Brendan Gregg‘s perf book is done. Yes, I edited this one as well.
These photos show my kitchen white board before and after completion.
Expect it in print September.
ps You can now order the book from InformIT or Amazon.
We did a series of videos throughout the writing of the book, about how and why it was written. Start here.
An amusing (depending on my mood) feature of Internet arguments is that they often reach the point where my interlocutor is reduced to statements like: “You must not be American” or “You’re not from Texas” or “You can’t understand because you’re not [some other tribe of reference]”.
So, to spare myself typing in future rebuttals, here is everything we know about my ancestry – which is a lot, because people on both sides of my family tree have been keenly interested in genealogy, for personal or religious (Mormon – yes, I know about them, too) reasons.
Straughan: My paternal grandfather. This is a rare Scottish surname, a variant of Strachan. The oldest ancestor we’ve located in the Straughan line was born in Virginia in 1747. That’s right, BEFORE the revolution. My more recent Straughan ancestors were farmers in east Texas; my grandfather escaped that by studying accounting and moving to the city (New Orleans, then Shreveport).
Tiemann: My paternal grandmother. Her family was Catholic (I was baptized). An ancestor of hers immigrated from Bavaria to New Orleans shortly before the Civil War; he was awarded a medal “for valor” by the state of Louisiana. Tiemann is also not uncommon as a Jewish surname; it’s possible that somewhere along the way this line of ancestors was forcibly converted to Christianity – so maybe I’m also Jewish!
Baird: My maternal grandfather. Don’t know a lot about him; the name is Scottish. He was an accountant, family in Mississippi. In the 1930s, he went to work for an American company in Havana, where my mother and her sister were born.
Cook: My maternal grandmother, whose brother (a WWII hero with an interesting story of his own) traced his family line back to one Koch, a Hessian mercenary hired by the British to fight against those revolting Americans. He deserted, married a local girl, and became a citizen of the new nation. Somewhere in this line of descent there’s also someone French.
And here’s an ancestor on the Cook side:
Assassination of F.M.B. “Marsh” Cook
On July 23, 1890, Marsh Cook of Jasper County was gunned down by six men after warning citizens that the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention would likely limit voting rights and disfranchise black voters. Cook was a white republican candidate for delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He had urged black voters to organize against disfranchisement. No one was ever arrested or tried for his murder.
More on Marsh Cook (courtesy of my cousin Robert).
So, for those who care about such things, I can lay claim to being:
Things I am not:
…I’ll edit this as I think of more things I am or know (probably when I am accused of not being or not knowing them!).
A cousin from my mother’s side describes herself as “a child of “French Quarter beatnik” parents much involved in art, design and music.”
My dad was always obsessed with keeping up with the news. When we returned from Thailand to the US to live in 1971, this meant that I woke up every morning hearing the news on the radio, and our dinners were accompanied by the CBS Evening News on TV, with Walter Cronkite.
I was only 9 years old, with little understanding of the events being covered. But I did know that my dad had been in Vietnam (as a civilian) for two years (1967-68). Back then I had understood even less – except to be quite clear on the fact that, although he was not shooting at anybody, he was in plenty of danger of being shot. Stationed in Vinh Long province, he had been caught up in the Tet Offensive, and evacuated (under fire) by US Marines.
In those years, Walter Cronkite ended every broadcast with a list of casualties, military and civilian, on both sides of the Vietnam war – so many hundreds or thousands injured or killed that day – followed by his famous line: “And that’s the way it is.”
I did not understand at the time that his dry recital of these facts was itself a commentary; he had reported his own conclusions about the uselessness of the war years before. All I knew was that each of those numbers represented someone’s loved one, someone’s daddy who had been in harm’s way, and not survived to tell the tale as mine had. I hated Walter Cronkite for the nightly reminder of those years of fear, and what I perceived as his callousness to those losses. But I never told anybody that; he was clearly venerated by everybody else.
When Saigon fell in 1975, I watched (live?) as the final US helicopters took off, leaving terrified south Vietnamese screaming and begging to be taken away. And I wept for all those who had not made it.
Two and a half years ago, Brendan was finishing the DTrace book
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