Dev-Jam 2013: Day Zero

Once again the core of the OpenNMS community has descended on the campus of the University of Minnesota for Dev-Jam.

This is our eighth Dev-Jam in nine years, and the sixth one be to be held at Yudof Hall. The facilities are top-notch and we especially like the Yudof Club Room. This is a very large room in the basement of the dorm, complete with a brick balcony that overlooks the Mississippi River. On one end are couches and a large screen TV. In the middle we set up tables for working.

At the other end is a kitchen. Now, a rather well stocked kitchen.

I got in Sunday evening. This year I brought my friend Richard who is a freelance radio producer (you can hear him on NPR) to produce a story on the OpenNMS community. Mike Huot (one of the major Dev-Jam organizers and also the person responsible for the longest commercial support contract for OpenNMS – first bought in 2001) and I were reflecting on how awesome this conference has become over time, and whether or not we want to grow much beyond the 30+ people coming this year.

Luckily, the Town Hall Brewery could support all of us, although for most of the week we’ll order out.

Sign o’ the Times

I started working in our building on June 3rd, 2003, so we’ve been here for over ten years. Granted, while we have several rooms now, when we started out the three of us share one 10 foot by 15 foot room (currently my office), it is still cool to know that for a decade the OpenNMS goodness has been in this spot.

So I thought it was time we had a sign.

We Have the Champions

Almost every customer we have starts out with one person with the vision to switch from expensive proprietary software such as OpenView or Tivoli to OpenNMS. We refer to them as “internal champions” and without them OpenNMS wouldn’t exist. They are the ones who find OpenNMS, explore its power and then convince their organizations to use it.

One of those people is Eddie van Zanten.

Eddie works for the Ministry of Defense for the Netherlands. They have been using OpenNMS for many years now, and they sent a bunch of people to the US for training. When you come to training you get an OpenNMS polo shirt, but Eddie wasn’t one of them. However, the operation of OpenNMS fell to him. His coworker Dennis Waanders wrote to me:

One guy is doing the implementation of OpenNMS in our department. And he is been busy with it for over two years now. Without him OpenNMS would have died a slow death within our department. He alone is keeping OpenNMS alive within our department. At this moment some OpenNMS features are implemented and ready for monitoring and now people in our organisation do see the benefits of OpenNMS. All because of the persistence of one guy. One guy who had faith in the use of OpenNMS.

That is pretty much the definition of an internal champion.

So I sent Eddie a one of a kind OpenNMS pullover, which he is proudly wearing in the picture above. We are here because of people like him.

OpenNMS Dev Jam 2013 Sells Out

I know that it’ll sound a little self congratulatory and somewhat artificial, but for the first time our annual developers conference, Dev-Jam, has sold out.

This will be the eighth conference in nine years. The first one was in 2005 when I invited anyone interested to come to Pittsboro, crash at the farm, and spend the week hacking on OpenNMS. In addition to the three founders, we had four other people show up for the week (and most of them have been to every one).

This year 30 people will descend on the campus of the University of Minnesota for a week of coding and camaraderie. While the University can support more, it becomes a lot harder to manage the more people show up, and besides, I only bought 30 tickets to the Twins game, so 30 it is.

Southeast Linuxfest – It Keeps Getting Better

The Southeast Linuxfest (SELF) is one week away, so be sure to mark you calendars and register (it’s free, but consider becoming a Supporter to insure that these types of shows will continue).

I am also happy to announce that Charlotte’s own nerdcore duo, Mikal kHill & Sulfur, aka The ThoughtCriminals, are also going to be performing as a special guest of MC Frontalot. It promises to be a fantastic weekend and I hope to see you there, and be sure to check out Mikal kHill’s website for the geekiest tumblr I’ve ever seen (although I must admit I thought tumblr was just for pr0n).

Barrel Aging Drinks

No OpenNMS content, but since at least one of my three readers is into home brewing I thought this might be of interest. While I love the chemistry behind home brewing, my waistline could never survive it.

