blahonga.yanson.org

I've wanted to write my thoughts for quite some time, and yes I've been procrastinating. Let's see where this leads us.

[fimblo]

Impact-driven goals and Burnout

Output vs Outcome

It feels like I have, during these last (say) five years, been constantly pushing the org around me to focus less on output and more on outcome. Not that output isn't important - of course it is - outcome can only happen if there is some output from our work. But in the teams/orgs I've been in, many - if not most - of the goals were stated in the form of output rather than outcomes. And this had the predictable consequence that a lot of the work which people did didn't have the expected outcome.

A curious observation

A few months ago, I hit the wall. Burn-out.

As you might guess, this was really bad. I mis-remembered things, found prioritisation almost impossible, slept badly, and my execution skills were severely broken. So I went on sick-leave for almost three months and just…. rested.

Now I'm (kind-of) back. Working 25% - which in practice means two hours a day. Everyone - including my doctor, my therapist, my manager explained to me that it's important now in the beginning of my rahibilitation period to not feel any pressure to deliver, that right now is the time to just get used to going to work and meeting people. There's lots I wish to write about getting back to work, but I'll leave that to another post. Instead, I'll go back to the topic of this post, which is Output vs Outcome (or impact).

Last week, I had a meeting with my manager who kindly put together a rehab plan for me, which followed the recipe I've preached all these years:

Include the following:

What is the desired outcome?

What is the longer term goal?

What tasks does this entail? State these as options.

Is there a time-frame? If so, specify.

It was, I think, almost a perfect example of a well-formed OKR and to my surprise, I had a panic attack. I found it difficult to breathe and I was sweating all over. Luckily, it was a small panic attack, and it passed after a minute or two. When I was back in control of myself, I managed to explain to him that this didn't feel awesome. Fortunately, my manager is very receptive to feedback and he proceeded to put this proposal aside, and we instead went with some concrete and simple tasks instead - with no mention of the impact it could have.

So what does this mean: learnings

It didn't occur to me that burning out also meant moving at least one step in the situational leadership model. Pre-burnout, you could tell me an objective and leave the details of what decisions to make to me. At my current operational state, this degree of freedom paralyses me.

Also - I experienced first hand another situation where impact-driven goal frameworks like OKRs work badly.

[fimblo]

SARADA - What are you motivated by?

Hello there.

Back when I started working as a manager, I was really keen to make sure that all of the people reporting to me were happy. Happiness in my workplace was important to me, since I’ve had my share of workplaces which kind of sucked on the happiness-scale.

Thing is, there was this one time a person on my team looked me in the eye and asked me why I cared so much about happiness. Shocked and somewhat disturbed, I asked him if we could talk about this more. What did he mean?

In the subsequent conversation about happiness, he helped me understand that what I actually cared about was if people’s motivators were satisfied. By focussing on happiness, I was missing the mark - happiness isn’t really something you can control, but a consequence of some factors which we can, actually, understand and to a certain extent, manage.

Happiness is important to me, but I now understand that it’s an outcome of various factors. In this text, I’ll go through some of these factors, then follow up with how mapping them could be beneficial for you.

I’ll start by just listing the motivators I’ve found most useful, then follow up with how to use them. If you’d rather, you can skip this first section and go straight to how you can map your motivators and get some value out of the exercise.

Okay? Okay. Let’s do it.

List of most common motivators in the workplace

Security (Order/control)

As in the feeling of having control over your context. If you’re motivated by this, you probably might be able to accept a chaotic situation if you know _where _the chaos will come from, or when it will come. For some people, one synonym for this category is order. Too much order can be demotivating too - and each of us react differently to each level of order.

Accomplishment

As in the feeling of completeness you might get when finishing something. If you’re motivated by this, you might be the kind of person who, when finishing something, intentionally writes the goal after-the-fact and marks it with a nice big fat checkmark.

Recognition

Normally conflated with positive recognition, this category also includes being seen when you trip and fall. If you’re motivated by this, you might be the person who gives others feedback regularly and frequently, because that’s what you want too. Please note that different people want recognition publicly, while others would rather have it privately.

Affiliation

As in the feeling that you’re a part of something larger than yourself. If you’re someone who is motivated by affiliation, you might stay till the end of a party to help clean up. You might be that person in a team who says “Yes, we might have failed, but it was a team effort and we all did the best we could!”

Development

As in the warm feeling you get when you note that you are learning things. It could be in a specific area, or a more general need to learn everything you can. If you’re motivated by Development, you might feel great about a failed project because you learned something new.

Autonomy

As in the need to be free in how you solve a problem - or even which problem to solve. If you’re motivated by autonomy, you’ll probably feel uncomfortable if others tell you _how _to approach a problem.

