Trip to San Jose

So, off I got to XenSource certification. A trip to San Jose is not strategic for us at this time, but we really want to get in bed with XenSource. I *have* to meet with their executives and get their technical certification if we want to play ball together.

Here's a rundown of the trip:

Customs and security were routine.

The flight to Chicago was too heavy so the airline had to find 4 volunteers to get off the plane before takeoff. Only two people said "thank you" to the volunteers as they were walking down the plane's corridor. I guess graciousness isn't really a traveler's trait.

My laptop started giving me SMART failures during the flight, so I started a backup on the plane, which I had to interrupt because we were landing. I won't purchase from Tiger Direct anymore, I really promise this time.

Arriving at O'Hare, I started Kismet and noticed that the Wifi coverage was huge, but I had no time to connect if I wanted to eat and make my connecting flight. The "Bar&Grill" on concourse G has a good fruit and bagel breakfast. I heard a Homeland security anouncement as soon as I was off the plane : "Level is Orange!" Who cares, and who can really tell what the heck that means ? Should I really change my behavior or are they just announcing justification for draconian security measures that have *previously* happened that day ?

Finding a power outlet near the H8 gate at O'Hare is like finding a needle in a haystack. I finally located an outlet and sat on the floor in the corridor to recharge my laptop. Sure enough, 10 mins later, a golf cart came by and the driver ask me to go somewhere else. That's OK. I got 20% more juice for my battery. It's not like there were any signs on the floor or on the wall that this was a reserved space...

The flight from Chicago to San Jose was OK, but I swear that I have hearing damage from sitting right next to the engines on takeoff. I was wondering if I wasn't *in* the engine. I guess S80 airplane are not known for their "hush kits".

The hotel was OK, right next to the HP arena where the Sharks play. It certainly was not a 4-star, but had complimentary Internet, complimentary breakfast and complimentary dinner. For $79US per night, that's pretty hard to beat.

As I said in my previous blog entry, the whole discussion and certification with XenSource is under NDA, so I cannot write about it at this time. But the people I met were awesome. I mostly stuck around the Aussies and Kiwis since they seem to be the best people to drink with :-) Ask Stuart to tell you the one about him going from the east coast to the west coast of the US with a $300 car purchased in New York, and then sold for $100 in Los Angeles when the trip was done...

The XenSource executives were on the ball, and my certification went rather well. I stayed at the back of the class with some kindred souls, and soon the trainer was calling us "the dangerous guys at the back", or maybe it was more like "the <censored>ers at the back"... Rebooting the Aussies box from the other end of the classroom while they were trying to finish a module was fun, and they promised to get even later over beer.

Leaving San Jose was a bit tricky. The weather was pristine but the flight was delayed for 2 hours as our destination (Chicago) was dealing with -2C temperatures. Our pilot said "I don't really know why that really matters, but O'Hare flight control tells us what to do , and we do it". I don't think he was too impressed.

I landed at O'Hare already 10 minutes late for boarding for my next leg. I rushed and got there to see the other passengers filling the waiting area. The flight was actually delayed 1.5 hours. When the plane finally did show up we were once again told that they would need 3 volunteers because they had overloaded the plane *again*. I volunteered, but it came out that it wasn't necessary since 3 passengers didn't show up. We got good wind and I ended up landing in Ottawa with just one hour of lost time from my original schedule.

Using git as a management tool.

We use git a lot. I really love it. One thing that I have been able to do with it is to track each programmer's "drifting away" from the main branch.

We can use this to remind individuals to update the local branch to make sure that they don't drift too far out and that way their commits will have much less chance of conflict. It is also vital for doing structured releases. A release manager using this technique can easily tell if all programmers have commited all relevant code.

Start by cloning the main tree:

cg-clone /main/development/branch <product>
cd <product>
cg-branch-add <programmer name> /programmer/local/branch
cg-fetch <programmer name>
cg-branch-add <programmer2 name> /programmer2/local/branch
cg-fetch <programmer2 name>
and so on

Then use this script for getting and showing where everyone is:

cg-update
cg-fetch <programmer1 name>
cg-fetch <programmer2 name>
...
cg-fetch <programmerN name>
gitk --all

You will visually see where each programmer stands regarding the main branch, and if they need to push their local branches into the main branch for release.

Use the XenSource, Luke...

We are preparing to partner up with XenSource so here I am sitting at the product launch. Room is full, and a lot of different countries are represented. Met people from Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. We are the only partner from Canada.

Their VP of World Wide Sales and Channels, John Glendenning is about to give us a presentation on the merits of Xen as a product and XenSource as a company. So will the CEO, Peter Levine.

As today is a Non-Disclosure event, I will have to keep this post short...

