Today was my last day at Joyent.

It has been a weird 3 years and 3 months, but I enjoyed the experience, and learned a great deal along the way. As is always the case, I’m really going to miss the people the most; both those there now, as well those I’ve worked with in the past. The company has used the term “Joyeurs” to describe its staff, and as much as I’ve never really liked the word, Joyent has managed to attract a certain kind of mind, and the people I’ve worked with during my time there have been lovely.

When I moved from Oracle, Solaris was in the twilight of its software lifecycle with a reduced amount of staff and resourcing dedicated to the operating system, and I felt sad about that.

Earlier at Oracle, one of my assignments was the Solaris kernel tech-lead role, and having had a hand in a sightly stressful build-system rewrite before that, I was a little burned out. I ended my tenure there working on the Solaris compliance(8) subsystem, which I enjoyed, but increasingly, it felt like a change of scenery would be a good idea. Several of my former colleagues had moved to Joyent and it looked like Joyent was assembling quite the team. I wanted to help out.

Perhaps this would be my next “for-life” engineering job? Having spent 21 years at Sun/Oracle, I wasn’t looking for a short-term lease, though things don’t always work out the way we hope.

I started out with an eye on build systems, the work I was really looking forward to taking on. We filed RFD 145 as an effort to improve engineering productivity for Manta and Triton development. That effort took just over a year, but I think it was well worth it, making the build system a lot less error-prone, and easier for engineers to use. After that, I worked on various bits of internal tooling, and improvements to the way we were using Jenkins.

I also had a hand in some Manta and Triton fixes, a bit of work in the SmartOS build system, and had the opportunity to learn (and, to be honest, loathe) node.js along the way. Given Joyent’s open-source-led approach to software engineering, you can see almost everything I worked on during that time, from 2018 to 2019/2020 on my GitHub page.

Still, as was suggested to me recently, it started to feel like I might have joined about 5 years too late.

While we had Manta, with its ahead-of-its-time co-located compute capability on objects, as well as the later “v2” variant (which sacrificed that capability, in favour of a more efficient metadata tier) neither solution was the approach our engineering organisation was eventually directed towards. A similar call to not continue with Joyent’s public cloud offerings, started to suggest that Joyent maybe wasn’t quite the long-term prospect I’d hoped for.

Several of the old guard at Joyent left to form Oxide, and with notable staff departures to different companies, our work environment had changed. Nevertheless, a new org was formed and hiring ramped up to contribute to a different, mostly closed-source, in-house object-storage system. We were to build-out that existing system, aiming eventually at the scale that Manta had previously delivered on. While that code was allegedly performing well on small configurations (running on very fast hardware that Manta never had access to, which always felt like a significant thumb on the scales to me), there was work needed to deploy it at a larger scale.

Curious to see what life after Manta would be like, my last year at Joyent was spent working on containerizing that system, writing new build infrastructure and new Ansible code to deploy it. I came up with some more efficient roles and playbooks, and now that we had the system composed of container images, we had the semblence of something that could work in production. This was all targetting CentOS on baremetal (for unclear reasons.) The side effects of that work were that I got to learn Ansible from the ground-up, and gained more Linux experience, for better and for worse, though I often missed the capabilities we had in SmartOS.

Over the past year, I’ve enjoyed drawing on the earlier Manta and Triton build work for this new solution. Growing a project that started as a bare-bones 2-week hackathon entry into something that we could legitimately consider for production was quite rewarding. Although there’s work still to be done, I hope the fundamentals are established. Getting the chance to write a simple build system from scratch, and getting to design it the way I talked about build systems from the beginning of my time at Joyent was a pleasure. I hope that at some point, it gets deployed to the scale we envisioned, and maybe it’ll eventually get released to the public.

With that work now in the past for me, no doubt my former colleaues will drive on with it, I’ll be taking July off to decompress, but am looking forward to my next job, and expect to be traipsing through an entirely different build infrastructure very soon.

Today is my last day at Oracle, after nearly 22 years working on and around Solaris.

I started at Sun Microsystems, Inc. in June 1996. Working there was literally a dream come true and I still count myself lucky to have had the opportunity to work on the best UNIX of its era.

I was an intern at Sun for a few months before accepting a permanent position in Nov ’96, with a fairly low sunid in the 23000’s. Here’s what my badge looked like when I started:

My plan now is to take two weeks to unwind and then start a new job, which is going to feel pretty weird, but .. you know, good-weird :-)

I’ve added a feature to FeedPlus, the command line G+ to Atom converter I mentioned previously. It now has option to also post to your Twitter stream directly, rather than going via Twitterfeed.

I found that, despite Twitterfeed claiming a 30 minute interval between checking the RSS/Atom URL it was configured to repost to Twitter, updates weren’t being pulled that frequently and often a G+ update I’d write that was relatively timely would finally appear several hours later. I decided it’d be better to work out how to post directly to Twitter.

