I cried again. With happiness.
Category Archives: bio
Four Years Ago / Today
It’s now November, 2012. I will be 50 at the end of this month. Around the time of my birth, my parents – living in Louisiana – participated in the fight for Civil Rights. Their part was small, but it was not without danger. Others, as we know, paid with their lives.
Four years ago, though racism is far from dead in this country, we saw a black man elected president of the United States. I cried with pride, because it showed then how much America deserved to be called a great nation and a world leader.
I have since been often appalled at the number of my fellow citizens who are apparently mortally offended (or fearful) at what made me so happy. They don’t all dare use the racist words of 50 years ago, but it’s there, in code.
The war for Civil Rights is not over. The war for gay rights has barely begun. And the GOP is trying to roll back women’s rights, also hard-won decades ago. They want it to be “their” world again, a world “safe” for straight white men.
Yes, I feel very strongly about this. I was raised to believe in “liberty and justice for all”, though I knew from an early age that that was a goal not yet achieved.
So, if you’re one of those people trying to turn back the tide of history, I want to hear why you think this is a good idea. Step up. You know who you are. I’m waiting.
Protective Spirits
Bryan, Brendan and I recently traveled to Porto Alegre, Brazil, to speak at FISL, one of the world’s largest open source software conferences. Porto Alegre, at least in winter, is not much of a tourist destination, and we had several extra days – far more than needed – to see all that there was to see. One attraction listed in the guides is the Mercado Publico: the century-old public market, a large building filled with stalls selling produce and household goods – not tourist stuff.
Two of the stores sell religious paraphernalia, not just the typical Catholic saints etc. you might expect, but items related to Candomblé, a syncretic religion developed in Brazil from the beliefs of various African tribes who were taken there as slaves. I knew a bit about it from the film (which made its way to the US while I was in college) and book Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
^ Statuettes of Candomblé priestesses in trance; each is possessed a different Orixa (god), symbolized by her costume.
I bought a couple of stickers without knowing what they represented, just because I liked their looks:
Research on Wikipedia and Google told me that these are Iansa’ and Zé Pilintra:
The figure of Iansa’ always keeps a good distance from the central female characters of the mythological pantheon of Africa; she is closer to the territory traditionally devoted to men, being present on the battlefield, where she joins in the big fights, and preferring paths full of risk and adventure. Finally, she is always away from home; Iansa’ does not like housework!
She is extremely sensual, passionate, and has had multiple partners – but rarely at the same time, because Iansa’ is usually full in her passions. She is never mediocre, regular, or discreet, her quarrels are terrible, her regrets dramatic, her triumphs crucial in any subject… She is not given to pettiness or small betrayals. She is the Orixa of rapture, of passion.
She was the wife of Ogun and, afterwards, the most important wife of Shango. She is restless, authoritarian, but sensual, strong-tempered, domineering and brash.
from vilamulher.terra.com.br, by way of Google translate
Zé Pilintra, on the right, is “the patron spirit of the barrooms, gambling dens and gutters (while not aligned with “evil” entities, however)”. For my Italian speaking friends, his name would translate as Zio Malandrino – which I cannot translate into English.
In other words: my kinda deities.
photos by Brendan Gregg
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Performance Analysis: The USE Method
Brendan Gregg’s talk at FISL, July 2012.
This talk introduces the USE Method: a simple strategy for performing a complete check of system performance health, identifying common bottlenecks and errors. This methodology can be used early in a performance investigation to quickly identify the most severe system performance issues, and is a methodology the speaker has used successfully for years in both enterprise and cloud computing environments. Checklists have been developed to show how the USE Method can be applied to Solaris/illumos-based and Linux-based systems.
Many hardware and software resource types have been commonly overlooked, including memory and I/O busses, CPU interconnects, and kernel locks. Any of these can become a system bottleneck. The USE Method provides a way to find and identify these.
This approach focuses on the questions to ask of the system, before reaching for the tools. Tools that are ultimately used include all the standard performance tools (vmstat, iostat, top), and more advanced tools, including dynamic tracing (DTrace), and hardware performance counters.
Other performance methodologies are included for comparison: the Problem Statement Method, Workload Characterization Method, and Drill-Down Analysis Method.
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Using Video to Communicate Technology
For once, there’s video of me, talking about what I do and why I do it that way.