SARADA is an acronym I use to help remember these motivators.

So… how can you use this?

As a tool to help you understand what you’re feeling

Answering the question “how are you?” seems to beg for an answer given on a one-dimensional spectrum from good to bad. But we’re more complicated than that.

This tool can help you get a more nuanced sense of where you’re at. Feeling strangely dissatisfied? Wondering if there’s more to work than meeting deadlines? We all go through that, and though I won’t be able to tell you the answer, I can supply you with a tool which might make things a bit clearer for you.

Here’s how:

For each of the motivators, mark on a scale how meaningful it is to you at work in general.

Follow up with marking how satisfied you are for each at this moment in time.

Do this every now and then - say once a month - and after eventful things happen.

That’s it!

The distance between the two positions for each motivator (desired position and current position) can help better explain to yourself or others why things are great or less-than-awesome.

As a tool to craft goals which are meaningful to you

So let’s say you’ve done this - you have a notebook or something where you keep track of what motivates you.

Even after just one session, you will probably be able to see patterns emerge. You might even have known what the pattern would look like. That’s Ok - it’s quite common actually.

But here’s the thing.

Having a consistent way to measure your motivators can help you in not only creating goals to meet your needs, but also a way to see if it actually had an impact.

So let’s say that you notice that your need for recognition is not being met. In that case, you’ll benefit from making sure that you phrase your goal in such a way so that nailing it can fulfill your intrinsic need for recognition. Another way is to separate the goal from the activities which result in achieving the goal - and to consider your motivators when designing your activities.

If you’re not dissatisfied (your motivators are satiated), then you can keep your motivators at the back of your mind when crafting your goals, so that they are in line with them - or at least don't detract from them.

A final note on this - your motivators aren’t goals in themselves. They just help tell you how satisfied you are.

If you’re a manager - as a tool to help your direct report help themself

The first time I go through this with someone who reports to me, it takes about 30 minutes.

First, I go through the exercise and explain how it could be of value to them. I go through each motivator and explain what they mean, with examples if possible. (I take internal notes on if it sounds like the DR has a different definition - which I’ll use later on)

Then I go through the list together with my report on a whiteboard and map my own motivators - partly to show how it’s done, and partly to level the power-dynamic a bit. I rank each one on a scale 1-10, carefully trying to make sure that none have exactly the same rank. I take a step back and ask them what they see, what does this tell them about me? I follow up afterwards by going through each motivator and ranking them by how satisfied I am with them at this current moment in time.

Next I ask them if they are comfortable doing it with me. If they aren’t that’s fine - I ask them to do it in private and come to me at the next 1:1 with reflections. If they are OK with doing it with me, then we do the whole exercise again - but with them guiding the process.

If you took an internal note previously that they might not define a motivator the way you described it, then take a break from the process to explore what it means to them. Help them get it into writing. Then continue with the process of mapping the motivators - first with the desired state, then the current state.

Finish off with taking a step back together and ask them what they see - and afterwards you can come with some reflections.

What can we read from a motivation mapping? I’ll copy the example above here for convenience:

Accomplishment and Recognition are interesting - this could indicate that the person in question feels like they are achieving lots - much more than they need to feel good; but at the same time does not feel that their achievements are recognised.

This person’s Security and Autonomy is also over-saturated, while development (personal growth) is low. If they have had this role for some time, perhaps it’s time to explore a new role? Or new, riskier challenges? They have some security, accomplishment and autonomy to spend without becoming unhappy, after all.

What else do you see?

Finally a word of warning to the manager: Don’t draw conclusions yourself from the mapping - instead, help your DR draw the conclusions they see and support them there. You can and should ask clarifying questions, but avoid making judgements. It’s a tool for them to identify their feelings and drive change, not for you.

Some thoughts before I let you go

On the motivators

There’s of course a lot more motivators. These are just the ones I’ve found useful. Feel free to replace them with others. You can also replace all of them in favour of your fav Motivation model - you could for example draw from Two-factor theory (aka Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory). This theory splits hygiene motivators like (e.g. salary, benefits, job security) from true positive motivators (growth, recognition, challenge, etc).

The important thing is the subsequent reflections you can make, not the model you use. Use what works for you.

On defining the motivators

Each of us define these somewhat differently. The point isn’t to be able to compare yourself with others - it’s just a tool for you to understand yourself. So feel free to redefine the terms if you want to. One piece of advice: Make sure you write your definition down, so it’s useful for you later when you go back to it.

Scoping

These motivators are quite situation-specific. When looking at yourself through them, look at yourself in the context it will be applied. What I mean is: If it’s at work you’re doing this, then think of situations at work - not at home or with your buddies.