For webapps, this didn’t appear to be too complex, but it’s a bit more involved for CLI applications (OAuth, yuck!) python-twitter helps a lot though, and it seems to be working so far. For now, I’ve got this running in a cron job that fires every 5 minutes, and while it’s definitely not as network-efficient as it could be, it’s doing the job just fine.

As before, I’m really hoping Google will come along with proper G+ to Twitter bridging (and in that direction: yes it’s lossy, but 140 characters just seems so restricting these days!) I’m also hoping that more of the folks I follow on Twitter will ditch both Facebook and Twitter, and give G+ another go – we’ll see.

Comments and bug reports welcome over on the FeedPlus Github page.

I had been using Russell Beattie’s PlusFeed application to create an RSS feed that I could pass to TwitterFeed, in order to syndicate my G+ posts over to Twitter.

It wasn’t perfect, but was good enough to do the job.

Unfortunately, Google recently changed the pricing for AppEngine, which led Russell to turn off the service.

I wasn’t able to find any good alternatives out there, so quickly rolled my own. It takes the id of a G+ user, and spits out an “atom.xml” file into the directory you choose, which you can then send to anything that can consume Atom.

The code is up on GitHub if anyone’s interested. My code isn’t perfect either, but will do the job until something better comes along: FeedPlus.

Enjoy.

Update, Dec 13th 2011: I’ve updated the app to use the offical G+ API now, rather than relying on the json data that Russell’s app relied on. Hopefully this will make it a little more stable. Next stop, add an option to have it post to Twitter directly, rather than just writing atom.

As promised here I spent the last week avoiding Twitter and Facebook, giving Google+ a go.

Summary? I think it’s fabulous.

I like the idea of Circles, I like the user interface and have yet to start to accumulate the amount of crap I was tending to get on Facebook (pointless games, updates from people who clicked on spammy “see who’s been watching your profile” apps, that sort of thing)

It’s missing some stuff so far that for me makes Twitter the better option if you’re looking to follow interesting people, or look for posts about particular topics but don’t necessarily know who those people are, or who’s writing about a particular topic of interest: #hashtags. Being able to tag posts would be useful too, because while I like being able to view just a set of posts from a given Circle of friends, not everything those friends write about is necessarily relevant to me.

I’ve a few other nits with G+ that I’d like to see improved as well, including better client support on Android, a public API (which will help towards the first item, no doubt) but I’m happy to be patient.

It’s early days with Google+, though what I’ve seen so far makes me think it won’t be long before they’ll have the extra features that seem like an obvious addition to any social networking application.

So, what’s my plan with Twitter and Facebook?

Well, the week-long experiment on Google plus wasn’t long enough for me to choose whether or not to keep using one of those other services. My plan for now, is to hang on to my Twitter account, @timfoster and essentially treat it as read-only, except for direct messages and any replies I feel like posting to other folks on Twitter.

I’m going to try to use +Tim Foster for everything else.

As for Facebook, I’m going to give it up completely – I really only started using it to connect with the people that I know who don’t use Twitter, and seeing as there’s a better application out there now, it seems like Facebook has outlived its usefulness. I’d honestly rather one corporation had a detailed map of me than two (not that I can be particularly precious about this: I’ve got an Android phone, use Gmail – so in a sense, I’ve already signed my soul over to Google)

So, I’m closing my Facebook account as of next week, and stopping the Twitter re-publication now (I rarely ever actually post on Facebook, usually it’s just my Twitter feed getting redirected there)

If you would still like to keep up with me, get onto Google Plus – I’ve a few invites left which I’ll give to you if I know you, but I’m guessing they’ve got to be close to opening the service for anyone who wants in, invite or not. Otherwise, join Twitter.

I ran the 2011 Wellington Marathon on the 19th of June – that was my 3rd marathon, and without doubt, the toughest one I’ve done to date. As with the other races that I’ve
run, here’s a writeup of my experiences.

There’s also an official race report, if you’re interested.

Going into the build-up for the race this year, my goal was to try to beat last year’s time, but really I wanted to see if I had a sub-3hr marathon in me, I knew it’d be a stretch, but I was going to give it a try.

With that in mind, I stepped up to the next level of training, getting serious about it. As with earlier years, I thought I’d stick with Hal Higdon’s training program, but this time going for the Advanced – I plan. Over and above the “Intermediate – 2” plan that I followed last year, this one added speed-work, hill repeats, tempo runs, and an extra day of running.

So, for 18 weeks during the lead up to the marathon, I was running 6 days a week, which was extremely grueling – not just for me, but also for my long-suffering family. They were incredibly supportive during the training, thanks Bob, Ella & Calum!

