An Introduction to OpenStack

Earlier this month I gave a talk to the December meeting of the LUV, introducing the members of the group to OpenStack.

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I wrote the whole lot out before I prepared the slides.

Which turned out to be a good thing, as we couldn't get the overhead projector to show the slides...

Luckily I had prepared some hand outs, and was able to wing the talk based on the handouts. This is the copy of the talk I prepared before creating the slides. An Introduction to OpenStack

I thoroughly enjoyed both giving the talk and answering the subsequent questions. LUV seems to be a group populated by people both smart and friendly!

Shot!

I thought I'd try my hand at a short story...

I'll never forget my 21^st birthday. A day that was set to be most ordinary turned into the most memorable, and puzzling day of my life so far. For it was the day that I was shot. Let me tell you the story.

I'd been away from home for a few years, doing my national service. Unexpectedly the army sent me home on leave the day before my 21^st birthday.

I thought I should celebrate, but when I phoned around none of my old school friends were in town. So I had a quite celebratory breakfast with my parents, and that was my birthday.

It had been a tough tour, I was probably depressed, so 8:30 that evening I decided that I would simply go to bed.

But I couldn't sleep. I tossed and turned. Sleep just didn't fall. After what seemed like an eternity I reached up, grabbed the dangling Victorian light cord, and switched on the bedroom light. The clock on the wall read 9:30. “Ah, I might as well get dressed and go to the pub” I thought. “I'll find someone to talk to.”

I found the pub unexpectedly crammed, full of people, strangers, shoulder to shoulder, beer to beer.

“What's going on?” I shouted at the closest person to me. “Why are you all here?”

“Conference. University.” he shouted back at me “Wonderful town!”

I waved my thanks at him and elbowed my way through that laughing happy crowd to the bar. The lone barman was struggling with the crowd, racing from customer to pump at the far end of the bar.

The clock behind the bar read 10:20. There'd be plenty of time for a few beers. As I waited for the barman to get to my end of the bar, I pulled a cigarette and out and lit it.

I was tapped on the shoulder: the woman next to me at the bar, blond and vibrant, asked “Can I have a light?”

“Sure” I replied, and held my lighter up to her proffered cigarette. She put her hand on my shoulder to steady herself as she lit her cigarette. My 21^st was suddenly looking up!

“Are you part of the Conference?” I asked.

“No, my husband and I moved here a few months ago” she shouted back.

At that moment there was a disturbance in the crowd to my left.

“You!” a man popped through the crowd, shouting, angry, pointing at me: “You! You're the person who's sleeping with my wife!”

“No!” I shouted back, quizzically. “You're wrong!”

“I'm going to kill you!” As he made the threat, unbelievably, surreally, he pulled a gun out of his jacket and prodded my chest with it.

I felt the woman's hands digging into my shoulder.

“No!” I shouted, now desperate. “You've got this all wrong. It's not what it seems!”

BANG! The bastard had pulled the trigger.

My first reaction was anger. A deep anger at what the stupidity of the whole thing.

But quickly the anger was washed away by a wave of pain. Pain at a scale that I have never felt before or since. It was as though someone had plunged their hand into my chest and pulled a large chunk of it out. Which, in a way, I guess they just had.

And with that wave came powerlessness. I was no longer in control. I was falling, not just physically to the floor, but far worse, the world was falling away from me. Reality was closing down, the light and screams at the end of a tunnel that I was being pulled back into.

The physical world around was gone long before my body hit the floor. All that I had was pain. Excruciating pain. And then that faded away, leaving me as nothing more than a speck of consciousness in a vast empty void.

I tried rationalising.

I'd been shot. I must have died. There was life after death! I was initially triumphant. There is life after death.

But no relative came to take me elsewhere. Just the unrelenting nothingness, that went on and on and on.

I suddenly knew that this must be hell. An eternity of nothingness. I ranted and raged. I didn't deserve this! But no one can hear you scream in a vacuum. Not even yourself.

I calmed down. I tried remembering scenes from my life, remembering people, songs, places. Anything that could occupy me.

