#!/usr/bin/env python
def ian(): location = 'Where am I?' age = 28 occupation = 'Support Engineer' friends = array( [doug, 'blog'], [david,'notablog'], [dan, 'blog'], [nate, 'twitter'], [fgcmh, 'link'] ) email = 'me At ianwilson Dot org' professional = 'linkedin' pics = '23hq' tools = array( [cobbler, 'link'], [koan, 'link'], [svn, 'link'], [ltp, 'link'], [LinuxCOE, 'link'], [Backups, 'rsync'], [duplicity, 'link'], [Hosting, 'quantact'], [Linux, 'CentOS'], [Firewall, 'pfsense'] ) def timeSink:
No rest for the wicked
or, in this case, me.
More when I have a few minutes.
Posted 47 minutes ago by Ian ·
Bah. Just fscking Bah.
I woke up this morning, and after putzing around on the couch for a bit, I realized that it was light enough to go outside and get some exercise, so I took a nice, 2.5 mile bike ride…in under 15 minutes. While I’m sure that a 15 minute bike ride around some blocks probably doesn’t count as exercise to some, it woke me up, got the blood pumping, and now I’m feeling generally better about my day.
I then spend 20 minutes fighting with Motionbased trying to get this morning’s activity off of my device and processed.
The good news?
it’s done :)
Posted 2 days ago by Ian ·
Grumpy asshole poptart, again
I was up for about 35 hours before I fell asleep last night, including a 3 hour planning call with our engineering team.
I slept for 6 hours.
and now I’m wide awake, and can’t fall back asleep.
To those customers of mine who have to deal with me:
I’m sorry.
Posted 2 days ago by Ian ·
Amazon EC2
I haven’t always been a big fan of “On Demand”/Cloud computing until recently. I’ve always wanted to own the hardware, be able to tweak with the settings myself, or be able to just nuke and rebuild something as many times as I really wanted to until I got it right. I’ve been playing with Amazon EC2 for a while now, mainly to prototype things, or to throw up a test instance of our software when I didn’t have the VM Space available, but tonight, after playing with SearchBlox, and configuring it to index one of our test sites to see how the new SFEE5.0 behaves under load, I’ve really started to fall in love with Amazon EC2, and how amazingly simple, and powerful it is.
Now, to only try to convince my boss that he should expense my EC2 fees that I’m racking up.
Also on a similar work note, apparently, someone has been asking about a Gantt Chart creator for the projects in SFEE. It’s not that I’ve been stalling on it, it’s just that I really haven’t had the time to do it, and since this weekend is one of the rare wedding-free weekends that I have this month, I took the time to enjoy it and try to relax. I’m probably going to spend a bit of time working on it this week, and try to get together a screencast/webex so that I can demo it to the salesguys and professional services folks.
This also leads to another interesting discussion, one that I’ve been having with myself a lot recently — what do I want to be when I grow up?
At this point in time, I’ve got 2 years in working with SFEE — I could tap out, and go somewhere else, but is the grass really greener on the other side of the fence? Likewise, maybe a new place would be better for me, and allow me to leverage the skills that I learned from working with SFEE in other places. Of course, then again, I’m really kinda skewed — we talk about single server scalability here at $WORK, but at my previous job, there were clients who had a 3 PetaByte system working, with plans on working on a 10 exbibyte when I was leaving, with 120,000+ client devices sending data through various hosts to land on the storage, which is why I think that a 300 or 600 node linux farm sounds like fun, because to me, it is!
Speaking of fun, I’ve been going to lunch with the group of linux/unix/SAN/windows guys at a local shop here just up the road. In a way, it makes me miss going to lunch everyday with Doug and David when we’re in California — we didn’t have to talk about work stuff, but we did every now and then, and we’d chit-chat about what’s going on with tech at large, and if there were any specific issues that needed to be worked out, your mind’s a lot clearer when grabbing a burrito from the Elephant Bar, or winding down at In-N-Out Burger (Damn, I miss In-N-Out).
Blah. I can’t sleep, and I’m nowhere close to being tired! Looks like I’m going to be up all day. I’ve been thinking about putting SFEE’s 15 user download on EC2, but, I’m sure that I’d catch a world of shit from it, so, I have been a good boy and I’ve been erring on the side of caution. :)
Posted 3 days ago by Ian ·
Amazon's S3, Smugmug, and me.
Using Amazon’s S3 service for managing my photos was one of the options that I was considering yesterday when I was looking at different options for managing my photos online. I’ll be honest, I don’t really like the thought of other folks having my image files — if for no other reason that I’m really not sure that they’re being good folks with my pictures (backing them up, making sure that the folks who should see my pictures see my pictures, and the pictures that are marked as private, no one sees) other than the fact that they say that they’re being good with my photos.
It was reported earlier this morning that Amazon’s S3 Storage Service was down, and that it was causing huge issues at SmugMug. I had looked at SmugMug a few weeks ago when uploading my pictures from the fourth of July, but I was horribly unimpressed with the speed of SmugMug.
I’ve used S3 in the past, managing some files that I needed to have available (Specifically, when I was running a very specific repository for a bunch of computers that needed to be up and available, I chose S3 to host the yum repository), and I think that I’m going to walk down the path of using S3 for my online photo storage.
And with that said, it’s time for me to hang it up…
Posted 3 days ago by Ian ·