As before, I took a unit-test-inspired approach, printing out the training plan and sticking it to our fridge, with an aim of turning it green. Days when I just couldn’t be bothered running would get a red mark, days when I was unable to run, either because I was sick or because of work-pressure would be highlighted in yellow. Otherwise, I got on with the training, and slowly coloured each square green when I could. Ella was happy to help colouring too, she did a great job!

Overall, I was happy with the training progress – here’s the completed chart. I was sick for about 10 days in total, and if you match up pkg(5) integration dates for the projects I was working on, you can probably spot where work got in the way of running :-)

During training, I was getting my Yasso repeats up to the point where I was definitely in the right ballpark for a sub-3hr finish.

As I got closer to race day though, I became uncertain whether I’d be able to run the pace I was aiming for over the full distance. The longest I’d run at full race-pace was 16k. Still, I reasoned that those 16k were very hilly during training, so perhaps on the flat, I’d be alright. There was only one way to find out.

Race day, like last year, was cold and wet – a marathon at the end of June is in the depths of winter here. We lined up on the concourse of the Westpac stadium at 7:30am ready for the off.

My first few kilometers were slow as I moved through the pack, and I only looked at my watch as we approached Te Papa seeing that I was a little behind. I picked up the pace a bit, before settling into my race-pace.

The wind around the Wellington bays was strong and gusty, and like last year, I drafted when I could and took my turn. Getting out towards Shelly Bay, my 10k time was looking good – there was another runner doing about the same pace as me so we hung on and kept each other going. At this point, I was running a pace of between 4:01 and 4:12/km (depending on wind and water stations, I guess) which should have had me finishing around 2:52:00 – bang on the pace I was hoping for.

Thinking about pacing before the race, I had eventually decided that I’d go out with a really aggressive pace, aiming for well under a 3hr finish, rather then being more conservative and potentially making it over the line in 3:01 or thereabouts. While just scraping over the line sub-3hr would have been great,
I’d hate to have put in all that effort, and only miss my goal by a few seconds.

The question I faced was, was I willing to potentially blow my chances of beating last year’s time at all or risking the dreaded “DNF” (Did Not Finish), just to avoid the anguish of barely missing a sub-3hr finish? Yes, I was.

At the half-way turn-around, things were still going well. I was keeping to my pace, and feeling quite good about progress so far, but they say the first half of a marathon is just about transport – the race really begins at the halfway mark.

My pace slowed slightly leading up to the 30km mark and then I hit the wall – or rather, my legs did.

With only 10k to go, I started feeling slight twinges in my calves, which made me extremely worried. I tried easing up on my pace a little, to give my legs a chance. Apart from my legs though, I still felt good at this point – I wasn’t tired or out of breath, and definitely had fight left in me.

Unfortunately, things only got worse from here. As I made it back along the route we’d taken earlier, now joined by the half-marathon runners, the cramps in my legs became worse. At water stations, I’d drop to walking pace, trying to struggle back up to at least a 5:00/km pace when I started running again, but the cramps persisted and continued to get worse, as did the pain.

Partly it was pain in my legs, which was getting really intense at this point, but also it was from seeing my goal-time slipping away from me: there was nothing I could do about it.

The last 5k were gruesome – I just wanted to finish the race at this point, and didn’t care what sort of time I’d finish in. Finally limping over line, I was happy it was over, but depressed at the same time.

As it turned out, I did beat last year’s time of 3:12:39, with a 3:11:37 finish. So, was all the training leading up to the race worth a finish time of only 62 seconds faster than last year?

Well, I can’t pretend that I wasn’t hugely disappointed with my result, but at the same time, I keep telling myself that a 3:11 marathon finish isn’t shabby by any measure. I know I’m faster than that, but I’m still weighing up whether I want to try to prove it or not next year.

In the meantime, I’m taking a break from running – give it a few months and perhaps I’ll be back on the roads again, but for now, I’m enjoying the extra free time I suddenly seem to have!

Race results, and splits from my watch during the race are below:

Had a good conversation with Ella (age 4), as she was cleaning her teeth this evening:

“Dad, do you know what mints are made of?”
“No, I don’t Ella. What are they made of?”
“Toothpaste and water.”
“Really? Did Mum tell you that?”
“Nope. I just figured it out.”

Here is a selection of the last three pairs of running shoes I’ve owned:

– they’re all Asics Nimbus x, and all from successive years. I’ve trained for and run a marathon in each of the last two pairs, and am currently putting my most recent pair through their paces with another race in the next few weeks. I’m running 6 days a week at the moment on the road, with a maximum of about 50 miles/week. I really like these shoes – honestly, no complaints and no injuries to speak of.

The thing is, it’s getting to be fairly obvious to me where my runners wear out the fastest – just on the outside edge of the heel, and at a fairly consistent area on the midsole. (yes, I know I should have changed the red & white pair well before they got into the state they’re in)

So, here’s my idea: could someone please come up with a mechanism that allows me to present these old shoes to my running shop the next time I’m getting a new pair so that they can do a quick 3d-scan of the old shoes, then send the scan off to the factory along with my weight and height, and a brief description of the sort of running I do.