For example, my life at home is quite well-organised - almost regimented - due to the needs of my family members. So my need for security (order) is satiated at home, and at work I therefore need much less of that. Actually, a little chaos is refreshing. So for me, I tend to put my need for security at work a bit lower on the scale (too much order is demotivating).

Your motivators in the face of a changing world

Finally - your base motivators will change over time. My need for personal development has gone from top to middle over my career, while Affiliation and autonomy have become stronger. It’s normal and OK for your motivations to change.

Also, if you’ve recently gone through an impactful event of some kind (marriage, a sudden loss in your family, or something as simple as changing roles), your motivators will likely change. Being aware that an external event can change your internal motivators can help you help yourself.

I hope you found this useful!!

[fimblo]

Observations and reflections - DevOpsDays Stockholm 2019

Last time I attended a DevOpsDays conference was in Gothenburg, 2011. At the time I worked as an Operations engineer, and the conference was really inspiring and useful for me for my day-to-day work.

When I heard that DevOpsDays was coming to Stockholm some six months ago, I decided to treat myself with it - with the hope that it would be just as good as last time. I had my doubts - after all, in the eight years since I last attended, I had worked mostly as a manager and toward the end, an Agile Coach.

I needn't have worried.

If you put lots of awesome people in a venue, give them space to talk, feed them and supply them with interesting subject matter in the form of presentations and lightning-talks, the result can't be anything less than motivating.

Here are some of my observations and reflections - some of them organisational, some of them technical, and the rest perhaps a little random.

The understanding of DevOps culture isn't as pervasive as I thought

After all my years at Spotify, where we built up this devops/agile/trust-based culture over time, it's easy to forget how it was at other workplaces. The wall between developers and operations. The paperwork and risks involved in deployments.

After working at a place where devops was so ingrained in how we worked, it became so easy to take it for granted. The problems some participants brought up in the Open Spaces were nightmarish - and I was surprised over how surprised I was.

It was a humbling experience.

Your "code" in your VCS for a project/epic should (must) be more than just the business logic. Your code needs to include config, tests, deployment logic etc.

This should be obvious, but I guess it isn't in some orgs. If you need to go back in time in your VCS to get a earlier working version of your project, you'll likely want to see how that version of your business logic was brought to life in prod.

DevOps is a culture where everyone works together to deliver and operate a feature for the customer.

… and automate the crap out of everything.

If your Definition of Done doesn't include the code hitting prod, you're misleading yourself.

Also, something something "adoption by at least one user"

If you have a dedicated DevOps team alongside your Ops, Dev and QA teams, you're doing it wrong.

… congrats, you just added another silo in your org.

Overheard: References to "Accelerate" by Nicole Forsgren et al

… awesome book, not surprised it came up here. If you haven't read it and you're an engineer(developer,sysadmin,tester,etc), or you're a manager or agile coach, it's definitely worth the read.

Some participants didn't see the connection between Agile/lean and DevOps

… while for others, of course, it was so obvious that it was difficult to explain, much like a mathematical axiom. Both require concepts such as:

Continuous improvement through reflection, sharing, and experimentation

Relationships based on trust

Feedback culture between individuals and teams

Failing fast.

Two different mindsets in orgs: Role and Mission mindset

Role mindset: I do what my role prescribes. This works (?) in orgs operating in ossified commodities markets, where the org/product/technology doesn't change very often.

Mission mindset: I do what I can to achieve the mission. This mindset works if you're doing something new, experimental, or risky. If you don't know what the market will look like tomorrow. Why limit yourself to a role generated by an organisational system designed (even with the best of intents) to solve yesterday's problems?

Overheard about hypergrowth: Throwing people at a problem only introduces more handovers.

Fun way of expressing the problem. Here are my thoughts on what happened during early Spotify days on the matter:

Growing the engineering org to add capacity often leads to people using recruitment as an excuse to not have to sort and truncate the epic backlog, leading to an org unable or unused to the difficult task of prioritisation and saying no to important initiatives.

Also, hypergrowth will unfortunately lower capacity initially thanks to time spent on recruitment and onboarding. The more you hire during a short period, the deeper and longer the cost in capacity. Also, # of incidents due to lack of tactile knowledge will rise, pulling focus away from new deliveries in favour of stabilising the system.

Was surprised when I found out that a Post-mortem at Google was a document, not a meeting

At Spotify, the term "Post-mortem" refers primarily to a meeting. At Google, it refers to a document. The purpose of the two are the same - to fix the root cause(s) and enable learnings from failures. The main difference IMO seems to be the scope of the post-mortem. At Google, the post-mortem document is written primarily by one person and shared with the whole org and posterity. At Spotify, the result of a post-mortem is a shared understanding among engineers and stakeholders of why and how the system failed. The focus is on raising empathy thereby lowering the threshold for sharing learnings in person.

