And then a WordPress update led to me not being able to access the backend, so I couldn’t blog anymore. And then a lot of other things happened in RL that just put blogging on the back burner. Luckily I have a nasty cold these days, so I could start to take care of all the small things that needed attention – like this blog for example.

I’m back, I’m alive and I have started to blog (lightly) on our company blog: PetaBlog - feel free to pop over and have a look.

And so I retreat back to bed, another small task solved, with some tea.

One of the reasons, our systems fall over (we assume) is that we run quite disk heavy things on our VMs. After the update of one of the physical hosts to Raring, the “most important” virtual machine decided it wouldn’t boot anymore:

It could be, that this due to a different kernel on the physical machine, than on the host – although that seems highly unlikely. Anyway – what now? The usual forum links point to a situation, where you can either boot the system, or access the disk by booting into a rescue system – neither option works in a virtualized environment.

But, there is hope: You can mount the image and try to perform operations on it. The OpenStack Operations Manual (p 106ff) has informations on how to mount a disk and read from it, if you want to write, you will have to do a bit more:\

kvm-nbd --connect=/dev/nbd0 /var/lib/nova/instances/instance-000000af/disk
mount -rw /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt

mount --bind /dev/ /mnt/dev
chroot /mnt/ /bin/bash        # from now on, you are inside the mounted disk
mount -t proc none /proc
mount -t sysfs none /sys
# do your stuff
exit                          # and back on the physical host
umount /mmt/dev /mnt/proc /mnt/sys
kvm-nbd -d /dev/nbd0

NOTE: Don’t edit stuff on the mounted filesystem if you haven’t done the chroot command. You will mess up the files (and the owner information) and will leave files that cannot be edited or removed…

For all the editing we did, we never managed to get the VM into a state where it worked again. The snapshot done yesterday had the same failing behaviour. We will therefore rebuild the VM.

Oh well, sometimes you win, sometimes you loose. (We didn’t loose any data though – that is stored on a volume outside of the VM)

Easier because I’m not actually hungry, there is sort of a constant nagging from the stomach, but nothing that is really difficult to ignore (or to shut down with a glass of water). The family (of course) continues to eat, and that is a bit more difficult to stomach – so to speak – so I have not spent time with them at the table. Still the smell of freshly made Lasagne is a strong detractor.

More difficult because I had quite strong headache most of the afternoon and evening, and felt quite weak from time to time. I spent a couple of hours in bed – not sleeping, but just lying there, feeling miserable :) Also, we spent a couple of hours cleaning out or basement, and Daniela and I took a nice long walk in the afternoon.

Now, after another 2 hours of dozing, I actually feel quite good – just a slight headache remains.

Stuff consumed:

Lots of water, mixed herbal tea (mint), 1 dl of freshly squeezed orange juice and maybe 1.5 dl of vegetable broth (without any vegetables in it, of course) – and 30 g of Sodium Sulfate in the morning.

Weight loss: 800g from yesterday to today

I have been reading up on the process and been absolutely disgusted with some of the books that are out there: A terrible mix of esoteric, religious, spiritual and pseudo science. Luckily, the book I used last time, is still available and as good and “almost dry” as I remember it – with usable plans instead of non-sense.

Not eating as much as I am used to is actually a lot easier than one thinks – drinking enough helps. But now I’m really hungry, so its time to go to bed. Tomorrow the real thing starts, and in 2 days, I should be fine and over the initial bad days.

I remember from last time, that I had terrible head aches the first two days (due to caffeine withdrawal). I hava a feeling that at least that part should be a lot easier because I have switched to green tea a couple of years ago.

Will report back (as if you were interested :) ) on the progress.

OpenStack uses Gerrit for code reviews, and recommends to use git-review for easier review workflow.

The installation is explained in the documentation and it could be as easy as:

sudo pip install git-review

However that didn’t work for me – I was stuck with:

~ ⮀ git review
git: 'review' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

I use homebrew to install local packages, so the probable cause was some wrong path. It turns out, that pip installs the git-review binary in a non PATH path:

~ ⮀ sudo pip install git-review
Downloading/unpacking git-review
 Running setup.py egg_info for package git-review

Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): argparse in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from git-review)
Installing collected packages: git-review
 Running setup.py install for git-review

changing mode of /usr/local/share/python/git-review to 755
Successfully installed git-review

all I had to do then, was to link git-review into my usual binary path:

ln -s /usr/local/share/python/git-review /usr/local/bin

and things started to work. More information on gerrit and the workflows to use it can be found here:

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/git-review
  
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Tutorial

So far the reactions (from Daniel and my wife) have been positive, but I wonder what others are thinking…

Also – I’m totally nervous to actually play live to a crowd – my “first gig”… And it seems, that Dragica and I will have no time to rehearse anything before the event – good thing we are in the same improv workshop and know a bit on how we tick musically and how we can play together…

If you are interested in home recording, then be sure to check out Michael Hollands “Wiggly Toe Music” and his “Recording at home” series. He’s on day 2, has good content and there is a bunch more in the pipeline…

In the meantime, the next Coursera course has started: Introduction to Improvisation taught by Gary Burton. I have watched the first weeks worth of videos and was quietly disappointed by the lack of teachings about improvisation. Gary spoke about online course, how to do assignments, lots of logistics but only a few minutes on what he thinks is important in improvising.

But then the assignments came: Analyse a solo by Gary over “What is this thing called love”

and then recording an own improvisation over the chords of the song.

I realized that I just by doing the first part of the assignment, I will be able to learn a lot. As usual, I will only get back as much as I put into this. I then decided to record one improvisation over this song every day – to see, if and what kind of progress is happening.

So if you want to listen to some really mediocre playing, here’s the set (currently consisting of only one recording).

When I recorded this first improv, I had never played over that song before – I probably have heard it before, but I didn’t remember it. I didn’t look at the chord progression (and even if I did, I wouldn’t know which scale to play over which chord). This was all played by ear (including two times accidentally plucking an empty string) and I am actually quite happy with how it turned out. Let’s see how this is going to sound tomorrow…