There, they would take the scans, run them through a CAD system, do some magic, then 3d-print a new pair for me with slightly harder-wearing rubber on the bits that wear out most quickly for me. They’d send them back to the shop a few weeks later and I’d pick them up. I would even pay slightly more for this, if it means my runners don’t wear out as quickly, and they’ll have a loyal customer for life.

Yes, I admit to the possibility that perhaps harder-wearing parts of the sole might mean less cushioning in those parts, and that maybe the runners are designed to fall apart at the moment, in the interests of protecting my joints? Still, it’d be an interesting experiment I think.

I’ve had a few people asking for the focaccia recipe I mentioned here, so here goes.

It comes from Annabel Langbein‘s The Free Range Cook and someone has helpfully transcribed it here.

Other than the description above, Bob mentions that you should mix the extra virgin olive oil together with the potato using a fork until it’s smooth before adding it to the dough.

Yes, potato in a focaccia recipe – some say this betrays our Irish roots, they’re probably right, but it makes for pretty fabulous bread.

2010 was a busy year for myself and the family. Here are some of the things I got up to:

• Moved job

  I joined the IPS team in January

• Moved company

  Sun Ireland disappeared in April, and I became an Oracle employee. Personally, that’s working out very well and I’m not noticing much difference in terms of my day to day work. Yes, the company has a different culture – and if there were a “Top Gear Cool Wall” for IT companies, in my opinion, Oracle would likely be “Seriously uncool“, with Sun as “sub-zero“. I think the Solaris engineering culture has survived the transition so far, at least at my level. We’ll see what the New Year brings.

• Moved country

  I moved from Ireland to NZ in May, having gone through the long process of applying for residency here. That this coincided with the economic conditions in Ireland was purely chance. Our decision to move was not related to work or the economy, it was purely based on a willingness to stretch our horizons and see some more of the world. So far, NZ is treating us well – ups and downs.

• Ran another marathon

  Phew.

• Was mentioned in a piece by the Irish Times

  (albeit with the errors that they used my wife’s maiden name, and mis-credited my photo to Alan Betson, though I’m happy to have my photographs confused with his, I’m really not in the same league :-) )

• Did a total of 24 putbacks to the pkg-gate.

  This covered 66 bugs or RFEs – some were minor and didn’t take a lot of work to get right, like 12723, some were major like 13536 and were projects in themselves. All were a lot of fun to work on though, and I feel privileged to continue to be employed on something I enjoy.

Looking forward to 2011, I’m hoping to explore more of NZ. If you follow me on Twitter, subscribe to my Flickr feed or look at some of the stuff I’ve put up on Smugmug, you’ll see some of the photos I’ve taken this year: this country really is incredibly beautiful – indeed, as is Ireland. You should visit both places, then pick which one you want to live in.

There’s lots to do next year – we’re moving house in a few weeks time, and I get to set up a new home office, in a separate building to the house – so I’m hoping my struggle for a healthier work/life balance will start tipping in the right direction.

I’ll also try to keep up the running – possibly entering the Wellington marathon again to see if I can better this year’s time, though being honest, I’m not sure I’ve got a faster pace in me – I’ll aim to improve though. Having recovered from the marathon, I’m doing a lot less road-running and a lot more mountain/off-road running now so perhaps it’s time to look for a different sort of event instead?

Roll on 2011 :-)

For the past few years, every Halloween, we’ve had fireworks in Dublin. I go out, take photos, post them on my blog along with a bit of a commentary on what I got up to during the day. I generally also give a nod to Z-Day along the way (back in 2005, I was working on the ZFS test team when we integrated into Solaris, something I still feel proud to have been a part of)

This was the first year in a long time that I’ve not done that, and while my birthday was great in every other way, I really missed the fireworks. Halloween just isn’t a big thing here in NZ, and I think that’s a shame. In or around my birthday, since the day I was born, there’s always been something extra special in Ireland – fireworks, a spooky atmosphere, and some pretty wonderful parties (I like to think Tim’s Halloween Fancy Dress parties had a bit of a reputation, back in the day)

It turns out that NZ, with it’s colonial background, has more celebrations for November 5th than it does for Halloween, and Wellington seems to go all-out on the fireworks front. So, armed with my 70-200 f4 (no tripod, I enjoy the swirling pattern that you get from handheld fireworks photos) I took off up to the hills of Khandallah this evening, ditched the car wherever I could find some space, and rushed to find a vantage point. I didn’t get the best spot, but I was reasonably happy with the photos I got nonetheless.

The SmugMug album is here, and I’ve thrown in a few thumbnails below (if you want them bigger, go for the SmugMug link instead). I’m looking forward to next year’s fireworks already, wherever I’ll be at that stage.