I travel a lot for my job, which means I’m lucky enough to eat and drink in nice restaurants (the downside is that I’ve had more than my share of meals purchased from convenience stores as well – the joys of travel). One thing I’ve seen over the last year or so is a resurgence in the art of the cocktail.

I’m not talking about a rum and Coke or a seven and seven. I’m talking about drinks that take time to prepare, like most of the cocktail menu a the bluezoo restaurant in Orlando. Some good friends of mine introduced me to that place, and the General Manager there has been kind enough to share with me some of the recipes, usually involving infusions, shrubs and/or foams.

One thing they do at bluezoo is barrel age cocktails to create a much richer, complex flavor. I’ve always been interested in trying that, so when I read an article by David Lebovitz about a barrel aged Vieux Carré I decided it was time.

I contacted my friend at bluezoo who sent me to Thousand Oaks Barrel Co., and I dutifully ordered a 2L oak barrel for this project.

The barrel is oak that’s charred on the inside, and while the barrel itself seems well built, I’m not happy with the little spigot. You have to assemble it yourself, but even though I was very careful, the handle came off. I’ve attempted to glue it back on, but I might end up using pliers to turn it. A little disappointing since otherwise it looks pretty cute.

In any case, I was now ready to assemble my Vieux Carré. I had my Canadian Club (per the recipe), a decent Cognac and the only Sweet Vermouth I could find in Pittsboro. I also had the required Peychaud’s bitters via Amazon.

Since it was a 2L barrel, I decided to go with 600ml of each spirit and a teaspoon and a half of bitters. Once done I placed it out of the way on the bar.

Now all I have to do is wait 6-8 weeks. I believe I’ll need to decant the drink once it is done as too much aging is not a good thing, but I plan to experiment a bit with it.

Unread Notifications in Ubuntu 13.04

I think Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is one of the most stable operating systems I’ve ever used, deserving of the “Long Term Support” label.

I haven’t been as happy with later releases. I still run 12.04 on two machines, but my work machine is running Raunchy Ramjet. It tends to die in a spectacular way a couple of times a week (always Compiz) but now I’m getting some weirdness in the unread count for Thunderbird.

I am very e-mail driven, so I always find myself looking up to the left hand corner of the screen to see if I have any new mail. While it works some of the time, quite frequently the unread counter is missing when I have a number of unread messages. But what I thought was even weirder was that once the indicator actually looked crooked:

Odd huh. Haven’t seen it since, however.

Still wish I could get .WAV files to play properly on 13.04.

Sweden – Part 3

I just got back from Sweden (my third time this year) and was given permission by the client to discuss the project we are working on there.

The client is Bonnier Digital, part of Bonnier AB. Bonnier is a huge media conglomerate based in Sweden that consists of over 175 companies with more than 10,000 employees. If you read Popular Science then you read a Bonnier media product.

With so many individual companies, Bonnier was dealing with a lot of duplication of IT infrastructure. Bonnier Digital was founded to both consolidate their IT operations as well as to build a business providing world class IT services to other companies. They are deploying thousands of kilometers of fiber around Sweden to bring together various data centers, the largest of which will house nearly [redacted] shipping containers (a lá Google) filled with servers and related equipment.

(I was asked to remove the actual total by the client, but it’s “lots”)

OpenNMS has been chosen as the application platform which will manage this huge infrastructure, and in doing so provide state of the art surveillance for IT operations in general and the media business in particular.

It was interesting to be in Sweden when it wasn’t frozen. While it wasn’t warm, the leaves were starting to emerge on the trees, and the days were very long. The first morning I was there I woke up in a panic that I’d overslept since the sun was streaming in the window, but my handy reported it was only 05:58. I liked the fact that the woods were carpeted with this plant with little white flowers.

