For a while I couldn’t quite put my finger on why the NoOps discussion was bothering me. Sure, I’m nostalgic for the old-school and Ops had been my bread and butter for forever, but I’ve evolved over time and so has Operations. Anyone that hasn’t is a dinosaur.

I think what’s bothering me is that NoOps feels like an attempt at giving a cool-kids’ name to selective ignorance. But, it’s not the good kind of selective ignorance, like ignoring what your parents did to bring you into this world. It’s the same feeling I get from people that don’t know where their food comes from. NoOps means ignoring that someone had to lovingly raise and then kill and butcher the cow I’m eating right now. And that’s not cool with me; whether it’s ignoring with how my code makes it to production or how my food makes it to my plate.

The argument that it’s a valid marketing term to describe a service, the same way we slap “cloud” and “organic” on everything is fair, I suppose. In the same way that most marketing terms are bullshit, so is this one.

I am all for what is trying to be described with NoOps: A Platform-as-a-Service that means that developers no longer have to worry about Ops because it’s being handled by another company. But this seems like a poor way to come up with a sexier term for PaaS. What’s next? NoDev to describe outsourcing development?

I just like knowing where my food comes from.

‘NoOps’ Debate Grows Heated

NoOps Is As Legitimate As DevOps

What is NoOps anyhow?

Fast forward to Friday May 7th, 2010, 6:30PM at O’Hare. We were supposed to leave at 3:30, but we’ve had interference from a volcano, the plane was at the wrong gate, it’s tow truck busted, and now our pilot and first officer have had to go to the plane to taxi it to our actual gate because getting another tow truck will take an hour. This means we’re probably going to miss our second flight and have to wait an extra 12 hours in the Frankfurt airport. Fuck. Don’t freak out. The upside is that I’ll get to sleep, the downside is that means we’ll arrive the next day in Addis, and who knows what that means for our schedule in-country. This is the first reminder that we can’t control this at all.

On the plane This flight is packed, but pretty uneventful so far. Somewhere over the course of the next 8 hours I’ll finish Bargaining for Advantage and watch a movie I won’t remember. Lufthansa makes for a comfortable flight. I am getting a bit confused between the flight attendants speaking to me in both English and German. I think they’re testing me.

Frankfurt airport Crap! We have 30 minutes to try to make our flight to Addis. Why is this security check line taking so long? Why do I need to get re-security checked leaving one international flight to get on another international flight? Where was I supposed to get get a bomb? The duty-free shop? Grumble.

Somehow, we’ve miraculously made it to the bus to our plane with a couple minutes to spare. Now that I see there are only like 10 other people on this flight, I think they were trying to be a bit lenient to people late from their connections. I’ll watch 1/2 a Bollywood movie and get started on reading Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet before descending into my brain somewhere. I had wanted to do all sorts of stuff on this flight, but as it always does on long travels, my fatigue is getting the best of me. And, I’m getting a little bit worried.

It’s part not really sleeping and part fear of the unknown. Is he going to like us? What are we going to do if something bad happens? What if we forgot something, or brought the wrong size clothes or diapers? This is going to be interesting.

Addis Ababa We’ve landed, and gotten through getting our visitor visa. They definitely take corruption seriously here. After getting the visa, what must have been a higher official asks us how much the agents charged us. He departed satisfied with everyone’s answered, so apparently we weren’t swindled. Next up, exchanging some cash, a luggage cart with super lopsided wheels, and meeting the driver. It’s raining, almost pitch black outside and we’re exhausted.

Tomorrow we’ll get to meet Gavin for the first time…

PS. Both books were great by the way. You should read them!

So, I configured the webserver at 174.143.24.6 to use a HTTP 301 redirect from somedomain.com back to www.somedomain.com. For any domain that resolves to that server. Hopefully someone else will find it helpful. Have fun!

I’ll post more details here about how it’s setup and monitored.

UPDATE Zerigo and other DNS providers have totally picked up the slack on this, so “over-here” is officially shut down!

Wait, was that my phone? Crap! It’s an area code I don’t recognize and Cindy said we could get the call any time now. Call back. No answer!!!! Call Cindy. It is the call, and she conferences me in with our social worker!!! Our social worker congratulates us then tells us the story of how Gavin came to be in the orphanage, where he’s from, and when they think he was born. She’s emailing us photos and mailing a packet of paperwork that we needed to ger back to them ASAFP! I better get back to my desk to see these pictures!