I ran the Wellington Harbour Coast Marathon yesterday, finishing 32nd overall, 24th in my category with a time of 3:12:39 – results here. I’m thrilled with the result, and thought a race write-up was in order.

It was a very early start – with the gun going off at 07:30, I was up at about 05:40 in order to get some breakfast in and give it a bit of a chance to get digested. I was in bed early the night before, and the night before that, but didn’t sleep much on Saturday. Still, I’d watched the best pre-marathon advice video I’ve seen, here and was as prepared as I could be. The weather for the day, was a 10°C high, 7°C low, a 37kph southerly and 87% humidity, according to the race website and it felt pretty bleak as the missus gave me a lift to starting area.

We made it to the Westpac Stadium for about 06:40, checked in my bag of clothes for after the race, donned my bin liner and started some gentle stretches & warm-ups.

After the pre-race briefing, we headed out into the pouring rain to the stadium concourse, and lined up at the start. It was a much smaller field than Dublin last year, with 387 people taking part. The half marathon and 10k races, held on the same course that day, had 1,600 and 1,162 finishers respectively and the walks added a few more numbers to those taking part: about 4,000 people in total.

The course itself was an out-and-back route, around the Wellington harbour and bays as far as Breaker Bay and back again. It was cold, dark and windy to begin with, and while the rain eased off a little after a few kilometers, the wind was pretty constant. Thankfully, this was a blessing & a curse, as there was a good chance the wind you fought in one direction would give you a gentle push on the return journey. I drafted as much as I could, and was happy to reciprocate.

My aim for the run was to beat my previous marathon time of 3:30, with a stretch goal of running a 3:15 – during training, I was racking up long runs at 4m 30s/km so felt I might be able to pull it off.

I ran the first 10k in 47:12 a little slower than my ideal pace, but had reached halfway point at 1h37m – bang on target. Then, I picked up the pace a little, with a bit of a mental boost coming from running back past the rest of the field who were still on the first half.

At the end of Shelley Bay Road, we hit the half-marathon turn-around point (the half-marathon run was also an out-and-back route), and a lot of human traffic as a result – the road had been ours so far, and we now had to share it with a much bigger field of runners. Going into the race, I’d thought that the half marathon entrants would be running at a much faster pace (and indeed, the winner of that race did it in 1:08:02 so some of them definitely were!) but further back in the field, they were running slower than I was and I overtook a lot of runners with green race numbers (marathon runners had black race numbers). Again I think that might have given me another subconscious boost, but the best boost of all was seeing the missus and the kids at that point, cheering me on!

During the course of the run, I had exchanged a few words with a fellow runner, who it turned out, was running his 13th marathon, and was running at my pace more or less. So, at this point I decided I’d keep him in view for the remainder of the race, and we overtook each other at a few points during the run back, with general words of encouragement, egging each other on.

At about 38k I was getting pretty tired, but hung on for another few kilometers and then gave it everything I had over the final 2k, really picking up the pace and finally sprinting for the line over the last few hundred meters. I was elated to see a sub-3:15 on the clock as I ran over the line, and have a feeling that most of Wellington heard me whooping with delight! The guy I was chasing probably had a good 30 seconds on me at that point, but he was nice enough to wait around for me at the finish line and exchange congratulations.

As for my splits over the course of the race, I’m not entirely sure: I had been trying to record these every 2 kilometers, but with the drinks station positioning and my missing the occasional marker, what I ended up with is below. They seem a bit suspicious to me in places, but they’re reasonably consistent I think.

This was my 2nd marathon, but it went a lot better than the last time. I was following exactly the same training plan from Hal Higdon’s website, with the only major gaps being the two weeks at the beginning when I had a cold, and the week or so in the middle when we were moving the family down to New Zealand.

I kept a physical training log this time around, pinned to the fridge so I’d always see it, as well as a version on Google Wave for a bit of self-induced peer-pressure. The yellow entries were runs I completed and orange being ones I missed, and my aim was to make the page turn from white to yellow with as few orange bits as possible (inspired by unit-testing – I think I should have picked green & red highlighters :-) Towards the end of the program, I wasn’t too worried about missing runs during the taper.

