Schlomo Schapiro

The Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference is always about bringing hard data to make a point. This year I was overwhelmed by the amount of T-Shirts given out by the exhibitors. Over a coffee I was joking with somebody, that there must be like 20000 shirts at the conference. He was loughing it off, but I actually go curious and asked all  exhibitors how many shirts they brought: But, I was wrong. According to the survey there where a total of 10746 shirts for about 2500 attendees, which makes  over 5 shirts per attendee ! So what caused this "overprovisioning"? As not everybody likes to take shirts, there must be people who walked away with 10 or 20 shirts... Now that we have some hard data we should try to learn something from this data. Unfortunately I could not find any other information about all these companies that might be correlated here. Some companies who brought few shirts told me that they give them only to special customers and not hand ...

Do you use your smart phone to record videos? Do you use it to record talks at conferences? Did you ever try to hold up a smart phone for 45 minutes? Well, I did and it was no fun at all! My fix for this problem was to build an improvised camera stand for my phone: All you need for that is some cardboard and something to cut it: It takes about 5 minutes to make and greatly improves the video quality: No more jitter, shaking or covering up the mic. With the right light conditions you can even manage to make professional looking videos. Also, if you switch the phone to flight mode you can be sure that no incoming call will interrupt the recording. Download printable version .

Limmud 2012 was in Berlin at the Jüdische Oberschule  and that made it quite different from the previous Limmud festivals at Werbellinsee . The feeling was much less that of a closed community and more that of a regular conference. Luckily the next Limmud festival will (most likely) be back at Werbellinsee. The festival was well attended without feeling crowded. I talked a bit to the org team. They seemed as stressed as in previous years. Seeing how well the festival runs they really deserve a lot of respect and gratitude for doing this job. Highlights where the talks by Rabbi Cardozo which where approximately the same as the ones he gave at previous Limmud events (see the his YouTube playlists  for a choice of videos), but still worthwhile to sit through. There were also lots of kids programs, like Ruth and Naomi , Ask the Rabi  and of course lots of movies. The unusal venue in the middle of the city allowed for various tours which where also well frequented....

Today I spent almost all the day helping the LinuxTag crew. They needed someone to help with transportation and I own a trailer and had a day of vacation. IT turns out that the LinuxTag - like all trade shows - comes with a lot of stuff and the people who help also need something: Shopping for the LinuxTag And this is actually not all of it, just to help the volunteers and project members and booth staff. Besides lugging lots of boxes and crates I actually learned a lot about the LinuxTag today: It is all completely done by volunteers, most of whom actually take vacation days to organize the event! If you like the LinuxTag please come and join the effort and sign up to help at the LinuxTag:  http://www.linuxtag.org/2012/de/mitmachen.html

In his blog DevOps is DOA  Tom Mornini writes that DevOps is already outdated in the face of PaaS offerings. His opinion is not entirely surprising as he is CTO and co-founder at EngineYard , a large PaaS vendor. Interstingly most people seem to disagree with his opinion (for example here , here and all  of the comments at Tom's blog). I also believe that he missed the main advantage of DevOps which is IMHO that DevOps actually supports knowledge-driven teams while PaaS requires one to trust in the service quality of the PaaS vendor with little to no way of influencing that. So, if you don't want to increase the amount of knowlegde in your organization then PaaS is a good way to go and then you maybe really don't need a DevOps approach. Just wait a while and find some of your developers turned into ops because in the end even in a PaaS world somebody needs to maintain the automation that is used to feed the PaaS hosting. But, if you want to increase the total amount...

In his recent blog post about Package Management Systems , Diomidis Spinellis gives sound advice about using packages for software management: "The breadth of modules you can reuse is nothing short of amazing, making it a crime to start writing code before you investigate what packages you can reuse. Whatever your need, there’s likely to be a package that you can effortlessly link with your application. Promisingly, the structure that package managers bring both to the tools we use in our development process and the libraries we reuse in our products ties nicely with the recent move emphasizing development operations (DevOps) as an integration between software development and IT operations. Orderly and organized package management is a key element of a well-run software production process. Maintaining a list of an organization’s recommended packages allows teams to share best practices and avoids package incompatibilities. So, if your business allows it, join a pack...

It has been a while since my first Silicon Berlin blog post. I tried to put the essence of my understand of Silicon Berlin into a few lines: Silicon Berlin is a label or brand that hopes to unite Berlin web companies to make Berlin a better place for web companies. It can serve as a label under which a community of web companies and IT people can act together. Silicon Berlin - beeing a true community effort - is not owned by anybody and can be used by anyone interested to further their goals with regard to making Berlin more attractive for web companies and for people who like to work in web companies. Please comment and let me know your opinion. My most recent activity is my first public Silicon Berlin talk at the 5th Berlin DevOps meetup . Here are a few new related articles, events and links: Silicon Allee Breakfast Meetup on 2012-02-07 Warum Berlin das neue Silicon Valley ist , Berliner Morgenpost, 2012-01-29 „Berlin – das Silicon Valley Deutschlands?“ Event on 2012...

