Sunday Aug 03, 2008
Last week, the Porto Alegre OSUG proposed and voted a set of ground rules for the group. The need for these rules appeared early on, when the group was still struggling with what to do about meetings, membership and leadership, and became a recurrent topic in meetings. So after last month's meeting an initial set of rules was proposed, modified over the following week and voted and accepted earlier this week.
We posted the rules in our website, but since this might be of interest to other groups around the community, here's the translated version (the translation is a bit rough around the edges, but should be enough to get the point(s) across).
PoaOSUG's ground rules
This set of rules was voted and is valid as of July 31st 2008.
1. Constitution and rules
(a) the Porto Alegre OpenSolaris User Group has as main objective to promote OpenSolaris technologies through events and activities in the southern region of Brazil and similar events at the national and international levels;
(b) the group is affiliated to the OpenSolaris.org community and as such, respects its rules;
(c) this set of rules aims at organizing the different aspects of the group's activities with the intent to promote and encourage its member's commitment to the group and its events;
(d) any decision made by the group must follow the rules described in section 4, including modifications to this set of rules.
2. Meetings
(a) the group holds meetings at every last Thursday of each month. In case of a holiday, the group will decide whether the meeting should take place a week before or after during the previous month's meeting;
(b) each meeting has 70 minutes in duration at the most, being the first 25 minutes for general topics and the remaining 45 for one or more presentations;
(c) the group maintains a calendar of the upcoming meetings, as well as the material used during the previous meetings, available through its website;
(d) in case a member who has a presentation scheduled learns that he/she won't be able to attend the meeting, he/she must notify the group with at least two weeks before the event with a justification. The presentation will be rescheduled to the end of the queue in case the member does not comply with this rule;
(e) any member of the group can propose a talk/presentation on any OpenSolaris related subject of at least 15 minutes;
(f) in case there are no scheduled presentation(s) for a given meeting, the group's leaders are responsible for creating presenting a talk, inviting next month's speaker or to cancel the meeting. Meetings must always have a presentation or talk;
(g) the decision to call a meeting off is entirely up to the leaders, and must be taken with at least a week's notice.
3. Leadership
(a) the group's leaders are elected by the mechanism described in section 4. Any member can propose his/hers nomination as a leader through an email to the alias with the proposal and its justification;
(b) a leader can cease being a leader in case a member of the group propose that leader's loss of leadership through an email to the alias, or in case the leader him/herself decides not to continue to be a leader;
(c) the leaders are responsible for the meetings/events calendar and the organization of such, as well as the distribution of giveaways and creating flyers, posters and others;
(d) it's up to the leaders to set aside a few t-shirts and giveaway items to award the participation of members and encourage them to be more active in the community, etc.
4. Voting
(a) for the approval of a proposal, it must receive two favorable votes (not counting the member who proposed it) e none against (not counting the leader in case it's a proposal to remove him/her);
(b) a proposal must be approved or rejected in exactly seven days after the first proposal;
(c) a rejected proposal can only be re-proposed seven days after its rejection. In Case of a new rejection, the same proposal cannot be re-evaluated before a month;
(d) proposals must be submitted to the alias with the tag '[proposal]' at the beggining of the 'subject' field. Proposals will not be valid if they are not properly identified. This rule tries to guarantee that every member can easily identify the need for a vote;
(e) to elect or remove a leader, two votes in favor and no vote against are necessary (excluding the leader in question in the case of a proposition for removal). Any member can nominate another member for group leadership, as well as a self nomination. In the case of a nomination by a third member, the nominee must accept his/hers nomination prior to a vote.
Monday Jul 28, 2008
I'm close to wrapping up six months in Dublin, so I thought I should post a follow up to About Dublin. Kinda amazing how fast these months passed by, but somewhat expected. It's been an interesting experience - which is euphemistic and detached, but nonetheless a good description - so far.
I don't remember having any bad experiences with Irish people, so I guess this confirms the rumors I heard before coming here, that the Irish are friendly and like BRs in a lot of ways. For instance
Forgot my wallet at a shop in Smithfield, went back half an hour later and got it back (with everything in it).
Took dozens of pictures for tourists and locals around city center, and people were always nice and friendly.
Random conversations with complete strangers at bus/tram/train stops were, for the vast majority of times, hilarious.
Lost my credit card at another shop in Dublin, got it back just fine.
Was coerced (in a very nice, friendly way) to have my picture taken with three teenage girls at Connoly station - you owe me a picture girls ;)
Wasn't kicked out of a pub after asking if they had non-alcoholic drinks there (I know, this was lame, but hey, they do carry a rep..).
Random conversations at pubs have also been good fun, even though sometimes just understanding what some of the people were saying with all the noise was difficult.