I did a few things differently this time around, and I think they helped me a great deal during the race:

• The Ngaio Gorge and its hill! When we moved to Wellington, my running routes changed to include a lot of hills (Wellington isn’t a flat city) and despite my complaining about them and the really crappy weather we’ve been having here, in retrospect, I think the hill running during the 2nd half of my training was the key thing that made me faster and tougher over the distance.
• I tried as much as possible to stick to a constant pace – not to panic when things were a little slow at the start of the race, but to just keep an eye on my time credit/debit at the kilometer markers and make gentle adjustments to my pace.
• I ate jelly babies fairly constantly during the race, as opposed to just when I felt I needed them (or deserved them!) Last time around I alternated between fig rolls and jelly babies, but I found the jelly babies on their own much easier to eat on the run.
• I only drank water from the drinks stations during the race, and avoided the Powerade that was supplied, with the only exception being the 250ml of fresh orange juice (with a fair bit of salt added) that I was carrying, which I drank at about 37k. If I do another marathon, I might try to find out what energy drink the race provides, and add that to my training to see if it makes a difference.
• I ran farther during training: I know this is up for debate, but felt that during the last marathon, the 20 mile (32k) long runs I was doing didn’t prepare me for those final 10k. This time, my longest training run was 37k, with an additional 4.1k of a gentle jog/walk back up the Ngaio Gorge – practically a marathon during training, and while I only did that once, I do think it helped.

Today, I feel a lot better than I remember the day after my first marathon – stairs today aren’t as scary as they were last October, and my John Wayne impression isn’t nearly as good as it was last year. That said, there’s an element of this in the way I’m moving about today (except the bit with the nipples, elastoplast FTW :-).

Will I do another marathon? Yes, probably – though I somehow doubt I’ll be able to make as much of an improvement in my PB next time around, we’ll see how things go. For now, recovery beckons.

We’ve just gone through LEC (legal entity combination) and Sun Ireland is no more.

I’m not sure how I feel about Oracle yet, but I’m going to stay positive and give them a chance to show me that it’s a great place to work. Certainly getting paid to work on Solaris continues to be wonderful but I always felt there was more to working at Sun than just the code. I think we’ve lost something special with the demise of Sun, but I’m looking forward to the next few months to see how things turn out.

Now Oracle, it’s your turn.

Well, that’s one bit of my life over. I worked at Sun from ’96, fresh out of college up to today, 28th January 2010. I’m a bit irked that I didn’t make it to the 15-year milestone – not to worry.

Thus far, I’m still working at same job, and I suppose technically, I’m still a Sun employee helping to write the OpenSolaris packaging system. I still have plans to move to New Zealand this year, all being well.

The date that JAVA dropped off the stock market was the same date that our passports arrived back from the NZ immigration dept. with residency visas attached to them, so that’s got to be a sign that it’s time to move on.

I had a wonderful time at Sun, and am hoping Oracle treats the company, it’s former employees and (most importantly to me) the Sun culture with the respect they deserve. Time will tell.

In the meantime, this blog, like the old one will contain the usual mix of work and non-work content, in categories so you can avoid what you don’t care about. And, lest it not already be clear, any opinions stated here are mine alone, not Oracle’s not Sun’s – I speak for nobody other than myself here.

It’s Anew day.

This has been a pretty exciting year for me – learning to deal with life as a
parent of two kids (it’s more than twice as hard as dealing with one, but just as enjoyable), spending 2 incredible weeks in NZ for Glynn & Jayne’s wedding,
getting myself a little more involved in the xVM codebase, working on a few
projects that taught me more about OpenSolaris, then for the last half of the year, learning Python & writing a
new tool to make xVM admin/config a lot more intuitive to Solaris administrators: virtcfg.
Combined with virtadm & its API written by johnlev, these
tools were a lot of fun to work on. I really hope they get to appear on opensolaris.org
at some point.

However, one of my favourite moments of 2009 was getting to cross the finish line of the 2009 Dublin Marathon, and seeing what this meant to people other than myself (which was a bit weird, but altogether lovely)

Next year is lining up to be pretty exciting too:
we’ve been granted preliminary
approval for residence Visas to New Zealand: a few more bits of documentation to
dig up, and we’ll be moving the family to the Southern Hemisphere to see how we get on. The exact time-frame has yet to be decided, but it’ll likely be the first half of 2010.

At the same time, an opportunity came up to try my hand at something new: in 2010, I’ll be moving positions within Sun – still contributing to
Solaris, but just not on xVM. I’m looking forward to having another codebase to dig into, and a
learning curve I’m going to enjoy swooshing happily along.

Looking back, things I’m not so proud about include my lack of time to support
IE-OSUG,
and the vanishing

‘OpenSolaris news in review’ reports: I really hope
in the coming year these will get a new lease of life – any takers?

In the meantime, I hope you all have a wonderful 2010, and that whatever
happens, we all manage to end up this time next year having thoroughly enjoyed the ride.

Happy Z-Day everyone!

Breaking with tradition somewhat, I’m not sure there’s going to be any fireworks photos here this year: we’re down at my parents house, and are less likely to get the sort of sustained shelling that we normally experience in Raheny each year.