Then the insanity hit. If there was nothing but my consciousness, then I could create things. Like hands. I don't know why, but I fixated on hands. I worked really hard on feeling what it would be like to have hands – and I had hands!

I put them together, feeling, treasuring, the sensation of them touching. They hungrily explored each other. They had arms attached. And the arms connected to a body. My body!

But there was a sheet over my body? Why?

I rationalised again. I must be in a hospital!

I lifted the sheet felt underneath, where the wound would be. There was no wound!

But I was blind?

I opened my eyes, and in that infinite darkness, touched my eyeballs. They were there!

I rationalised, yet again. When I fell, I must have hit my head and suffered brain damage. Now, many months later, I had come to, my wounds healed. But my ability to see had been destroyed by the brain damage!

“Nurse” I shouted, “Nurse!” But no one came.

It must be night. It must be night, and the staff were sleeping. In a hospital, there must be an alarm bell, to call the staff.

I felt above my head. And there is was, hanging from a cord!

I pressed it. Light flooded the room. It was my bedroom. The clock on the wall read 10:30. 10 minutes ago I had been in a pub, lighting a cigarette.

You know, there are people who say that if you dream of dying, then you die. I have to disagree with them. For if they are correct then this world we stand in is one I constructed in my death.

Regardless, I have been shot. And yet am here to share the tale.

The mice are driving the experiment

My next speech on. For this one I thought I'd try to give the audience a window into the wild and wacky world of software development, as I see it. And the view isn't that good...

A twig. It all started with a twig. Someone, a long time ago, prodded something, and noticed that it moved. Ever since then we have been poking away at things, and developing increasingly complex machines based on the results of our prodding. That jumbo jet that flies above can be seen as the apex of this twig technology.^[1]

But our world is changing.

Through the wonder of integrated circuits we are now building machines out of the dancing of electrons. There are no moving parts in these machines. We are entering a new age – the silicon age.

Software development stands at the very forefront of this new age.

But if we truly look at the world of software development I fear that it shows we are not doing very well in this new post twig era. There are many issues, but I believe that there are two primary issues causing most of the problems.

But to explain, first you have to understand software.

Software can be seen as machines of the mind. Machines that have been created from words. Small sets of words written down to form tiny languages. With those small languages we instruct the electrons, building at first simple machines. As these tiny languages have such limited vocabularies, we communicate the ideas behind our machines of the mind with others through abstractions and metaphors.

Then we iterate, adding new words to our existing languages, developing new languages, wrapping existing machines to extend their capabilities, building new machines, and so on. We build on our past successes, learning from our mistakes... Of course, with the new languages and new machines come new abstractions and metaphors.

And so the circle of software development goes.

The speed at which we software developers extend and change our machines, languages, abstractions and metaphors mean that half of what a software developer knows today will be obsolete in three years time. This then, is the first issue: the need for continuous learning.^[2]

Very few software companies have learning at their heart. So much so that Starbucks will spend more on training a barrista than the typical software company will spend on training a developer. ^[3] Software companies thus expect their employees to keep abreast of the rapidly changing world through after hours study, or they rely on new hires to bring in the new knowledge they require.

This makes the industry ageist.

Think about it. The more time you spend working on a current language or platform, the less time you have to study and learn the ones that will replace what you currently know. Especially if you have a family.

So the industry is also set against people with normal family lives.

Which makes the industry inherently sexist.

Any women who take time out to have children will find that the longer they leave their return to the industry the more out of touch they will be – and thus less likely to find work.

Google is one of the few companies that I know of that have developed a strategy to help their employees learn: they allow developers 20% of their paid time to work on things that aren't in their job descriptions. To try new things out, to experiment, to learn.^[4]

When I tried to discuss Google's approach with the head of software development at a local company he was outraged – exploding in white hot anger at the thought that his developers would spend one day a week not “working”.

The next issue is subtly related.

People have ideas, and those ideas are turned into theories. But in software, those theories are mostly never tested. If accepted, they simply become dogma, a truth that all are expected to follow, unquestioningly. Those who don't follow are ostracized and ridiculed.

