• 48 Hours In Dublin

  good set of tourist tips for a foodie Dublin weekender

  (tags: dublintourismfoodeatingdiningrestaurantstipsweekend)

• Linux Load Averages: Solving the Mystery

  Nice bit of OS archaeology by Brendan Gregg.

  In 1993, a Linux engineer found a nonintuitive case with load averages, and with a three-line patch changed them forever from “CPU load averages” to what one might call “system load averages.” His change included tasks in the uninterruptible state, so that load averages reflected demand for disk resources and not just CPUs. These system load averages count the number of threads working and waiting to work, and are summarized as a triplet of exponentially-damped moving sum averages that use 1, 5, and 15 minutes as constants in an equation. This triplet of numbers lets you see if load is increasing or decreasing, and their greatest value may be for relative comparisons with themselves.

  (tags: loadmonitoringlinuxunixperformanceopsbrendan-gregghistorycpu)

• Distilled Identity

  Gabriel recently bought a distillery in Barbados, where he says the majority of his team is of African descent. “The sugar industry is a painful past for them, but my understanding, from my team, is that they do see it as the past,” Gabriel explained. “There was great suffering, but their take is like, ‘We built this island.’ They are reclaiming it, and we are seeing that in efforts to preserve farming land and not let it all go to tourism.” I rather liked this narrative, or at least the potential of it. Slavery was appalling across the board, but countries and cultures throughout the African Diaspora have managed their paths forward in ways that don’t mimic the American aftermath. A plurality of narratives was possible here, which was thrilling to me. I am often disappointed by the mainstream perception of one-note blackness. One could easily argue the root of colonization is far from removed in the Caribbean. But if I understood Gabriel, and if he accurately captured the sentiments of his Barbadian colleagues, plantation sugarcane offered career opportunities to some, and was perhaps not solely a distressing connection to a shared global history. We chewed on this thought, together, in silence.

  (tags: historydistillingrumbarbadosafrican-diasporaslaveryamerican-historyboozelanguageetymology)

• cristim/autospotting

  ‘Easy to use tool that automatically replaces some or even all on-demand AutoScaling group members with similar or larger identically configured spot instances in order to generate significant cost savings on AWS EC2, behaving much like an AutoScaling-backed spot fleet.’

  (tags: asgautoscalingec2awsspot-fleetspot-instancescost-savingscaling)

• Going Multi-Cloud with AWS and GCP: Lessons Learned at Scale

  Metamarkets splits across AWS and GCP, going into heavy detail here

  (tags: awsgcpgoogleopshostingmulti-cloud)

We’re delighted to introduce cassandra-reaper.io, the dedicated site for the open source Reaper project! Since we adopted Reaper from the incredible folks at Spotify, we’ve added a significant number of features, expanded the supported versions past 2.0, added support for incremental repair, and added a Cassandra backend to simplify operations.

The road ahead is looking promising. We’re working to improve the Cassandra backend even further, leveraging Cassandra’s multi-dc features to enable multi-dc repair as well as fault tolerance for Reaper itself. We’ve tested this work internally as The Last Pickle as well as received community feedback. In addition to the site, we’ve also set up a Gitter based chat to keep development out in the open as well as help foster the community.

Over time we’re looking to expand the functionality of Reaper past handling just repairs. We would love for the Reaper WebUI to be the easiest way to perform all administrative tasks to a Cassandra cluster.

• GitHub – hillbrad/U2FReviews

  ‘Reviews of U2F [Universal Second Factor] devices’ — ie. Yubico keys et al.

  (tags: u2ftotpoathotpone-time-passwordsauthenticationdevicesgadgetssecurity2fa)

This 2nd half of the year speaking season is starting and you’ll find me speaking about DevOps, Kubernetes, Jenkins,… at

• Scaling Jenkins with Kubernetes. Jenkins World, San Francisco, August 29-31
• Using Kubernetes for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. Java2Days in Sofia, Bulgaria, October 17-19
• Divide and Conquer: Easier Continuous Delivery using Micro-Services. Bosnia Agile Day in Sarajevo, October 21
• Using Kubernetes for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. JokerConf in Saint Petersburg, Russia November 4-5
• Jenkins and Containers, a Match Made in Heaven. Agile Testing Days in Potsdam, Germany, November 13-17

If you organize a conference and would like me to give a talk in 2018 you can find me @csanchez.