On the plus side, we had homemade pumpkin soup for lunch, so was at least able to get this shot. If there’s any fireworks later on, I’ll update this post – but otherwise, here’s some Halloween cheer:

The day’s been great so far – lovely birthday presents (a Merino base-layer and a copy of Neverwhere from the lovely missus, and DVDs of the first two Ice Age films from E (I think she had an ulterior motive there!) and a nice fleece from my folks)

I also popped out for a birthday run around Greystones this afternoon, only 10k but it was enough for me to realise I’m far from being back in running form: the recovery is going to last a few more weeks I think!

My folks are baby-sitting tonight, so myself and the missus get to go out for a grown-up dinner, which I’m really looking forward to. Happy Halloween!

Update: There were fireworks after all, here’s a few shots: fantastic, the tradition continues!

I ran the Dublin City Marathon yesterday in approx. 3h 30m (more on that later) – that’s my first marathon, but I suspect not my last: to anyone even half-thinking of running 26.2 miles, you have to try it.

My motivation for running started several months back on a low note. The background was that I was increasingly working from home, with work being busy and having a desire to eat dinner with the family and be around to put the kids to bed, I was noticing that there were days where I wasn’t leaving the house at all. At the same time, the rumours started about Sun being in talks with various companies about a possible acquisition.

When the Oracle deal was announced it made things worse – what had previously just been rumours in the press became a lot more believable. Usually when something like this is going on, I’ll write my thoughts about it here: but doing so would have been unprofessional. The furthest I ever went was the occasional emoticon on my twitter feed.

The solution for both problems, I decided, was to get out in the mornings and run: exercise, and a little time to think.

As the months went by, I was running further and further, logging my progress to @timfoster as I went ,and generally having a whale of a time. One weekend, we had a few friends over for lunch – Kev, Nic, Mike & Maria. A bit of the conversation went something like this:

“That’s great running you’re doing Tim, you should do the marathon”

Well, that was it, I’d had vague thoughts of doing it one day, but hearing someone else say it out loud was enough to make me register that night – with some trepidation, I might add. The registration form grouped entrants into three categories in order of expected finishing time: 3h or less, 3:30-4:15, 4:15+. I had no clue where I belonged, so popped myself in the middle and got on with it – that was July 28th this year.

I figured I ought to be following some sort of formal training plan.
The athletics forum on boards.ie was a great resource, and were pointing newbies like me to Hal Higdon’s running site . I chose the Intermediate II schedule, as I figured I was already reasonably fit with the daily commute on bike from time to time, and all the running I’d done so far. I’d missed a few weeks at the beginning of the formal program, so worked out where I should be (which turned out to be a good place to start given the running I’d already done) and stuck to it.

As I got closer to the race, I was dutifully doing my Long Slow Runs each weekend and was coming up to running the last of the three 20 milers when I became anxious about what sort of pace I’d manage in the race – could I go fast over a long distance? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to risk burning myself out in the early stages of the race, and end up not finishing. I decided to push it, and do a Long Fast Run instead – you’re not supposed to do this during training, I found out why. Yes, I discovered that I actually could manage a 7:15 min/mile pace over 20 miles, but I also managed to injure my leg in the process. To make matters worse, I’d miscalculated where I was joining the schedule, and it left me with only 2 weeks to taper before the race rather than 3, and most of those 2 weeks were spent just resting my leg rather than doing the suggested mileage.

With that, race day was upon me. I was aiming for a 3h15m finish – but given the last few weeks, this was probably unrealistic.

The atmosphere around the start was tense, but an amazing experience – very very well organised I thought: a record turn-out of 12,500 people this year.

After a lot of limbering up, and shedding of bin-liners, the starting gun fired. We moved very slowly at first, eventually getting past the starting line. The race started gently: I was in the middle of the 3:30-4:15 pen and first few miles were depressingly slow, difficult to overtake slower runners and I was already well down on my target. They say one of the most common mistakes by new marathon runners is starting too fast, so I kept repeating that to myself, and tried to stay calm.

By mile 5, I’d escaped the crowds in Phoenix Park and picked up the pace, passing Kev & Nic at mile 10 who were out cheering for me (thanks!!) and managed to keep pretty much on target till about mile 16 where I started slowing down, only to slow down further on miles 20/21 (the dreaded Roebuck/Foster Avenue hill) The missus & the kids, and Mum & Dad were cheering for me there, and I spotted my friend Barry too, who was marshaling for the race: familiar faces making the run a lot easier.

In general, the support from the crowd on the day was phenomenal: I really hope the people who got up early on an October Bank Holiday Monday appreciate what a difference them cheering really makes to runners – and, to the lady watching the race who gave me a jelly baby around Kimmage to whom I forgot to say “thankyou” – many many thanks, it was yummy, and much needed!

Things took a turn for the worse though around mile 22 – going down Nutley Lane, I felt a twinge in my thighs that I’d felt once before during training: the onset of cramp. I had to stop stretch/shake out my legs periodically, eat more jelly babies and start again. My times were tumbling now, and I watched in dismay as the 3:30 pacer balloons passed me on Merrion Road. For the rest of the race, I kept going as fast as I could manage, but it wasn’t enough.

