I want no monuments

It started as fresh air and slowly became toxic.

As a technical director, I thought I had the power to steer the technical part of my company but that revealed to be false. My father and his friend are the main providers of the software that let us work. I found it slow, difficult to maintain and evolve and not as productive as the company needed it to be.

I took the long way round and started providing the company with better systems, removing some daily problems.

And then I finally said that: We need to remake this software: why don’t we sit and choose if to start from the most critical parts that add the most value to our business or if to start from the boundaries and make the process slower but more predictive?
And nobody sat.
Not even my father.

It’s a professional and personal failure.

But it finally lets me open to learn something new, to re-join the community I left and to be have a better private life.

Or you’ll get some weird exchange as on today bbc homepage

Tomorrow I’ll attend the first Italian Java Application Server Day, organized by Genova JUG.

See you there folks!

UPDATE: an unexpected problem prevented me from attending :( Hope to find the slides online, at least.

Despite you pair or not, you’re agile or not, this talk will teach you be a better co-worker. It examines some of the common problems you get with you colleagues and depicts how to get out of them or to solve them. It also mentions the “pomodoro technique” :)

ps: I’m trying Parleys embedded videos for the first time. Just go the site if you don’t like it.

In the beginning I was creating virtual machines out of physical ones, overbooking their size to make guests believe they had, say, 30G, while the hard drive just had 20.

With the passing of time, these disk images were growing and growing, and performances went lower and lower.

So I’ve followed this guide, and found a problem at paragraph 8: converting an image file into a raw LVM volume does NOT work, at least with the current version of KVM available on Debian Lenny.

The solution is quite simple, even if time and disk space consuming, and it came from this post.

First create a raw image file:

kvm-img convert disk0.qcow2 -O raw disk0.raw

Then DD it to the LVM volume

dd if=disk0.raw of=/dev/vg01/vm1 bs=1M

Voilà!