Marc's Public Blog

Unfortunately caltrans has been making people put chains even if there is no snow on the road, it took us forever to get there and then because conditions at Squaw were so bad despite the recent snow, I went to Alpine, but that took another 1h+ due to the inefficient shuttle system. In the end, I was at the top of the first lift around noon.

spider boxter with chains, nice...

you could still find some snow if you were willing to risk core shots

rock garden? Well at least they're being honest about it

yeah, I went riding through that, anything for powder

and core shots I got, I had to cut this out with my swiss army knife

mmh, I think I got a bit lost out of bounds, my only way down was in powder.

later in the afternoon, we got some sun

ok, that's better

The next morning, I went back with some coworkers. Thanks to sucky transortation and Squaw sucking, it took us a mere 1h15 to get to Alpine and we missed first chairs and new overnight snow. Grr...

waiting for shuttle #2

first lift, finally

Hi Matt

Alpine had good snowmaking

Last chair

If you like snow, you can read more about alpine and see pictures.

The evening party and food were great (well, except for the once again way way too loud music), thanks to the organizers for putting this together.

How yeah, the theme was Cowboys and Aliens.

'empathic listening to your life issues', love it :

the mad scientist, fear!

Some of the dive pictures are below. Unfortunately, the water was pretty cold (19C) and the differential was enough to instantly fog my camera lens on contact of the low temperature. Thankfully I had my gopro as a backup.

Visibility was somewhat poor, but we got to see cool critters:

this is where the plentiful lobsters were supposed to go :)

Between the 2 drives, we had a good "healthy" Australia BBQ lunch:

After our successful Sydney in a day last year, we tried Sydney in a half day this time :)

This was not really a plan to spend so little time in Sydney, but with our flights it worked out that way, we got a hellish red eye from Perth, and I figured it'd be more fun to spend 6 hours in Sydney than sit in the airport.

We went to the botanical gardens after stopping by Google to drop our luggage:

I had brought seeds to feed the cockatoos we saw last year. I love those birds:

I finally found some customers

an interested customer :)

it brought a twig to exchange for seeds :)

The video shows how one wasn't shy at all, but the two other ones really wanted the seeds, but were too shy to take them from our hands. Per Jennifer didn't get them to eat from her hand this year.

These are Sulphur-crested Cockatoos and many have been tagged so that people can report sightings on this Cockatoo Wingtag facebook page. They're fun and intelligent birds from what people have been reporting.

From there it was just a short walk to circular quay where we went to get a jet boat ride:

The jet boat ride was fun and wet (I know, what were the odds? :). That boat had enough power to do 360 turns in the water. Cool way to see the Sydney harbour :)

Last, but not least, we went to Google for lunch, and I got a few pictures from there, and then from the Sydney airport before flying home:

Did I mention they have a frigg'in monorail?

it's a conference room inside, by the way :)

But the gbike from Mountain View that somehow got very lost and ended up in Sydney was a winner by far. Big props to the culprits who made this happen :)

nice :)

It was a fun little zoo to visit:

I love those birds

good thing I had bird seeds with me :)

Finally, it was time to go molest some kangaroos

After finishing the zoo, we took a cab back to Fremantle to spend the rest of the day before going to the airport for our flight home:

We had 15mn to visit the marine museum before it closed:

the fast ferry to Rottnest

After sunset on the beach, we had a good dinner before going to the airport for a hellish red eye to Sydney:

bikes are the best way to get around

We went to our room first, and right away we had a hungry quokka came to our room. Thankfully I had some bird seeds that are ok for them to eat, whereas other foods can make them sick. They are the cutest marsupials:

After that, we went for a bike ride for what we had left of the day:

Quokkas are actually nocturnal, so we saw many more at night:

The next morning, our little friend came back for more (we left some water for it):

And we went back out to take the first ferry out:

So Jennifer and I flew to Xmas Island from Perth after linux.conf.au was over, and met Dirk and Linus there who had arrived the previous day. Turns out Xmas Island should really be part of Indonesia if you look at a map (it's just south of Jakarta. It is however quite far from Raja Ampat where we dived a few months prior), but for historical reasons, Australia got it as a territory some time back, and it's a 4H flight from Perth (thankfully, with a real plane and no luggage restriction like Lord Howe Island).
There is a lot to see on the island, but I have a separate post on our visit of Xmas Island and its many crabs.