Rounding the final corner onto Pearse St. I went for it, eating my remaining sweeties and telling myself it’d soon be over. I crossed the line, and stopped my watch, which told me 3:30:46. I was tired but happy – I’d missed the 3:15 target, but there’s always the next marathon.

As for official timing, I’m still a wee bit confused – the timing service that was tied to the chip on my bib told me I’d finished in 3:32:04, yet when I visit the results page on the Dublin Marathon website and search for my number (4871), at the time of writing, it confirms that chip time of 3:34:04, but tells me my finish time is 3:30:34. I know there’s a difference between chip time and gun-time, but I’d always thought gun-time should be longer than chip-time (as it doesn’t account for the time it takes you to actually reach the starting line, whereas chip time is registered from the moment you cross the start-line) Perhaps they got the numbers mixed up – 3:30:34 is closer to what was on my stopwatch. Anyway – it doesn’t really matter.

I had a ball on my first marathon – I finished 1516^th out of a field of 12,500, which I’m happy about. I’ve got memories I’ll never forget and a belief in myself that I never had before. Sure, I’m walking around like Boris Karloff today (legs rather sore) and am wishing our house didn’t have stairs, but I’m extremely proud of what I’ve achieved. I think I’ll keep running and would strongly recommend everyone to have a go at completing a marathon: it’s a truly unforgettable experience.

Here’s the route map, and the splits from my watch – I missed a few mile markers here & there, so just rolled up those times into a single row. As you can see, I lack consistency here – so that’s something to work on for next time.

Discovered via Boing Boing this morning, I found this article particularly enlightening. Bruce Sterling talking about the future, picking five technologies from today, “The Cloud! Web Squared! The Internet of Screens! The Internet of Things! Augmented Reality!” and showing how they would seem completely normal to anyone in the future.

They’re phantom far-out notions gobbled up by the real world. They packed in there so deep that nobody notices them. So, yes, I can write about it. It’s just: it doesn’t look futuristic. It looks way too real.

Why isn’t it grand? Why isn’t it as fantastically grand as the spectrum of all possibility? Well, why isn’t today grand? Why didn’t we wake up this morning in direct confrontation with the entirety of past and future? The
present day is the only day we’re ever given.

[ Bruce Sterling, writing for Webstock ]

Definitely worth reading the whole article.

A few weeks ago, we had a Saturday that was everything a Saturday should be – not too early a start, a nice breakfast, an energetic, if slightly damp, walk with Calum and the four of us visiting the Botanic Gardens for a picnic.

We’re sort of in a weird state at home at the moment, trying to go around appreciating everything that Dublin has to offer (hence the visit to the Botanic gardens), unsure of what the future holds.

Ever since our first trip to New Zealand we’ve always thought it’d be an interesting place to live, but before my most recent trip there for Glynn & Jayne’s wedding, we’d talked about my using the time over there to consider more carefully whether it’s somewhere we’d want to emigrate to.

Over the course of the two and a bit weeks there, I was gradually leaning towards a “yes” answer to the question above, but it’s funny – as soon as I heard the rumours about a supposed deal with IBM to buy Sun, I’d decided that if the deal went through, that’d be it, we’d really seriously look into moving. In some ways, that the deal fell through was a bit of a relief, not only because I think it’d have been the wrong thing for Sun, but also because I was off the hook in terms of facing that big decision to move. Now that there’s another deal pending with Oracle, I need to face that question again.

On the other side of the argument, we’ve got a pretty cushy number in Ireland at the moment: our house is a 25 minute cycle from the office (the missus has a shorter commute to her office) and the creche we use for Ella, and possibly Calum too, is right next door — but that, in a way makes us feel even more trapped: should we give up what appears to be a perfect setup and fling ourselves into the unknown? Looking further out, there’s good primary schools in the local area for the kids, but getting them to a secondary schools would mean quite a commute for them I think, so we’d end up having to move somewhere in a few years anyway.

There’s some things that could make moving easier. Already, I’m the only person in Ireland working in the Solaris xVM kernel group, so I’m working remotely wherever I am: working from the other side of the world probably wouldn’t be that much different for me, assuming I’m allowed that opportunity with the pending acquisition. And of course, I’m not just moving me – we’re a family, so anything we do has to work for everyone, otherwise it’s not going to happen.

So is the decision to move made yet? No, not at all – it is a realization though, that we need to make that decision soon, rather than leave it hanging over us. Perhaps the best way, is to try to get out there for a year, and see how we settle – a sort of “Try and Buy” approach I suppose.

But, between then and now, there’s plenty to enjoy about Ireland, and it seems like considering the question on whether to emigrate or not has made us think a lot about life in general and what we want to get out of it. I think we all should be enjoying it a lot more, dancing in the bluebells as much as we can.