As an example there is a deep seated belief that there is at least a 10 times difference between the productivity of 'good' and 'bad' developers. But the truth is that there are no really valid metrics to measure programmer productivity. People can't even agree on what makes a good or a bad developer. So if developer productivity can't be measured, how can the belief have any basis?

We need look no further than the job adverts for software developers to see these two problems exposed: Employers choose to drill down on technology skills, riddling job adverts with acronyms, seeking years of experience in specific languages, platforms and tools^[5] . The industry is looking for people it doesn't have to train - and applicants have to prove that they don't need the training. Nowadays even people with PhD's can expect to be asked to write a test to prove their competence when they apply for a post.

But here in Australia, for every hundred resume's received by a software company, only one person will be hired. In the United States that figure was two in a hundred.

This is in an industry that claims that that there is a shortage of developers.

Only one in a hundred applicants are accepted.

Isn't this really symptomatic of an industry that is picky beyond belief, doing its level best to only hire the “good” developers that require no further training?

I believe that these two issues expose us as the illogical beings that we really are. Struggling with unfounded beliefs and not able to deal with an the need for continuous learning in our workplaces.

Software development is the experimental frontier of the post twig era. In that experimental frontier I believe that that the mice are driving the experiment.

Footnotes

[1] Douglas Adams was the person who I first heard make this observation. Read the book: it is recommended!

[2] Can anyone say "Innovator's Dilemma"? Perhaps one of the reasons companies claim to look for people who go to user groups and write open source software is that subconsciously we recognize that passion does trump rational decision making?

[3] I believe that McDonald's might also spend more on training their burger flippers than a typical software company will spend on training its developers.

[4] Atlassian also do this: I think that their business focused way of directing this might be a a better way than Google's.

[5] Yes: the more acronyms, years and jargon I see in your job advert, the less I expect that you spend on training your developers. The best job advert for developers I have seen simply read "Wanted: Scala developer". I applied, but didn't make the cut as I was deemed "not to be a good fit for the company culture". I understood that to mean that I would be the only developer on the team with a wife and kids - I was too old :-(

Beware what lies in the sand beneath

Another month, another speech. This one was a fun one to give, as most people in the audience really hadn't heard of toxoplasmosis.

Beware what lies in the sand beneath

There is a parasite that lives amongst us.

A parasite so small that when eaten by you, it will make its way through your gut wall, and then, using your bloodstream as a vehicle it moves to the sites in your body which it will call home.

These sites being your muscles and your brain.

Once the parasite has arrived at its future home it forms cysts inside your cells, hiding in the cysts, safe from your immune system.

It is a parasite that most of us aren't aware of.

Which is odd – because at least one in five of us are infected.

That's just the humans – a whole range of other animals are also subject to attack by this parasite. From mice and rats through to humans.

Not only is it a common parasite – but once infected it is very difficult to clear the infection.

The name of the parasite I am talking about tonight is Toxoplasma Gondii

Until recently it wasn't considered a bad infection to have.

Then it was noticed that toxoplasmosis alters the behaviour of infected rats.

Infected rats started to behave in very un-rat like ways.

They begin to hang out in areas where there are cats – even at times trying to go one on one against the cats, trying to show those cats exactly who is the boss.

Which is not a very bright thing to do, because, well, cats eat rats.

So infected rats, despite their bravery, generally don't have happy endings.

But here's the thought provoking thing: Toxoplasmosis can only breed in the small intestine of a cat.

So it needs to be ingested by a cat to breed. It is critical for the survival of the parasite that it find its way to a cat's gut.

How convenient then, from the parasites point of view, that a rat infected with Toxoplasmosis would change it's behaviour in such a way as to make it more prone to be eaten by cats.

Scientists believe that convenience plays no role in this. Rather, they believe that Toxoplasmosis cruelly and deliberately plays with the brain of its rat hosts to make them go out and get eaten by cats.

Singapore zoo has a its tigers separated from us human viewers by large plate glass windows. From some angles it looks as though nothing separates you from the tigers.

I don't know about you, but in those moments, when it just me and the tiger, my stomach always instinctively tightens in an apprehensive knot.

It is almost as though my subconscious recognises that a few thousand years back, when men were far more puny, and tigers, lion, and other large cats were far more plentiful, that, well, we were the prey.