There is a single dive shop on the Island, Wet n Dry run by Hama, and he did a great job getting us good dive sites every day, even if we came at a time when whales sharks which are usually not uncommon happened to be allusive during the week we were there. Hama does a great job running the dive shop. He does 2 dives a day every morning, and knows all the spots you can go dive at depending on the day's current conditions. Between dives, he usually got us a spot to snorkel where we could see dolphins or other cool critters while he was changing tanks on the boat between the dives.

Hana, hard at work :)

We got privileged to get Lynne as a guide who made sure to show us her world famous clit rock as well as phallus cavern :)

'Yes, post on the internet about my clit rock, I named it!'

Here's the map of where we went:

Before the pictures, here is a great summary video from Dirk:

Below are some of the pictures I took.

one cave I surfaced in during a dive

a few fish

a few more fish

a few more other fish :)

clown fish can be mean :)

our partners in crime

I love this juvenile rockmover wrasse:

Fish being cleaned:

those fish can turn from black to white with their mood.

I love these big puffer fishes:

Between the dives, we got to snorkel at nice spots:

snorkel with dolphins

some quick vids where we got to snorkel with dolphins, Manta Ray, big fish and sharks:

Between dives, we also got to see little fish that liked to jump on rocks and apparently could breathe air for a while:

those fish jump on the rock and seem to breathe air

Frigrate birds seen from the dive boat:

And that was it, after 5 days of diving, we got to see quite a bit in super clear water. Xmas Island was definitely a good place to go to, even if we didn't see any whale sharks :)

As seen from the plane, Xmas Island is reasonably large, you definitely need a car to get around

Thankfully they have a real runway that allows full size jets to land (along with proper luggage)

Our hotel was called "the sunset", I wonder why :)

Some dinners, we at in our hotel room with basic cooking facilities, others we ate in restaurants:

The island had a lot of industry linked to phosphate mining:

Unfortunately, people from other countries have figured out that they can just take boats to show up as refugees and flee to Australia:

Anyway, back to visiting the island, we covered a lot of the island thanks to the rental car:

This is the lovely 4x4 we got. It was full of dings and scratches, and that turned out to be a feature since we sure got a lot more scratches while driving between trees and plants and trying to avoid running over crabs that were everywhere.

We used our beaten up 4x4 rental to drive around the island to some hikes, remote beaches, and interesting viewing points, and it was definitely worth it. While they call themselves "the other galapagos" this is over-reaching, but they do have lots of cool birds, many many kinds of crabs, boobie birds, and more.

look at the webbed feet around the branches

We also got to see flying foxes (bats):

We also had many lizards and geckos:

This of course does not count the diving which was quite good in warm easy waters with great visibility.

After the dives in the morning, we used our rental car to go visit the Island, and it was a lot of fun to see so many crabs. From what we were told, the ubiquitous red crabs that are all over, including crossing the road everywhere, making driving interesting, aren't good to eat, but the robber/coconut crabs are, however they are protected. To be honest, I grew attached to those little red crabs, they are not afraid of humans, I've been able to give them food to their claw which they grabbed and ate slowly, and they do a great job recycling organic matter (animal or vegetal).
I have so many crab pictures, it was hard to select a few:

we missed the big crab migration, but some roads were still closed due to too many crabs

those little guys were fearless and all over, including the road

coconut crabs

we found this coconut crab white driving back at night

beauty

this little guy went hiding in the urinal during a rainfall, maybe not the best move

these guys were more shy

coconut crabs come in different colors

a beautiful blue one

the path was littered with crabs

this coconut crab found in the rocks had eggs

ghost crab

the ubiquitous red crabs eat all debris, vegetal or animal

we were able to feed the crabs some leaves, which they were happy to take from us

all shapes and sizes

unfortunately, many get run over

Many other pictures from driving around and hiking to beaches:

blowhole

we actually got to use the 4x4

remote beach we drove and hiked to

the tracks are from turtles that came to nest

these crabs can't swim, but they lay eggs in the ocean

they were underwhelming when we arrived, bad timing

A couple of late afternons, we went to Margaret Knol to finish the day. We got to see some birds and flying bats:

The pilot I flew with gave me a good overview of what to do and what's involved in flying big iron with passengers compared to what I usually fly.

Here are a few videos:

Dusk takeoff from LAX:

Landing at a SFO:

Landing at a small airport in the Alps:

I got to see the gear running all this, lots of computers:

I was excited to do the arduino miniconf this year since it was to make a GSM phone.

this looks almost like my nokia phone from 1999

We had some good keynotes this year too, my eagerly awaited favourite being of course Jon's arduino in space.

And Tridge was the lucky deserving recipient of the Rusty Wrench award this year:

I definitely enjoyed his ardupilot talk

Of course, like each year, I enjoyed socializing with my international friends:

The fancy talk description is here:

This talk will look at how we upgraded our ancient linux distribution on all the Google production servers to a more modern one based on debian stripped down and built from source.
We do live upgrades on running machines using an rsync-like rollout mechanism, and we slowly switched distributions on the fly without rebooting or downtime unless required by separately upgraded kernel, but doing a 10 year jump of linux userspace without breaking users was no piece of cake.
The talk will explain how something so crazy made sense, was even possible, executed, and worked out, as well as recommendations for maintaining linux big servers and dealing with upstream upgrades.

The video:

If you'd like the presentation in other formats:

More importantly, you can get the ProdNG LISA Paper which has many more details on how the upgrade went and the implementation.

>

Due to merely asking, and some super nice pilots in the B747 we were taking from SFO to Sydney, the captain not only let me sit in his chair, but even took the picture for me :)

cute!

After a dinner and night in Perth, we took an early private flight to Monkey Mia and Shark Bay. Putting the price aside (flying in Australia is not cheap), the owner unfortunately used the flight to check out one of his pilots, so we had an extra person in the plane which does not have much room, and we did a long 3H-ish flight in the cramped back seats of a Mooney. It was pretty miserable, but we got to Monkey Mia eventually. Unfortunately we got there too late for the last dolphin beach sighting of the day, so having arrived there after missing the main attraction was a bit disappointing.

I've flown the slightly faster version of this plane, I don't consider it a 4 seater

but we had 4 of us inside, it probably stretched the allowed payload

downtown perth

this board told us that we'd likely be out of luck for seeing dolphins that day

the dolphins swimming close to shore, but not interested in coming to see us

actually we got lucky and saw some wild emus

Next, we flew to Hamelin Pool to see Stromatolites by Shark Bay. Those cool organisms are now believed to have created part or most of the oxygen on earth, some 2 billion years ago. Unfortunately they helped create most of the animal life that exists on earth today, and in turn the fishes apparently though they tasted good and ate most of them. The few surviving ones are there because they are in very salty water that most sea animals don't like, and that's the case in Shark Bay:

this looks a bit dry, and it sure was hot and dry

this wild kangaroo didn't seem to mind.

After long flight back, I snapped a few pictures from Perth:

Naval museum and Fremantle in the back

Some pictures of Perth University:

the women are not impressed, tough crowd

but they could be bought with food easily :)

During the conference, one early morning, I went for a walk in the big park between Perth University and downtown Perth:

As for Perth itself, I didn't have any time to go visit it until the last evening after my flight in the B747 Simulator at Perth Flight Experience

I do have a few pictures from around the University where we had the conference, though:

And the university:

Jennifer and I walked around town a bit, had dinner, and got ready for our flight the next day to Christmas Island to see crabs and to dive