Three years back, a bizarre glitch in WordPress turned the operation of this blog Turkish.  That felt rather Kafkaesque until it resolved itself, as I’d’ve had to navigate through a lot of Turkish to fix my settings back to English!

Now in a faint echo of that, it’s sent me email in a cyrillic language.  The email template looks like a regular notification that someone is following my blog.  Comparing it to the last such notification (from earlier this week) and pasting the subject line[1] into google translate both confirm it.  Indeed, I tried google with several Cyrillic languages: Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, and it appears to say much the same in all of them.

And the punchline: the person who just subscribed is in Ankara, Turkey!  Which is what first reminded me of the Turkish incident, but no more cyrillic than English!

This is not in the same league as the Turkish WordPress: when I log in, things are still in English.  Nevertheless, bizarre.

[1] Subject line truncated to preserve privacy of the latest subscriber.

• How to Easily Unsubscribe from Bulk Emails in Gmail – Unroll.me Alternative

  nice Google Script which runs in the background and scrapes out unsubscribe links. I’m drowning in single-opt-in mainsleaze newsletters at this stage so this is very welcome

  (tags: mainsleazeunsubscribespamgmailgoogleemailone-bite-of-the-apple)

• AdoptOpenJDK/jitwatch

  Log analyser and visualiser for the HotSpot JIT compiler. Inspect inlining decisions, hot methods, bytecode, and assembly. View results in the JavaFX user interface.

  (tags: analysisjavajvmperformancetoolsdebuggingoptimizationjit)

• Roy sells ThoughtWorks

  ThoughtWorks, my employer, had some big news to share today. Our founder and owner, Roy Singham, has decided to sell ThoughtWorks to Apax Funds - a private equity firm based in London. Apax wishes the current management team to continue running and growing ThoughtWorks, using the same model that's driven our growth and success for the last twenty-odd years.

• Someone who puts that kind of money down to buy a company is going to want to have a say in how it's run.

  The second rule of buyouts is that everything will change in the second fiscal year. They won't tell you NOT to do something, they just won't give you any budget for it.

  The first rule of buyouts is that the promises always come from someone who isn't in a position to back them up (like the old owner, or your boss's boss, who only have a single seat on the board between them).

• Oakland grapples with Uber’s threat to sell massive HQ instead of moving in

  After spending two years bracing for Uber’s arrival, residents reacted with both worry and relief Friday after the ride-hailing giant said it may instead sell the building that was supposed to be its Oakland headquarters.

  Following Uber’s announcement that it is reevaluating plans for the Uptown Station building at 1955 Broadway, Oakland residents are left wondering what will become of the massive, vacant building in the heart of the city’s revitalizing Uptown neighborhood. The space, formerly occupied by Sears, has generated excitement and controversy ever since Uber announced its intention to move in two years ago.

• The best photos and videos of the 2017 solar eclipse

• The story behind viral, iconic Smith Rock total solar eclipse photo

  Ted Hesser, a 31-year-old freelance photographer from the Bay Area, scouted locations at Smith Rock State Park in Central Oregon with his girlfriend, Martina Tibell, for a week. The two rock climbing enthusiasts spent days trying different climbing routes alongside other adventure photographers who all descended on the park looking for the perfect angle during totality.

• Limiting Memory to Avoid the Oom

  While killing processes is never good, it is better than having the system halt due to memory exhaustion. Sometimes the oom kills Postgres, and that isn't a good thing either. This email thread explains how to use ulimit to cause Postgres sessions that consume a lot of memory to fail due to excessive memory requests. This avoids having them continue and be killed by the oom killer, which causes the entire database server to restart. The Postgres documentation also explains the behavior of the oom killer.

• How Hardware Drives The Shape Of Databases To Come

  With so many new compute, storage, and networking technologies entering the field and so many different database and data store technologies available today, we thought it would be a good idea to touch base with Stonebraker to see what effect these might have on future databases.

• Kurtz-Fest

  Stuart Kurtz turned 60 last October and his former students John Rogers and Stephen Fenner organized a celebration in his honor earlier this week at Fenner's institution, the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

  Stuart has been part of the CS department at the University of Chicago since before they had a CS department

• The Enduring Legacy of Zork

  In 1977, four recent MIT graduates who’d met at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science used the lab’s PDP-10 mainframe to develop a computer game that captivated the world. Called Zork, which was a nonsense word then popular on campus, their creation would become one of the most influential computer games in the medium’s half-century-long history.