Let us all do some basic scientific research in the form of a little thought experiment.

Could it be possible that us humans are also susceptible to behavioural changes driven by something so much smaller than one of our cells?

Also, if there are behavioural changes, just what might they be?

Scientists were also intrigued by this line of thought.

Having a fairly large infected population to sample, they found it fairly easy to design experiments and tests that would reveal changes.

And they found them!

Interestingly they found that the changes were gender related

Infected men are far more likely to disregard rules and are more expedient, suspicious, jealous, and dogmatic.

Infected women are more beautiful, warm hearted, outgoing and persistent.

Common to both are impaired motor skills, and slower reactions

So much so that people with toxoplasmosis are six times more likely to have traffic accidents than people without.

Thought provoking. Are these behaviours that increase your chances of hanging out with the cats?

Regardless, the killing tigers have now been replaced by the killing cars.

More disturbingly, there is emerging evidence that some of us might become schizophrenic or neurotic when infected. And now forms of brain cancer are also being linked to infections

How do you get toxoplasmosis?

Easy!

Touching or coming into contact with sand containing infected cat poo.

Eating uncooked, unwashed fruits or vegetables that have been contaminated by manure with infected cat poo.

Eating raw or undercooked meat that's contaminated.

And sometimes, very rarely, by being born with it (a woman who gets a toxoplasmosis infection while pregnant can pass the parasite on to her unborn child).

There is a belief by some that we humans are where we are today because of schizophrenia.

And because of dominant rule breaking people who have pushed the boundaries.

It is a sobering thought that our civilisation might be what it is because of a tiny parasite.

But you know what: looking at the modern world I think that perhaps we can live without this parasite

That the time has come for us to make our own way, brains unaltered, into the future.

So make sure that your children's sand pits are covered when they aren't playing in them.

Keep your cat away from the wildlife.

Do a good job of washing and preparing your food.

Wear gardening gloves.

Such simple steps to stay safe.

And remember, if you get hot under the collar while driving, and want to gun your car from one stop to the next, and those idiot cyclists who just slow you down and you get so tense at the stupidity of others...

Just remember it could be your inner parasite trying to introduce you to your modern tiger.

So take a deep breath, calm down.

Beware what lies in the sand beneath.

I don't understand the Australian IT business

Here in Australia employers are screaming out that they can't get skilled IT employees.

The situation is so bad, apparently, that we need the visa rules changed to allow IT specialists into the country (this link is one example of the articles that flood our papers).

But at the same time, IT companies in Australia will hire only 1 in a 100 applicants!

If you have a shortage of skilled people, then you don't turn your nose up at applicants at this rate. Sorry. You are obviously spoiled for choice and being super, super selective in who you hire. So much so that you are wasting more time in filtering and selecting people than you should be.

This, by the way, is in a country that has as almost standard, a probation period. If the employer doesn't like you in the first few months of your employ then you are toast. No recriminations, no blame. It would be surely be more cost effective to hire people and then shed them if they don't work out?

Do employers really want to open the gates to allow in people who they then aren't going to hire? It makes no sense to me.

I'm guessing that the real reason that we want the visa restrictions relaxed is to drop salaries, in some warped supply/demand way... If true, what does that tell us?

Footnote, 29^th August: Of the 1 in a 100 applicants hired, almost 50% aren't up to the job...

Another month, another speech..

Be Prepared

It has been a long day. The seats on the train are all taken. So you stand, hanging on to a strap as the train hustles you home.

A girl near the end of the carriage unexpectedly jumps up, sobbing, and steps through the inter-leading door between the carriages.

You see her framed by the door window, standing on the exposed, shaking, platform that bridges the two carriages.

Suddenly she picks her leg up, swings herself up and over the guard rails, and falls from sight.

You, and the the people in the carriage that saw this are shocked. What has just happened? Did she really just jump – why was there no sound – are trains really that brutally massive?

All these thoughts race through your mind. But before you can work out what to do you see her head bobbing at the bottom of one of the inter-leading carriage windows.

Relief fills you, and everyone else who saw her vanish. She's alright: she's clinging to the carriage! But she is in a very dangerous spot.