Even if I knew that Google conducted post-mortems, it had never occurred to me that it could be done differently. How many other assumptions have I made over the years?

Overheard: Can DevOps culture happen in a centralised command-and-control org?

This question was discussed or touched upon multiple times during the two days, and the discussions leaned strongly toward the opinion that the engineers who write, test, deploy and maintain the code are best suited to make the decisions necessary to do their work. If they are given relevant information (business info, purpose of the project, who the end-users are, budget, etc) they will make good decisions.

My own musings on giving people mandate, or empowering people:

What we want to do to enable the above is to remove the obstacles which hinder people's natural propensity to take initiative. If you are discussing 'giving mandate' or 'empowering' your staff, there's already something iffy IMO. Mandate isn't something which is given - it's something humans innately possess. Instead of telling someone they now have mandate, consider how your organisation removes mandate from a person. What control mechanisms do you have in place? Identify these, and for each consider why said mechanism is in place. What problem did they solve? Is the problem still a thing? Is there another way of solving the problem without depriving mandate from your teams?

Also - What is the social cost of failure in your org? How do formal and informal leaders react to failure? People can have all the mandate in the world and still feel disempowered if they are scared of public shaming.

Overheard: "Distributed monolith"

In the attempt to transform a backend from monolith to microservice, there's a risk of ending up with a distributed monolith - where one suffers the disadvantages of both monolith and microservices.

If your microservices operate with knowledge of the internals of other services,

If your microservices know what services exist upstream,

If many microservices share a database (or worse, share tables (or gasp, write to the same tables)

… then you probably operate a Distributed Monolith.

On scary deployments

Fear of failure drives out creativity and smothers innovation. And you're likely to be working in an environment where innovation and creativity is paramount. Fear isn't binary - it's a spectrum with with gradually increasing magnitudes - from slight nervousness all the way up to sheer panic. So you might not be terrified when about to deploy something to prod, but anxious. Or nervous.

But this tension shifts our focus from what we like to do - create, experiment and learn. From the company perspective, the fear of failure in teams leads to deploys once every couple months, during a weekend, in the middle of the night.

So what we want to do is change how we do things to decrease our fear and raise our confidence. Each thing below can help you and your team do this:

Release smaller changes: This will make it easier to review your code and understand it. Also, the potential risk of failure becomes smaller since the release is a small one.

Release often to production: You'll find bugs in your release process much more often if you go from one release a month to multiple a day. And you'll start to trust your process more if you do it often,

Automate your release process to reduce human error.

Use feature flags to apply your changes to a smaller demographic, and to be able to decouple deployment of code from when it impacts the user.

Write tests to verify the knowns.

Ensure that monitoring of the service exists from the get-go to detect early signs of system failure or degradation and to get data for troubleshooting and later, for your blameless post-mortem.

All in all, the conference was fun and inspirational. It felt good to be able to both learn from others and at other times, to share my experience and thoughts with others. 10/10, will definitely do this again :)

[fimblo]

Installing Ubuntu 18.04 on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon G6

The Question

In just over a week, I'll be starting a new job - and they asked me during the onboarding process what kind of laptop I wanted. Did I want a Mac or a Thinkpad? This seemingly innocent question stumped me, mostly because I was hearing the following questions:

Do I want everything to just work out of the box, or do I want hours of configuration to get GNU/Linux running the way I want it?

Do I want to have a laptop that feels like an extension of my fingers and mind, or do I want a machine where someone else has decided what's best for me?

Do I want to be oblivious of everything under the hood, or do I want to see how much I had forgotten over the last ten years?

Ultimately, it was the last question which really got to me. Ten years ago, I was on top of what was being developed in the kernel, I knew off by heart what parts of the system did what during boot, runtime, and shutdown. That was my job - and it was my passion.

But as it happens, I became interested in how teams work, how organisations grow and change, and what makes a good leader. And off I went down that path, branching away from engineering and into management. Not that I regret that choice in any way - growing these soft skills is fun, and there's so much to learn.

But still. When asked about what laptop I wanted, I found myself looking back at that branch in the road almost a decade ago, thinking - Even if I wanted to install some Linux distro on the laptop, was I capable of it? What if it goes wrong? And what if I don't have the time and/or energy to maintain it afterwards?

As the day approached when I would have to give an answer, I knew that I just had to try it. If I could get the laptop a few weeks in advance, I could install and re-install the machine a few times, learning from my failures and getting things right.

So I decided go for it.

I planned to go with a simple Linux distro, with lots of community support. One where I don't need to compile stuff from scratch, and where I don't need to understand everything, but just enough. Also, a distro which is known for its stability and one which I had used at some point in the past. So I went for Ubuntu, which is close enough to Debian. I decided that if it went well and I liked the experience, I could go with Gentoo or even LFS on another partition.