• The new 'Uncharted' is the best $40 you can spend on gaming in 2017

  "Uncharted: The Lost Legacy" sounds an awful lot like every previous "Uncharted" game. What that description doesn't tell you is how sharply executed and delightfully concise "The Lost Legacy" is.

• Trashcan Sinatras 2017 acoustic tour

  Over the course of the tour, Frank, John and Paul will play each of the just over 100 songs that the band has written and recorded to date. Prepare for deep album cuts and obscure b-sides (many of which have never been played in concert)

And, we close with a question: who really should get credit for:

Never check for an error condition you don't know how to handle.

Something very strange and awful happened in Berkeley yesterday: Black-Clad Anarchists Swarm Anti-Hate Rally in Berkeley

An anti-hate rally was disrupted when scores of anarchists wearing black clothing and masks stormed the demonstration in Berkeley and attacked several supporters of President Donald Trump. But police were able to head off any wider violence.

I wasn't there, and have no standing to comment, nor any deep understanding of this.

But I do know that this is not just an isolated incident. Some very strange and awful things like this have been happening around these parts for years, going back (at least) to the strange and awful Occupy Oakland period of 2011.

I never really felt that I understood Occupy Oakland, and as you can see in essays like these and these and these, a lot of other people have strange and awful and confused understandings of what happened then, too.

In particular, what happened yesterday in Berkeley sounds very much like what happened in 2011 in Oakland: Black Bloc: The Cancer in Occupy, and Infiltration to Disrupt, Divide and Misdirect Is Widespread in Occupy.

Sorry I have nothing more intelligent to say about any of this. But I do feel like it's very strange and confusing and I don't think any of the surface coverage (nor, really, any of the claimed "deeper" coverage) is really helping me understand it very well. After all, this sort of really strange and weird stuff goes back nearly 50 years, at least, in these parts.

Thirteen years ago today, my son was born. Jack has grown up to be a wicked smart and fun kid to be around. He started the 7th grade this year and is into Xbox, basketball, hanging out with his friends, and exotic cars. He dreams of driving a Lamborghini one day and enjoyed pretending he owned a bunch of Ferraris a few weeks back.

This weekend, I cleaned up Hefe to chauffeur Jack and his buddies to Dart Warz for an afternoon of fun with Nerf guns.

As expected, the boys had a great time. A few of his friends had a sleepover Saturday night and competed to see who could stay up the latest. They made it pretty late, but no one saw the sun rise.

My parents drove down from Montana to help revel in Jack's birthday. We had a wonderful time visiting with them and celebrating with his mom and her husband, Dave. Thanks to Julie and Dave for being such awesome co-parents!

Happy 13th Birthday Jack!

• The data for the Irish theory driving test is stored in the US

  Prometric is the company which adminsters the test and they appear to store it on US-based servers

  (tags: prometricdataprivacydata-protectiondriving-testirelandtheory-test)

• bet365 to save Riak

  ‘It is our intention to open source all of Basho’s products and all of the source code that they have been working on. We’ll do this as quickly as we are able to organise it, and we would appreciate some input from the community on how you would like this done.’

  (tags: ossriakbashostorageopen-sourcebet365)

• Britta Blvd – The Marauders’ Map

  lovely bit of papercraft

  (tags: harry-potterpapercraftorigamikids)

Others were, and are, at least as confused about antifa as I am. Several sent me some things to read, some of which shed more light than others, but all of which are pretty interesting.

Note that a number of these considerably pre-date last week's events.

• Inside the Black Bloc Protest Strategy That Shut Down Berkeley

  What people on both sides of this argument need to understand is that black bloc isn’t a group; it’s just a tactic. Those who do it wear black, sometimes between layers of “civilian” clothes so they can slip in and out of their protester ensembles. They often carry gear that is defensive (masks to protect against tear gas), offensive (Molotov cocktails) or both (a placard that can double as a shield). They attack storefronts and clash with police in a “hit and run” style, University of San Francisco associate professor Jeffrey Paris has written. There is no formal network of people and no set principles, just a belief that demonstrating peacefully doesn’t accomplish nearly as much as a flash of rage.