You realise to your horror that all the other people on your carriage who saw this drama play out are now starting to look at their newspapers, to look out the side windows – doing anything they can to exit the stage on which they unintentionally find themselves.

What would you do if that were you in the carriage?

I believe that we must consciously choose to act in the day to day drama's that intersect our lives.

I also know that we choose how we are to act in the drama. Our chosen role can range from deliberate inaction to full participation.

On that train rattling through the night, with the girl clinging to its side, I felt powerless.

She was behaving irrationally: if I went near her what might the result might be? Would she jump – or would she pull me out into the void to be with her?

I couldn't leave her, and I feared getting too close to her? What could I do?

There was another path I could follow. I could contact the driver. Every door on the train has an emergency intercom that allows you to talk directly to the driver.

But the more people there are around an unfolding drama, the harder it is for us to take an action that is different from theirs.

We look to the others around us for leadership – and when none comes we use their lack of action to abrogate our responsibilities.

I ran from door to door on that carriage, desperately looking for an intercom. And found none!

The people on the train were now starting to look at me – I was becoming the focus of their attention – not the girl desperately clinging to the side of the train.

It was just surreally wrong - if that had been your daughter, wife, or best friend of clinging to the side of the train, would you have ignored her to instead watch the strange man who was now running from door to door? I think not.

Yet on that carriage everyone did nothing, complicit in a unison of inaction. And now by focusing on me, made me feel as though I was the one who was strange and different – and that I was in the wrong.

Just then the train slowed and stopped at a station. I escaped their attention by leaping out the train.

I ran up the platform, to the drivers window, knocked on it, and told him of the girl.

Baden Powell, founder of the scout movement, said: “Be prepared”.

By that he meant that you must prepare yourself "by previously thinking out and practicing how to act on any accident or emergency so that you are never taken by surprise".

Later, when I got back on my carriage, after the driver had navigated the girl to the safety of the station platform, I saw that there were indeed intercoms on the carriage: others, standing, had simply been leaning against them, hiding them with their bodies.

Now when I get onto a train I check for the intercoms, making sure I know exactly where to go if something happens.

That preparation has already paid off: just last week another girl collapsed on the train. Whilst an elderly women aided her, I, nervously, because no one else was doing anything, called the driver.

No less than 8 officials met us at Flinders Station and and tended to the girl.

That brave elderly women and I were not punished for stalling that train in rush hour – none of the officials even bothered with the two of us once they were attending to the girl.

We just slipped away with the crowd when we saw the girl responding to their ministrations.

Ratko Mladic has just been extradited to the Hague, to stand trial for the Srebrenica massacre.

A massacre in which over 8000 men died. It is the largest mass murder in Europe since the end of the world war two.

What could tie the terrible deeds of Ratko Mladic to us, who were in that carriage with a girl clinging to its side?

400 heavily armed and highly trained Dutch soldiers were stationed in Srebrenica when the massacre took place. Unbelievably, they turned their backs.

The two events are related by the people who stood by and did nothing.

Evil blossoms when watered by the apathy of those around it.

If we can learn act in the day to day drama's that intersect our lives, we will be more able to act when evil starts to take root.

So be prepared – roll play scenarios in your head, learn from how others have behaved in emergencies.

And remember to choose your role – and act, when you find yourself inadvertently thrust into a drama.

JavaScript, Functional Programming & UML?

I come from a Java background. As I have been learning JavaScript through my naked server experiment I find myself wondering more and more if "traditional" Object Orientation is the right approach to JavaScript. I now agree: JavaScript is the most widely deployed functional language.

When doing Java development we often share our thoughts via simple UML diagrams. They offer a nice visual way to share concepts and discuss ideas. They allow us to abstract the underlying complexity of implementation away. In short, to a Java developer, UML can be jolly useful.

But now I find myself wondering how I can use UML to describe any functional JavaScript that I might write. As a set of utility classes, perhaps? Regardless, it would seem that I am not alone.

In fact the kingdom of nouns extends far further than the shores of Java. It would seem that at some stage the software industry did truly believe the religious  decree that procedural programming was bad...