs, etc.) -- looks powerful and clunky at the same time.
- Jira - this is very cool. It combines bug tracking, agile sprints, and a wiki all in one. It's mediawiki, trac, RT, and FogBugz all in one.
- SuSE SLES 9 - With the infamous ReiserFS filesystem. Give me yum over YaST anyday...
- Hyperic HQ - Nagios+Cacti+much more. Includes autodiscovery and can automatically restart services when they fail. So very nice.
- Zeus as a frontend to redundant memcaches.
- Java Resin/JSP/JDBC/Eclipse/... less said the better.
There's lots more going on here than you'd think. A bit strapped for time at the moment -- will blog more soon...
Da.. Da Da Dum
2 min read
Friday 2:40 AM.
- The Dog barks, wakes up Julie.
- Odd noises from outside.
- Julie wakes me up.
- Look out the window, looks like someone is trying to start their car
- A few minutes pass, another look reveals the rear window is broken
- Call Police
- Continue to Watch suspect try to hot-wire the car.
- Suspect notices me, looks up and gives me the finger.
- I step away from the window.
- Commotion
- Look out to see a plainclothes policemen tackle one suspect and an unmarked car chase down another down a one way street. They catch them. Response time was less than 5 minutes.
- I go down to the scene.
- On the ground, a gun and a screwdriver.
- Three police cars, one unmarked car.
- Three undercover cops, with the badge on a necklace.
- Officer arrives with a digital camera, must be about 8 years old, it stores the photos on a floppy disk.
- The owners of the car come by, they had the window replaced only last week and start exclaming about the "Pistola".
- Give my statement.
- Watch.
- "Is that heroin..." -- "Nah it's crack and meth".
- Another car comes by with a box to take the evidence away.
- I thank the police and head upstairs.
All Good Things....
2 min read
I can't believe it myself, Paul leaving Six Apart? Yes, it's true -- I've accepted an offer to be Hi5's Architect.
You can't fathom how much I will miss Six Apart -- the smart people, the positive dynamic environment, the technology and vision. I'm proud of what we've accomplished together and hope that my contributions have a lasting legacy beyond my final day, October 20th.
It sure has been a wild ride. Hard to believe it, but when I arrived TypePad was in the terrible twos - 2 app servers, 2 web servers, 2 Postgres 7.3beta databases, and (oh my) 2 SnapServers. Linux Kernel 2.6.5 had just been released and we were pushing a little over 10Mbps of traffic. Since then we've scaled up beyond belief while overcoming
all sorts of obstacles. We've seen many new Typepad Stacks, two colo moves, three new ISPs, three new versions of Postgres, and dozens of software pushes all while building up great Engineering and Ops organizations to care and tend it all.
My immediate plans are to wrap up all of the loose ends while pushing forward on one last hurrah -- finishing up a simple version of Typepad and Mogile integration. If there's unfinished business or you want a brain dump of anything please let me know so we can take care of this in the next week and a half.
Don't forget to join me for a very special FooBar on October 20th to reminisce about all the great success we've shared over the past two and a half years.
After that... well, let's try to keep in touch.
I'll do my best to blog more on my Vox Blog, my LiveJournal, and my new experimental Typepad Blog. You can email me at lindner@inuus.com.
You can also find me at the following places:
Thanks again for everything!
Paul
Sleestacks
1 min read
At first I thought that sleestacks died off because they couldn't blog. (Their pincer claws preclude this) Then I realized that a sleestack keyboard would consist of the letter 'S'.
Maybe it was latex poisoning instead......
Maybe it was latex poisoning instead......