... This paragraph would be huge if I wasn't under NDA ...

The big announcements will be December --th.

Now I get to fill in an evaluation sheet and get a free polo shirt. That makes the trip worthwhile :-)

Worse.... Update... Ever...

Well, I am usually keen on Apple's security updates. I have never been burned by them. Except for this latest one. To be fair, I think my laptop's hard disk started failing *immediately* after... SMART reports that I should move all my important data off the drive *right now*. That's lovely, as I am on a trip to California right now. So, it's 3am in a hotel room, and I'm copying what I can to my spare USB drive.

The security update prevents me from running Mail.app and Colloquy, so I have to revert to irssi and squirrelmail. It's the first time that a security upgrade reduces my efficiency. Thanks Apple. (Well, OK, the Mail.app crash *might* be due to GPG Mail and not Mail.app per-se...)

The thing that really aggravates me about the HD failing is that Disk Utility will not permit you to fix permissions if your SMART status is "failing". And no real flags to force the checking either.

So, here's what you have to do:

- Reboot and press Command-S to get into darwin's single-user mode.

- Run the following:

/sbin/fsck -fy
/sbin/mount -uw /
/sbin/autodiskmount -va 
/usr/sbin/diskutil repairPermissions /

- And then reboot

Laptop hand-me-down

Being a CEO has its perks, but getting the latest toys should not be one of them.

It strikes me as ridiculous to see the CEO of the company with gadgets that they own just for the "oneupmanship" of it. Of course, the same can be said about the sports cars, the huge mansion, the trophy wife...

I do most of my roadwarrior work using an old and battered Titanium G4. It was the ex-CEOs laptop, and has obviously seen one too many airport check-ins. The casing was damaged from being dropped on the ground, the CDROM was broken, and the battery was dead. I had a choice to make: purchase a new laptop, or fix this one. I didn't need a CDROM drive right away, and a battery cost $120CDN. If I can't show restraint at purchasing for myself, how can I show proper spending diligence to my investors ? I purchased the battery, fixed the casing with some vise-grips, and bought a CDROM drive when my travels brought me near the We Love Macs store.

That was last year. A month ago, I found myself being quite annoyed at the sound level of the 4800rpm drive in the Titanium. Also, the memory was getting a bit tight as I am now using a few more apps in the background than before. I priced and ordered a new 7200rpm drive (yes, I picked one that had less heat-load and used the same amount of battery life as my old one) and another stick of RAM. So, $300CDN later, I am once again happy. I had to use Carbon Copy Cloner to move the data to the other drive, but it was quite painless.

This laptop is over 4 years old, and I've had it for about 1.5 years now. I figure it should last me another 2 years, if the LCD holds on.

How I get this blog together

I might as well describe the steps I went through to get this blog into existence:

Choosing a blog host

I had the choice between hosting the blog itself or using a blog hosting service. If I hosted my own blog, then I could control the information that would be published. In other words, I would be able to censor this that I had already published. Well, the information I want to blog will be technical recipes, and won't be Xelerance intellectual property. Since I am making this information public anyways, there is no specific requirements for me to host my own blog. I settled on Blogger because I just wanted to get up and running fast.

Choosing a blog software

Bart proposed vimblog; that one is very tech-oriented, and the fun thing about it is that all blog entries are stored in "email format" on the server. Well, I decided on Blogger as a host, so since vimblog is mostly a server-side software, I decided to pass. I had to chose between software that would be able to speak MoveableType API to Blogger. I settled settled on Ecto because I have a Mac and Ecto offers a queuing system. With Ecto, I can create drafts of future blog entries I want to create for the future. Quite neat.

Publishing

Ecto sends automatically to Blogger when I connect to the Internet. I can also synch published stories between my workstation and my laptop. I cannot synch draft stories between my workstation and my laptop, but I will try to find or code a way. This might be hard, since Ecto seems to store drafts in a .plist file. Perhaps if I can find a way to synch parts of an XML tree, this might work.

Here we go

It's been 3 years since my last confession ....

Well, what are blogs supposed to be but a public confession of our actions ? Hopefully this won't be that kind of blog. I decided to get a blogger account and start typing for the general public because I've found myself asking Bart to blog a technical item or technique that I had created that day.

You see, that's where I think that blogging is becoming the norm. We are moving our great Internet archive method from Usenet to web logs. So, searching for techniques and information used to give us a link to a newsgroup, and now chances are you will be linked to an individual's blog instead. By creating this blog, I hope to archive some of the technical recipes that I've had to create as part of my job.

Of course, I might ramble somewhat about the "Chief Executive" part of the job as well.

As most bloggers seem to write to an audience, my blog may very well be lines of code and a few notes. If I bring in an audience, I will be the first surprised.