Below, I'll write out what I did, where I messed up, and how it all turned out.

Initial install

I went for the latest LTS release of Ubuntu, which turned out to be version 18.04. I did some googling on if there were any particular problems installing Ubuntu on this particular Thinkpad, and didn't find many people complaining about blockers (aside from the normal gang of newbies, and very specific things which I decided to ignore).

After creating the Ubuntu installer liveUSB, I booted up and started installing. One of the guides I used was this one by ThorneLabs, where I found the tips on how to set up BIOS really useful.

I was initially intending to set up the partitions old-school, with a separate root, /boot, /var, /usr/local and /home. But when it struck me that I needed to encrypt the entire disk, I decided to just go with what the installer recommended - which was one EFI, one /boot, and one huge crypto_LUKS partition, which in turn would be divided into two: a swap partition and the entire filesystem in the other.

The article also claimed that hibernation worked out of the box, which was nice since I like to save power when not using the machine.

I rebooted, and...

It almost worked. Almost.

Most everything worked quite nicely, but there were two things which didn't quite work.

Trackpoint and Trackpad

Hibernation

Trackpoint and Trackpad

This was most urgent to fix, since I won't always have a mouse with me. And since I normally set up X so that focus follows mouse, I use the trackpoint to nudge the pointer to the window I want to focus on.

The problem was that when I touched the trackpad or trackpoint, the mouse pointer would move a bit, then freeze. dmesg told me the following:

psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1

I found some nice tips here, which worked for me:

# # Comment out 'blacklist i2c_i801 # perl -p -i -e 's/^blacklist i2c_i801/#blacklist i2c_i801/' /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf` # update-initramfs -u # # # Add kernel param psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=1 # # to grub config # perl -p -i -e 's/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="(.*?)"/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="$1 psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=1"/' /etc/default/grub # update-grub

Reboot, and the trackpoint and trackpad worked nicely!

Hibernation

This was a little more difficult to diagnose. Looking around the internet didn't help so much, since it was peppered with many many people with similar but actually different problems. I must have read through at least 20 sites, many of them forums with post after post of people moaning about the problem and false leads.

So I instead did what I should have done from the beginning, which was to gather data.

# # Look at legal disk states # cat /sys/power/disk [disabled] # # # Look at available powersaving modes # cat /sys/power/state freeze mem

So it looked like the kernel didn't support hibernation at all. If it had, /sys/power/disk wouldn't say [disabled], and /sys/power/state would have the string disk in it somewhere.

After many more false trails (among others, one where I upgraded my LTS up to 19.04) I happened to notice a string in dmesg:

# $ dmesg | grep -i acpi:.*supports [ 0.423376] ACPI: (supports S0 S3 S4 S5)

Aha! The kernel does support deep sleep. S4, for example, means putting the system into low-power state. It was mentioned in dmesg - which in turn should have meant that /sys/power/disk should have the string platform in it. Which it didn't. Anyway, it struck me that I could grep for 'hibernation' in the output of dmesg. And there's where I saw it:

[ 1.855894] Lockdown: Hibernation is restricted; see man kernel_lockdown.7

Now this I could work with. The kernel supports hibernation, but refuses to activate it. From this point it was easy to hunt down the problem - it was the whole 'Secure boot' thing, which many people recommended turning off in BIOS. I hadn't done it, since that article by Thornelabs (sic) said it wasn't necessary anymore. So I booted into BIOS and disabled Secure boot.

And what do you know?

# cat /sys/power/disk /sys/power/state [platform] shutdown reboot suspend test_resume freeze mem disk

So now my kernel supports hibernation and wasn't locked down! I was super happy with myself, until I realised...

Hibernation pt 2

Remember how I let the Ubuntu installer fix the partitions for me? Well, I didn't think about it at the time, but it apparently only set aside 1G for the swap partition. I knew I had to resize it up if I wanted to dump mem into it when suspending-to-disk, and I also knew that disks and partitions were a bit more complicated nowadays, what with LVM and UUIDs for disks. Gone are the days of simple /dev/hda1. Also, I needed to understand at least a little of how the partition was encrypted...

Now I wasn't completely innocent when it came to LVM, since it was something we used back when I was an SRE at Spotify. But it was years and years ago. And to be honest, I never really became good friends with commands like pvdisplay and vgscan. Not like me and good old fdisk or fsck. Ah, those wonderful days where commands were short and man pages obfuscated...

After looking through different walk-throughs, I decided to give this one a shot - it had details at the command-line level, but also explained what was happening. It even had an overview, which I liked.