See Berlin DevOps homepage for group info. "Continuous Delivery – the tech parts" by Jens Bräuer Very interesting talk about the technical details of automating a complete server environment with AWS, RPM, YUM, MCollective, Puppet and Jenkins. Some things I noted: Amazon S3 <-> YUM Integration (use S3 as YUM repo backend) https://github.com/jbraeuer/yum-s3 and https://github.com/NumberFour/yum-s3-plugin Use createrepo baseurl to point to actual RPM location in S3 Using a distributed HTTP-based document store as a YUM repo backend to solve the availability problem sounds like a really good idea. Software packages bring their own monitoring and load balancer configuration He also recommended http://mmonit.com/monit/ for monitoring and http://haproxy.1wt.eu/ for load balancing. Their software packages bring their own monitoring and load balancing configuration that is dropped into /etc/monit.d and /etc/haproxy.d . Each server monitors itself ...

I am at the CloudCamp Ghent  and can share some notes. VMware Cloud Foundry http://www.flickr.com/photos/70260750@N08/6376439699/ Lode Vermeiren , VMware. Talk on Slideshare Long part about VMware products and history that are cloud related. It got actually interesting once he started to demo stuff. The good part was that it was very authentic (e.g. not all parts where working). The bad part was that there was not so much to see, just some basic "upload my simple Hello World app" The speaker distributed USB Keys with a VM and registration codes for the Cloud Foundry service. Look at http://cloudfoundry.com/micro and use the cloudcampgh code for instant access (till November 26 th ). Without the code invites might take a couple of days to activate. Combell Cloud Cases Company is sponsor, this is a short sales pitch Quite refreshing in its brevity "Devops in the Cloud" is a pleonasm http://www.flickr.com/photos/70260750@N08/637652...

What do these companies have in common? (bought by Nokia in 2006) (bought by Ebay) Well, they are all in Berlin! Berlin is one of the most vibrant places on earth where new web companies settle and thrive. Berlin attracts not only people from Germany but from all over the world. Especially English speakers are welcome in Berlin and find a lot of like-minded people here. Investors are flocking to Berlin and almost every day or week we seen new start ups. Even the big players are coming now, as the recent press reports (sorry, mostly in German): NEUES GOOGLE-INSTITUT: Investoren sehen Berlin als nächstes Silicon Valley (Berliner Morgenpost 2011-10-26) Amazon kommt mit AWS nach Berlin  (2011-11-10) STARTUP-METROPOLE UND SILICON VALLEY-PENDANT: Wann begann die Berlin-Euphorie?  (2011-11-10) BERLIN - Europas Silicon Valley (DRadio Wissen 2011-11-11) Berlin: ...

I migrated my domain to Google Apps and would like to share some of my experience. One of the great features is IMHO the Enterprise Marketplace where you can find lots of really useful (and even more of useless) Apps to add to your domain. Here is a selection of apps I tried or at least noticed. Must Have Doodle  integrates really nice into Google Apps and fulfils all dreams about scheduling meetings or asking several people about their opinion on something Useful Lucid Charts has a free account which is more than sufficiant for most simple drawing needs. The shape library is rather simple, e.g. no floor plan shapes. Diagrams are limited to 60 objects each. PresentOnlineNow gets the job done with regard to online presentations and comes for free for up to 10 participants in a meeting room. Only downside is that screen sharing does not work from Linux. Positive is that the participants don't need to install anything, it requires only Flash. Might Be Interesting ...

I would like to thank everybody who helped with the Birds of a Feather event yesterday. It was really great, at the start we had about 30 people and managed to fill up all the talk slots and also had a few discussions. Till the evening some more people arrived so that we where about 70 for the dinner. The party was also joined by participants of the CouchConf , which happened to be on the same day. I hope that everybody enjoyed it and will be back next year.

The  Velocity Europe 2011  is coming closer, only two weeks to go! If you have not yet signed up, do so now and use the discount code veu11pcy  to get 20%  discount off the regular price. The code can be entered on the Velocity registration page . We managed to put together a Birds of Feathers event just on the afternoon before the velocity. This will serve as a warm-up to the Velocity and provide the open space that the main Velocity does not have this time. Meet the vibrant Berlin web community at the Betahaus , a well-known location for start up companies. Attendance is free for Velocity attendees! As is the dinner & party after the event :-) Go to the  Velocity Eruope 2011 Birds of Feathers event page at veubof2011.eventbrite.co.uk  to see all the details and sign up, the event is limited to 150 participants.

Sukkot was really great this year. We had lots of guests, lots of food (no wonder when the holidays fall on Thursday and Friday) and, most of all, perfect weather. It was not too cold, mostly even above 10° C during the day and we could sit in the sukkah every day and evening! I don't remember such a good weather since we came to Germany, so this is really remarkable. Our small balcony sukkah Come and visit us next year!

I recently attended the first TechTalk of Telekom' DeveloperGarden in Berlin. It was about GPU computing, a topic that relates to GPU-based image scaling as Apache module . The speaker, Guido Juckeland , is a heavy user of GPU computing and works at The Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing at the Dresden Technical University . The talk was quite interesting for GPU computing newbies like me. It gave a solid overview and showed the different programming styles that can be used (CUDA and OpenCL). It conveyed a lot of best practice with regard to GPU computing and several important points to consider before starting. The most important aspect is to keep the PCIe bottle-neck in mind:  Moving data between the CPU and the GPU is very slow compared to moving it between the main memory and the CPU or the GPU and its memory. Therefore, in most cases it is not efficient to offload a computation to the GPU if the data is used only once. The speedup of the GPU-b...