Taxi drivers can be extremely funny. I once came back from the airport with a cab driver that should be a professional comedian. Best jokes I heard in a long time. He told me about a swimming 'competition' on the Liffey in September, and that he's one of the guys who goes on a boat in front commenting and narrating the thing. Out of the blue he pops some pictures of it. I'm looking forward to September, and this race is one of the reasons.
Even when some old fella stops you to ask directions but you tell him you don't know where it is and he starts mumbling to himself, you gotta love the attitude. Sometimes there's nothing funnier than someone talking and complaining by himself down the street.
And yes, I'm in a good mood today.
Saturday Jul 26, 2008
PowerTOP 1.1 for OpenSolaris was released earlier this week, featuring some cool enhancements to the tool and a lot of improvements to the code. Brian Leonard at the Observatory posted a cool review of the new version and Dave Stewart from Intel also posted some nice things about it.
I'd just like to point out a few other cool things about the new version:
- The code has improved a lot since the last version, we picked up a series of bugs along the way and crossed them. So PowerTOP runs much smoother now.
- PowerTOP 1.1 has extended the -d option (which dumps the analysis to the stdout) so that it does a specified number of analysis and dumps. This is very useful when you want to automate the tool. For instance,
$ powertop -t 3 -d 10
will run PowerTOP with a 3 second interval period for ten iterations and dump each of them to the stdout.
- PowerTOP will run on xVM domains (including dom0) as of snv94.
- The event report now takes cross calls into account. Cross calls (or xcalls) and Interprocessor Interrupts are basically a processor poking another processor. Those pokes can wake CPUs up and lead to higher power consumption. Both xcalls and IPIs are listed under the xcalls column in mpstat(1M). PowerTOP reports them as cross calls.
A cool thing to do when running PowerTOP is to increase the height of the terminal window so that the event report is able to list more events. This is most evident in cases where the system has a high number of P-states, as the tool resizes its subwindows automatically to show all of them.
If you're interested in PowerTOP, just join tesla-dev@opensolaris.org and drop us a line. We also have a category for our bugs/RFEs under defect.opensolaris.org, feel free to file one if you have it :)
Wednesday Jul 02, 2008
The OpenSolaris Developer Conference took place last week in Prage. I was over there attending the conference and giving a talk on OpenSolaris and NUMA architectures on Friday. Here's a quick report for those who couldn't be there.
Vineeth Pillai present a tutorial about Project Crossbow on Wednesday morning, which was very interesting and always a good thing to brush up on. I always get impressed at the flexibility Crossbow provides and how easy it is to configure a complicated network setup with a handful of commands. During the afternoon, Roman Shaposhnik presented a tutorial on OpenSolaris and developer tools. He went from Sun Studio 12 to p* tools, mdb, DTrace and dbx. Adriaan de Groot talked about his experiences porting KDE from gcc to Sun Studio 12, and how SS12 follows C standards so closely that in some cases it identified bugs that gcc hadn't picked up. I gotta find some time to play with KDE on OpenSolaris, looked very interesting.
On Thursday, Jim Grisanzio gave the keynote and talked about the OpenSolaris community and how it has evolved since it began. He brought up many points, I found very interesting his comments about how we at Sun are working towards opening our development processes and how things are moving forward with OpenSolaris 2008.05 and the upcoming move of ON to the external repo.
Jim Walker gave the OpenSolaris Testing presentation, which I did back in April during FISL 9. It's cool to see how your work compares to the person who not only wrote the presentation, but has given it a number of times. Wolfgand Ley talked about the OpenSolaris Cryptographic Framework, which I wasn't very familiar with, so this was one of my favorite talks during the conference. Max Bruning walked ZFS data structures and showed us how to go from uberblock_t to the actual data on disk. It's a tough presentation to give, but it's always cool to walk structs and pointers with mdb and zdb.
Friday started with Dave Stewart's keynote on Intel and OpenSolaris, covering all the points where Intel is participating in the community. He also showed how Intel is committed to open source in general. Chad Mynhier presented his work with stddev() and brendan() in DTrace, very enlightening to see how simple it is to incorporate actions in DTrace and how well designed and implemented it is. I went on and talked about MPO, lgroups, how the kernel optimizes performance on NUMA machines, liblgrp(3LIB) and discussed some of the challenges ahead for NUMA. The conference wrapped up with Michal Pryc talking about Presto, the new system for printing in OpenSolaris.
Overall it was a good conference, both from the technical and social point of view. Nice to meet some of the people I've been in contact with over email for quite some time, and meet new ones. It's good to see how things are evolving in OpenSolaris. The project had a rough last ~10 months and it's reassuring to see how we're making progress.
Thanks to the GUUG and the CZOSUG for organizing it, and congrats on the success. Hope to be there for next year's. Slides and videos here.
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Olá !
Como me cadastro na lista sobre opens...