I didn't need to follow all the instructions - after all, both swap and my root partition lived on the same physical volume in two different logical volumes. So I didn't need to follow the instructions which explained how to resize the PVs.

All I wanted to do was to reduce the root filesystem by 15G, and expand swap by 15G. To do this, I need to:

reduce the root filesystem

reduce the logical volume for the root fs

expand the logical volume for swap

re-create swap to fill the whole logical volume

This is what I did in more detail:

Boot into the liveUSB I used to install Ubuntu.

Load the cryptsetup module

# sudo modprobe dm-crypt

Decrypt the filesystem

# sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p3 crypt1

Activate LVM

# sudo vgscan --mknodes # vgchange -ay

Check the filesystem

# sudo e2fsck -f /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root

Shrink the root filesystem by 15G (from 474.75G).

# sudo resize2fs -p /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root 459G

Check the filesystem again to make sure nothing borked up when resizing.

# sudo e2fsck -f /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root

Take a look at the logical volumes on your system. There should be two - one for rootfs and one for swap.

# sudo lvdisplay

Reduce the logical volume for rootfs, then look at the volume afterward to see the changes.

# sudo lvreduce -L 459G /dev/ubuntu--vg/root # sudo lvdisplay

Now I have space for swap to expand into. Let's expand the swap logical volume. Oh and btw, you might have noticed that I actually shrank the root logical volume by a bit more than 15G. It was 15.75G actually. This is probably unnecessary, but I wanted to make sure that there definitely was enough room to write my mem to swap when hibernating. Also, I found it curious that the lvreduce command was used to expand the LV. Slightly confusing, but heartwarming to see that there are still idiosyncracies around to boggle us :).

# sudo lvreduce -L +15.75 /dev/ubuntu--vg/swap_1 # sudo lvdisplay

Create a new swap, using the entire space

# sudo mkswap -c /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-swap_1

After all this, I rebooted, and the command sudo systemctl hibernate worked like a charm. Pressing the power button brought me to the disk decrypt password prompt, and after a short pause I was shown the screen I had in front of me when I ran the hibernate command.

Very very nice.

So now what?

Well, I now have a functioning Thinkpad X1 Carbon G6, and it's working nicely. I haven't bothered with the fingerprint reader or the SIM card reader, I suppose I might try to get them to work at some point.

Looking back at this process, I gotta say that it was about as complicated as I remember it to be. Lots of small hurdles to get over, but that's not really new when installing Free Software onto computers, especially laptops.

I had expected more problems with graphics, sound, the wifi unit (is broadcom still making life difficult for people?) etc. But that just worked out of the box.

I suspect that I'll find maintaining this system a bit of a pain in the future, and to be honest I haven't tested everything yet. I'm not sure how to activate IEEE802.1X which I'm guessing we have at the office, and I'm guessing that printing is still a major PITA. I'm already prepared to have to struggle with PulseAudio. And I haven't wrestled with xrandr to get my secondary monitor working, something I'm sure I'll need to do.

But all in all it was a very satisfying experience, and call me a masochist - but I'm looking forward to getting all that to work.

We'll see what I think in half a year :).

Edit:2019/09/03 I noticed that sometimes after suspend/hibernation my trackpoint stopped working. Very strange. Did a little digging and figured out that the psmouse module was loaded after rmi_smbus. So I changed the order here:

# # change order of loading modules # cat > /etc/initramfs-tools/modules rmi_smbus psmouse EOF # update-initramfs -u

Then rebooting. This seemed to fix the problem.

[yearsoflivingdangerously]

This comic was produced in partnership by Years of Living Dangerously and Symbolia Magazine. For more amazing real life comics, get Symbolia on your iPad or via PDF. And for more information on the biggest story of our time - check out YEARS.

[yearsoflivingdangerously]

Here’s what you need to know about the war in Syria — and it’s not oil or religion. It’s something that we’re all creating together.

[fimblo]

Cooking Japanese rice the traditional way

So, today I asked my network on FB about if induction stoves were similar to gas stoves with regard to cooking Japanese rice the traditional way. I got many answers, but one of them was a question on how to make Japanese rice the traditional way. So here's a step-by-step on how to do this.

What you need:

A rice bowl (Ochawan) ... or a decilitre measuring cup. One normal ochawan is roughly two decilitres. Perhaps a bit more, depending on your ochawan.

Some round-grained Japanese rice Note that in Sweden, you could go for grötris (porridge rice) but you'll need to find some of high quality. You can tell high quality from the other kind by grabbing a pinch of rice and placing it in your palm under some good light. If they are white from minute cracks or crushed they are the bad kind. Bad rice does the job... but the final result won't be as good as it could be. Good high quality rice has a nice ellipsoid shape, pearly white, and slightly translucent.