Damn! They take a long time to make a ham and cheese sandwich. All this time I’ve been pacing in and out of Artisan, paying more attention to the phone than the world around me.

Holy shit, I’m a dad! I think this is the moment that it hit me that I was really becoming a dad. I mean, through all the process and the paperwork and the waiting, I knew that someday I would become a dad, but it always seemed there was so much that could potentially go wrong and make the process take longer and longer, that it never really hit me. But, that picture made it real to me.

Now, I just needed to figure out exactly what I thought it meant to be a dad. It obviously wasn’t just the feeding and the plumbing. I’m pretty sure it involves fishing and bicycles at some point. Thankfully, I still have a little time to figure that one out.

After that set in a bit, back to reality. There’s so much to do! I better call my mom, then dad, then my brother and sister. And we better go visit that doctor on Roosevelt that specializes in adoptions to look over whatever medicals they send us in that packet. Ugh, and we need to start pricing out travel. When do we find out what our travel date is? And we need to get a cashiers check for the final adoption fees. And we need a car seat. And who’s going to watch the animals? And…

I have no idea whether the sandwich was any good or not. I’m pretty sure it was cold by the time I ate it.

Gavin smiles a lot, seems to like everyone he meets and gets very cranky when he’s hungry. He was born in Assela just over 5 months ago and he’s our first child. Right now he has a bit of a cold, or sinus infection of some sort that our doc is helping us work through, but otherwise we’re all doing fine after the trip.

Adopting Gavin has been an almost 2 year effort for us, and for me it was easily the most arduous undertaking I’ve attempted in my life. Since I’m really just around to carry things, it must have been even harder on Cindy since she did all the real work. Thankfully, all the big stuff went as planned and now we have Gavin as a part of our family.

Before I go further, I need to thank everyone that’s helped us along the way. We had great support from our adoption agency – Children’s Hope, our home study agency Lutheran Child and Family Services, her former employer, my employer – Viewpoints, our travel agent – Golden Rule Travel, family and friends. We certainly couldn’t have done it without you.

I haven’t written much about the adoption so far, but now that we’re home and a bit settled I think I’ll finally give it a shot. I may delve into it a little, but I don’t plan to discuss much about the paperwork side to the process. It’s highly specific to the agency, the country we adopted from, the state we live in, and is constantly evolving. If you are interested in hearing more about our experience on that side of the process (or anything else), please email me at jro@codegrinder.com, and I’ll be happy to recount it in as gory detail as I can remember.

Look at More Pictures of Gavin!

This series of posts will go on both my more personal blog and on my more tech blog. This has been an incredible journey and I feel that it’s significant to both sides of my life.

• The average number of email accounts per submitter was 17.6
• The average number of email readers used was 8.0
• The average number of emails received per day is 3500.0
• Everyone uses email on their phone
• Most people think email is awesome
• Most people think email is overwhelming

What did I learn? I learned that I need more of an audience to get statistically interesting survey results. But, I did learn that at least some people are interested in seeing email improve as a tool. If you’d like to know more about what I’ve been mulling over, shoot me an email.

I do hope I can re-run this survey later with more interesting results, and I want to thank all those that submitted entries. You know who you are.

(setq mac-option-modifier ‘meta)

I was on a witch-hunt the other day to update my Terminal.app settings to be able to use the Command key (aka pretzel, apple) as Meta to match my gui version of Emacs (Carbon Emacs). Mainly, this would keep me from going insane if I use Emacs over ssh, or in a terminal for a quick edit. What I found was that it was much, much easier to change Carbon Emacs to use option as Meta to match the Terminal.app settings. Terminal teases you with the “use Option as Meta” checkbox, but no “use Command as Meta”. The reason is very likely because the Command key is so engrained in OS X for all of it’s standard key-combos. Long story short, don’t poke the bear.

I still have some muscle memory retraining to do, since the command seems to make Option an additional Meta for Carbon Emacs, rather than replacing Command. But, I guess I can’t have everything.

Credit goes to a comment from serverfault.