• 24000 Demonstrate in Berlin Against Reagan's Visit Today

  This evening's march was called by some 120 groups ranging from the Green Party through the violence-prone gangs known as the Anonymous. The demonstrators marched down the glittering Kurfurstendamm between solid rows of policemen in full riot gear. #24,000 Reported to March The police said some 24,000 marchers took part, including 2,000 Anonymous wearing black ski masks.

• The Public Face of Antifa: Daryle Jenkins has stepped up to explain the shadowy group’s violent tactics to a wary world. It’s not easy.

  Jenkins, 49, is a black man who has devoted his life to fighting white supremacists, sometimes literally. He is the founder of the One People’s Project, easily the most mainstream and well-known anti-fascist, or antifa, organization. (Its motto is “Hate Has Consequences.”) Unlike other left-wing groups that track the far right, One People’s Project—which Jenkins runs with the help of a network of about 15 volunteers—confronts its enemies, whether that means getting in their faces at protests, doxing them, or contacting their employers.

• The Rise of the Violent Left

  Antifa traces its roots to the 1920s and ’30s, when militant leftists battled fascists in the streets of Germany, Italy, and Spain. When fascism withered after World War II, antifa did too. But in the ’70s and ’80s, neo-Nazi skinheads began to infiltrate Britain’s punk scene. After the Berlin Wall fell, neo-Nazism also gained prominence in Germany. In response, a cadre of young leftists, including many anarchists and punk fans, revived the tradition of street-level antifascism.

• The Roots of Left-Wing Violenc Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448275/antifa-protest-donald-trump-roots-left-wing-political-violence

  Antifa are not a new phenomenon; they surfaced during the Occupy movement, and during the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Antifa movements began in early-20th-century Europe, when fascism was a concrete and urgent concern, and they remain active on the Continent.

If you're like me, you probably need to unplug your computer and take a break from the world after reading some of these articles.

But it's still worth knowing.

Original East Span Demolition One Year Ahead of Schedule, Saving CA Millions

Caltrans today announced the demolition schedule for the remaining 13 marine foundations of the original East Span of the Bay Bridge, including a series of implosions anticipated over several weekends this fall, with a projected completion date by the end of 2017. The series of implosions to demolish the 1936 concrete structures are scheduled for six weekends, starting Labor Day Weekend, September 2, and then every other weekend through mid-November 2017. Caltrans will be combining multiple piers on certain demolition dates, allowing the demolition work to be completed a year ahead of schedule, saving taxpayers nearly $10 million.

Caltrans blasting away 13 of 19 remaining piers from old Bay Bridge this weekend

CHP officers will close off the Bay Bridge to traffic for at least a half hour. Highway patrol boats on the water will keep recreational boaters at least 1,500 feet away, and BART will delay trains going through the Transbay Tube for 15 minutes while the work takes place.

Will these operations be using the "bubble curtain"?

I'm not sure, but I think so. The answer lies here: Toll Bridge Program Oversight Committee: Meeting Materials: August 29, 2017

With the experience gained in 2015 on Pier E3, and in 2016 on Piers E4 and E5, this year Caltrans is combining multiple piers on demolition dates, saving a year of work and over $10 million by accelerating the implosion schedule for the original Bay Bridge marine piers. Caltrans and Kiewit‐Manson, AJV, have gained the support throughout from environmental regulatory agencies for permits supporting this innovative implosion method that minimizes any impact to marine life during debris removal in the San Francisco Bay.  These innovative controlled charges have been shown to be more efficient and the environmentally preferable alternative to traditional marine foundation removal.

Out with the old.

On we go.

• Comment: ‘Mandatory but not compulsory’ – what exactly is the justification for the Public Services Card? – Independent.ie

  TJ McIntyre nails the problem here:

  ‘Mandatory but not compulsory”. This ill-judged hair-splitting seems likely to stick to Social Protection Minister Regina Doherty in the same way that “an Irish solution to an Irish problem” and “on mature recollection” did to politicians before her. The minister used that phrase to defend against the criticism that the public services card (PSC) is being rolled out as a national ID card by stealth, without any clear legal basis or public debate. She went on to say that the PSC is not compulsory as “nobody will drag you kicking and screaming to have a card”. This is correct, but irrelevant. The Government’s strategy is one of making the PSC effectively rather than legally compulsory – by cutting off benefits such as pensions and refusing driving licences and passports unless a person registers. Whether or not the PSC is required by law is immaterial if you cannot function in society without it.