A standard-sized cooking pot (~3-4 litres?) with a lid fit for steaming. Lids which let hot air/humidity out are a no-no. The best kind of cooking pots would be the ones which are made for steaming, but I've never had one of those :). Instead, I use cooking pots with a thickish bottom (>0.5cm) for spreading the heat evenly and a heavy lid which keeps the steam inside the pot.

Time and patience Cooking rice properly will take at least 40 minutes or so if you need to do it in one go. And cleaning the rice takes a largish dose of patience... 

A hand about the same size as mine, and an acceptance that this isn't very scientific I learned this from my mom, who in turn learned it from hers, and so on. It's traditional, and so I don't have any nice measuring units to pass on to you. You'll need to experiment a bit to get it right.

Here's what you do if you want to cook for around four people or so.

Preparation

Grab your ochawan and put up one bowl of rice for each person into the pot. Throw in one or two more if you're feeling hungry.

Now we wash the rice. This is primarily for separating the rice flour from the rice itself. The flour will make the rice slightly gooey. Gooey rice is not good™. Anyway, pour cold water onto the rice and when it's half-full, wash rigorously, making sure that the rice doesn't escape into the sink. Keep an eye open for non-rice particles - I've seen rice husks and bugs floating up to the top as well as tiny rocks which sink to the bottom.

The water will turn ugly pearly white. Pour this dirty water out, then repeat step 2. Do this until the rice is clean. 

Yes, really. This takes time, and your hands will hurt from the cold. Do it anyway because I said so.

Ok. Now you want to pour water back onto the rice, but so that it just covers the rice and then a bit more. To get the right level of water, you place your palm onto the rice, and the water level should almost reach your knuckles. If you have a pot with a small diameter, you'll need more. Likewise if you have small hands. (The pots I use are normally wide enough to let my entire palm rest on top of the rice, leaving 2-3 centimeters from my index finger to the wall of the pot.)

Ok, so now you have clean rice, and the proper amount of water in it. Put it aside somewhere and let the water slowly sink in for at least ten minutes. If you're preparing food for later, this is where you can just let it rest for hours. Back home we would put the rice aside overnight so that we could have freshly cooked rice in the morning. 

Cooking the rice

First off - from this point on till you serve the rice, you don't take the lid off the pot. This is important - you don't want the steam to escape. No peeking!

Place the heavy lid securely on the pot and turn the stove to maximum heat till it starts to boil.

At the first signs of escaping steam, turn the heat down. With gas, you want a small flame. If you're unlucky like me and have a plain electric stove, turn the dial to 1/5 of the maximum, move the pot off the heat entirely for two or three minutes, then put the pot back on the (now cooler) stove.

Wait 15-20 minutes depending on factors. 1) If your rice is cracked, 15 should suffice.  2) If you have lots more rice (and therefore more water) you'll want to wait a bit more.  3) If you're like me and forget to move the rice back after two minutes, you might want to let it heat a bit longer.

When you think it's been on the stove long enough, take it off and let it cool (with lid on) for another 10-15 minutes.

Post-cooking formalities

Now you take off the lid! 

If the top layer of rice is a little dry, that's ok. You grab your oshamoji (or if you don't have one, a wooden ladle) and turn the rice - so that the humid bottom mixes with the top layer. If it's still too dry... well, too bad. Next time add more water.

If the top layer is super-moist, most likely the lower rice will be wet. Put the lid back on quickly and heat a bit longer.

You'll still need to mix the rice so that the top and the bottom get mixed up. Also- pro tip - if you lift the bottommost rice off the pot's bottom, it will be easier to clean later on.

If you find that the bottom layer is crispy but not quite burned - Congratulations, you did it perfectly! This crisp bottom layer is called okoge, and is considered by some the best part of the rice. This is almost impossible to attain using an plain electrical stove. Yes, very frustrating for me.

Enjoy! And tell me how it went :)

[dyslexic-kids]

I’ve posted this before, but it bears repeating.

[fimblo]

Applies to recruitment as well.

[kingjamesprogramming]

Because of data abstraction, we were able to go forth to war

[kingjamesprogramming]

Correspondingly, (car z) is defined to be the Saviour of the world.

[fimblo]

Lol

[kingjamesprogramming]

With streams we can achieve the best of the land

[fimblo]

#Riemann streams. Mmmm. #sicp #kjb #markov

[kingjamesprogramming]

But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, so that he set the bounds of the resulting controller sequence

[fimblo]

5:32 And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was neither sword nor spear found in the interpreter

Lol Markov chains.

[kasiababiscomics]

[fimblo]

Yup.

