Thrift Packaging

My latest project at work is Cassandra, a distributed, eventually consistent, column oriented data store. It’s somewhere between Dynamo (Cassandra’s original author worked on Dynamo), and Google’s BigTable. It was developed as an internal application at Facebook, later open sourced, and is now an Apache incubator project. The external interface to Cassandra is thrift-based. Thrift is a framework for creating network services, services that communicate using a compact binary data format....

2009-05-10 · 2 min · 405 words · Eric Evans

Lenny Released On Time

Lenny released yesterday. This is great news, and congratulations all around to everyone that worked their asses off making it happen. By my calculations this comes 677 days after the initial release of Etch, (or 22 months and change). I’ve said before, Debian releases When Ready and that (to the best of my observations), consensus seems to be that somewhere between 18 and 24 months is the sweet spot. Not only does this make for the second “on-time” release in a row, but there was an Etch-And-A-Half sporting new kernels and video drivers in the mean time....

2009-02-15 · 1 min · 111 words · Eric Evans

Back Home

After 5+ hours on a bus, several hours at Ezeiza airport, and 12 hours on two different planes, I’m back home from Debconf8, (technically speaking I’ve been back since 8am yesterday, but was in no condition to post). Debconf8 was definately the best organized of the 4 Debconfs I’ve attended, and Argentina was an awesome setting, but it is good to be home. Pictures are here or here. Update: I’ve updated the Debconf8 set on Flickr with a panorama of the beach and skyline in front of the conference venue....

2008-08-19 · 1 min · 90 words · Eric Evans

Happy Birthday Debian

15 years ago today, Debian was born.

2008-08-16 · 1 min · 7 words · Eric Evans

Publishing divergence from upstream

On Monday I attended Martin Krafft’s talk, Packaging with version control systems. Martin has started a project, coordinated via http://vcs-pkg.org, to explore work patterns for packaging and cross-distro collaboration using distributed version control systems. This is a topic that I’ve spent a fair amount of time on so it was interesting to see Martin’s packaging work flow, and hear him discuss its evolution. Today I attended a Bof organized by Luciano Bello....

2008-08-15 · 2 min · 319 words · Eric Evans

Debconf8

It’s that time of year again! I’m at the airport soaking up a little free bandwidth (yes, it would seem that San Antonio International finally has free wifi), before boarding a flight to Houston, and then on to Buenos Aires. With the layover in Houston, the four wait before catching the bus to Mar del Plata, and the six hour bus ride itself, I’m looking at a full 24 hours of travel....

2008-08-08 · 1 min · 99 words · Eric Evans

Die Disk, Die

There’s been a lot of “Ubuntu kills laptop hard drives” buzz going around lately. The implication is that over aggressive power management is causing excessive load/unload cycles, exceeding a reasonable duty cycle, and drastically shortening the life of your drive. I run Debian unstable on my laptop but I looked into it anyway and sure enough it’s something which is effecting me as well. As Matthew Garrett points out, it doesn’t have anything to do with Ubuntu, Debian, or Linux in general, the culprit is aggressive power management settings in the drive firmware, or settings applied by the BIOS....

2007-10-31 · 1 min · 182 words · Eric Evans

Duplicity backport for Etch

I’ve been backing up all of my important machines to Amazon S3 using Duplicity for sometime now. It’s worked out really well but required just enough hackery to prevent me from providing straight forward instructions for others. I’m all about sharing the love so I submitted a new S3 backend to upstream using the excellent [boto] (http://code.google.com/p/boto/) library from Mitch Garnaat, and I packaged boto for Debian. The new backend made it into the 0....

2007-10-16 · 1 min · 116 words · Eric Evans

Etch Released On Time

2007-04-09 · 0 min · 0 words · Eric Evans

Debconf6: Pictures

2006-05-22 · 0 min · 0 words · Eric Evans