  (tags: pscid-cardsirelandsocial-welfareidprivacydata-protection)

• Meet Uber's newly chosen CEO

  Born in Iran in 1969, Khosrowshahi and his family fled to New York in 1978 following the revolution. In high school, he was class president and played lacrosse. He went on to earn a degree in electrical engineering from Brown University but took on a career on Wall Street after falling in love with a woman in New York.

• Uber's New CEO

  The deeper takeaway, though, is that Khosrowshahi has demonstrated the patience and resolve to fix problems at their root. In the case of Uber, the business may be in better shape than Expedia’s was (pending the fixing of finance, of course), but as this year has made clear the culture needs a fundamental reworking, not simply a fresh coat of paint. Khosrowshahi seems like an ideal candidate to take on the problem at a fundamental level, and has already shown at Expedia that he is willing to walk the walk on issues of sexism in particular.

• Uber’s Pick for Its New CEO Might Be the Anti–Travis Kalanick

  If Khosrowshahi accepts the job, he’ll take the helm of a company that seems to be in self-destruct mode. But looking at his history of building one of the most powerful online transportation empires in the world, he is clearly a compelling choice to take over the troubled Uber.

• New Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi Knows Many Tricks—He'll Need Them All

  The 48-year-old Khosrowshahi has proved himself an adept dealmaker across a nearly three-decade career in finance and consumer-internet businesses. He spent eight years at technology-and-media focused investment bank Allen & Co., then joined IAC Interactive after helping company founder Barry Diller acquire travel website Expedia in 2001. He became CEO of Expedia as it went public in 2005, and led the company through a decade of acquisitions, growth, and stock appreciation.

• ‘I have to tell you I am scared’: Dara Khosrowshahi says in a memo to Expedia’s staff that he has finally been hired at Uber

  he noted: “I have to tell you I am scared. I’ve been here at Expedia for so long that I’ve forgotten what life is like outside this place. But the times of greatest learning for me have been when I’ve been through big changes, or taken on new roles — you have to move out of your comfort zone and develop muscles that you didn’t know you had.”

• Uber’s New CEO

  The Board and the Executive Leadership Team are confident that Dara is the best person to lead Uber into the future building world-class products, transforming cities, and adding value to the lives of drivers and riders around the world while continuously improving our culture and making Uber the best place to work.

• HPE boss Meg Whitman re-entered the race to become Uber's CEO at the eleventh hour — but lost out anyway

  Whitman, who gave media interviews on Monday, said Uber's board approached her again over the weekend as a possible candidate.

  "They asked what it would take for me to change my mind,” she told The Financial Times. "I was not a contender for this job until the weekend

• Travis Kalanick's Great Defender Writes a Hell of a Motivational Letter

  a Pishevar spokesperson released a letter Pishevar wrote to his lawyers last week, as they prepared to file that motion. And boy, is it something. The spokesperson, Marcy Simon, says it was meant to "fire up" the legal team, and that it's "from the brain." And in that brain, apparently, is a voluminous, somewhat outdated thesaurus.

• Here are annotations to decode everything in Shervin Pishevar's epic Uber diatribe

  It's a heavy piece of writing, extrapolating on eight months of drama at the embattled ride-hailing company. Even readers intimately familiar with the saga may struggle to understand all of the letter.

  That's why Business Insider created an annotated version of the letter, decoding some of the thorniest sections and providing all the necessary context and references.

• A judge just sent Benchmark’s dramatic lawsuit against Travis Kalanick to arbitration

  The decision is the latest dramatic turn in a rift between Kalanick and Benchmark Capital, once one of his closest allies, and moves the ugly fight between them out of the spotlight as Uber’s new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, tries to assert control.

Caliban's War, the second book in The Expanse Series, is better than the first.

And the first was quite good.

This release makes CommentLessSource and friends use XSLT 2.0 under the covers and adds new methods to override the XSLT version being used.

The full list of changes:

• CommentLessSource, DiffBuilder#ignoreComments and CompareMatcher#ignoreComments now all use XSLT version 2.0 stylesheets in order to strip comments. New constructors and methods have been added if you need a different version of XSLT (in particular if you need 1.0 which used to be the default up to XMLUnit 2.4.0).

  Issue #99.