[fimblo]

Mutt, Gmail and notmuch

When I started working at Spotify, I was overjoyed that the company allowed use of IMAP to synchronize mail. Since I was a mutt user, I set things up so that I could read and send mail using mutt when I was by my computer. When I was on the run I could always use the normal gmail interface.

For all of the inherent greatness of mutt, there was one thing which annoyed me - changing folders takes time. Say you're in your inbox, happily reading mail. Then you realize you want to check a mail you had sent earlier and you open your "sent" folder. This operation took quite some time; initially because the mail headers needed to be read from all the mails in the folder. Later on, with a patch that enabled mutt to save the headers, it was much quicker, but it still took time. 

Due to this I had changed my way of using mutt quite a bit - all my sent mail was saved in my inbox, for example, so that I could see what I had sent without changing folders. And in Gmail, I avoided archiving emails - since this would mean that I would need to look in multiple folders - one for new stuff and things I was working on right now, and another for all the archived stuff. 

Today, a colleague of mine (hi Lowe!) recommended a search tool for mutt - called mutt-notmuch-py, which ran using a indexer/search tool called notmuch.

In short, given that you imap-sync your email to your computer using some tool, it will create an index of your local mail, making it possible to do really quick searches in it. The results of the email search ends up in a temporary mutt folder, which is very nice - since you can then run your normal mutt operations on it like any other folder. Very useful.

I started playing with it, and though the indexing took quite some time (I have some 150000 emails in my inbox), once it was all indexed, I was overjoyed with the snappiness of the search operation. It was quick!

...and as I did all this, I started to feel a little uneasy. After a while I realized that this was because I didn't know how this would play with my "don't support multiple folders" rule.

So I started thinking about how this new shiny tool could fit my workflow... and came to the sudden thought that this was the tool I needed to ditch my old workflow completely!

How? Well, first off, if I archive all my old mails, the folders would be smaller. This means indexing operation will be faster. Added to this, nowadays I'm using a machine with a nice quick SSD drive - reading from these is much faster than on my old 5400RPM disk.

Mutt's limit function (think search with a vengeance) is really good - but only works on one folder. With notmuch, this would no longer be a problem - since it indexes all folders and presents the results in the same virtual folder. Nice!

So a few hours ago, there was only one thing stopping me from testing this new workflow - which is to actually archive my old emails. This is easier said than done, since in the past, Gmail would crash if you tried to do even the simplest operation on a larger batch of emails. One colleague of mine tried archiving two hundred thousand emails in one go, and it crashed his account so bad that he had no access for many days - and Google had to send an engineer in to solve this issue.

Even smaller batches (20k, 30k emails) would cause gmail to hang for some time - an hour, an evening - well, you get the picture. I have heard from more friends who recently tried to do something like this, and it worked quite well for them, thank you very much.

So now I'm gonna take a deep breath and attempt to archive 20,000 emails in one go. Wish me luck.

[realitytvgifs]

[princessplzdont-deactivated2014]

See this… this is how it’s done.

No “you don’t look chunky, you look beautiful.” No “you don’t look chunky” at all.

Just complete acceptance. Yeah, you look how you do, and how you look is beautiful. Mama gets it.

[fimblo]

That's how it's done!

[fimblo]

Alan Turing and the Queen's pardon

This whole pardoning of Alan Turing is kind of on my mind. I'm glad that he got recognition from the Crown, but isn't a pardon something you give to someone who chose to do something wrong?

Our justice systems in the West is based on the principle of Free Will. Given a situation, our system of justice assumes that a healthy adult has a set of alternatives to choose from before acting on one of them.

Being gay isn't a choice; is something you are, like being of Asian birth or having the blessed curse of always spilling tears when watching Moulin Rouge for the Nth time.

This is why legal systems have special protection for the insane or inexperienced.  These people do not have a choice, just as little as a heterosexual cannot help bring attracted by individuals of the opposite sex.

A punishment for homosexuality is like punishing someone for being left-handed.

Forcing Alan Turing to choose between a prison sentence and chemical castration was a despicable thing to do.  It ultimately led to Mr Turing taking his life. In 2009, the UK government officially recognized that this was wrong and offered a formal apology. This was, though insufferably late, a good thing.

However, to return to my point- the Queen's pardon leaves me feeling ill at ease. It is based on false grounds, and makes me ponder her opinions on the LGBTQ community and the freedoms they are still fighting for across the UK and the rest of the world.

If anything, the pardon should come from the estate of Mr Turing, directed at the Crown.

[fimblo]

Having things to write and not writing

This is so frustrating.

During the last couple of weeks, I've jotted down quite a few things I'd like to write about, but every time I actually sit down to write something I find myself losing focus.

It's happening right now.

But damn it if I lose track this time- after all, I'm writing a meta-post, about

Dang. Lost one hour on facebook.