Musings

While reading up on IndieWeb related stuff, I stumbled upon the Now page of Chris Beckstrom. This page gives an overview what he’s working on right now. The original idea seems to be by Derek Sivers as stated on the NowNowNow Abount page. I really like this idea, so without further ado, here’s my now page

My daughter and I have started working on a LED light installation with several hundred LEDs. We are using the wonderful Fadecandy board by Adafruit. A couple of weeks ago, she hooked up their 8x8 Matrix to the Fadecandy and started to explore programming the lights with Processing. But we have bigger plans. I ordered a bunch of LED strips with 50 WS2812 Neopixels spaced out around 10cm and we started to work on hooking them up with power and data connections today. ...

Two days ago, when I resurrected this blog, I thought I’d just start from scratch, leaving the 930+ old blog posts forever gone. Then I read how Amit moved from Squarespace to Hugo using the ExitWP tool to convert a Wordpress XML export to markdown files. I had an old export file lieing around and after just a few minutes with ExitWP I had 936 Markdown files, spanning 10 years (2003 — 2013) of my old blog content. ...

After a hiatus of many, many years in the blogosphere; after a growing dissatisfaction with the way social media (I’m looking at you, Facebook) is building walled gardens; after the perceived need of having a place for a portfolio of my works, I have decided to resurrect my blog with some new technology and start all fresh. I have also decided to leave the old content buried in a broken database and in an exported XML file. Most of it is no longer technically relevant, and those personal pieces from the past, they are - well - from the past. May they rest in pieces and 404s. ...

Contrary to what the last blog post was (or wasn’t suggesting) I didn’t die while fasting - I just lost 7kg and the will to finish the 100 day blogging challenge (call it 95% success) And then a Wordpress update led to me not being able to access the backend, so I couldn’t blog anymore. And then a lot of other things happened in RL that just put blogging on the back burner. Luckily I have a nasty cold these days, so I could start to take care of all the small things that needed attention - like this blog for example. ...

So we are running an OpenStack installation based on Folsom, but with Ceph as our underlying storage engine for volumes. This is a bit cutting edge. To make matters more bleeding, we run the Ceph OSDs on BTRFS - definitively bleeding edge, as we had various of our servers die with BTRFS related kernel panics. The advice usually given is to upgrade the BTRFS code - so we have started to migrate our Quantal (12.10) servers to Raring (13.04) ...