Note that while I’m still curious, I have yet to try that other white thing one finds in Sweden:

Due to this project we spend a lot of time in country. I was there for two weeks, along with Alejandro. To make being away from home easier, we encourage our engineers to bring along their spouses, and for this trip Carolina joined her husband.

I hope she had a good time, because most days we work until late in the evening and during the week I only saw her a couple of times, but I did get to see her on the weekend. It was pretty gray where we were, so I did a Google search on “sunniest place in Sweden” and we decided to go to Karlstad.

Karlstad is a pretty neat town. There are lots of statues, and for those of you who play Ingress, that means lots of portals. Alejandro and Carolina followed me around as I played the game. I had my picture taken next to a statue honoring Sola i Karlstad (the Sun in Karlstad) a waitress known for her sunny disposition.

Karlstad is located in the province of Värmland (Bonnier Digital is nearby in Dalsland). There is a museum in Karlstad featuring the art of Värmland, which includes a replica of Viking runes. Fans of Lord of the Rings will recognize them as the inspiration for runes in those books.

Karlstad is at the top of Lake Vänern, so we drove down to see the water. Vänern is a huge fresh-water lake that is the largest in the EU, and the 26th largest in the world by area (as well as by volume).

It was a nice trip and we did see lots of sun.

My friends Lars and Linda (from the great Moose expedition) invited us out on the lake on the following Tuesday. While it was still a little cold, I can imagine how much fun it would be to be out on the water in the summer time. We saw tons of fish on the fish finder, but they just weren’t in the mood to bite.

As part of the tour we went out on Vänern proper, and you could see the waves getting choppier. Vänern is dotted with hundreds of little islands, and you could see several as we bobbed on the water. Since it was cold and the wind picked up on the open water, we turned around and headed back, doing about 27 knots.

When we got back to the dock, Lars got a call dealing with a security issue and so we sped off at high speed in his Range Rover to try and catch some bad guys. It is something to be doing 60 mph on backcountry Swedish roads, although I must admit that Lars is an excellent driver and I didn’t feel unsafe at any time. Still, when I had the chance, I did feel the need to rid myself of some extra fluids I’d been carrying around (grin).

So once again I left Sweden with a few more adventures (Lars and Linda took Alejandro and Carolina out on ATVs the next night, but I was a little too beat to make it) and I look forward to many more in the future.

The Dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide

Okay, I know that this was probably federally mandated, but I found this funny example of over-labeling:

This is label is from a spray bottle used for cleaning. DI Water, or Deionized Water, is a purified water product in which the trace minerals have been removed, which makes it nicer to use for cleaning since it won’t leave behind any scale residue.

What I found funny was the warning label, for water:

Yessir, drink enough water and you can suffer from convulsions. I’m a little upset that they don’t include death, since drinking absurd amounts of water can lead to death, not to mention if the product is used in ways contraindicated by the label (i.e. in the lungs). And be sure to wear the appropriate protective gear when working with water, or else your skin might get all pruney. It continues:

Now the key words are in the second picture: MSDS Reference. As a commercial cleaner, even if it is just water, there has to be an entry for it on the Material Safety Data Sheet, and I’ll bet that most of the wording for this label came from that document.

But I still have to ask myself if we, as a culture, haven’t gone a little too far.

All Dressed Up

Today was the first work day for our summer intern, Joe.

When he came to interview, he was all dressed up in a suit. I strongly recommend wearing suits to interviews unless told specifically not to. It demonstrates that you own a suit and can put on a tie, and thus we are likely to imply that you are conscientious, chew with your mouth closed, bathe periodically and don’t pass gas in public. These implications may or may not turn out to be true, but it is nice to see someone make the effort.

Since today was his first day, we decided as a joke to come to the office all dressed up.

( Click to embiggen )

The non-smiling, non-tie-wearing guy is Joe. Next to him are Emily and Carolyn, our account managers, Ben, Donald, myself and Matt.

Seth and Jeff, who were remote today, dressed up for the daily scrum call.