I grew up in the States. While growing up, I got interested in the country of Garistan. I was drawn to a country full hard-core passion for living a happy life. I studied the history and geography of Garistan, and got a pretty good feel for it.

So I moved there. At first, things seemed to go OK. Sure, there was a bit of a language barrier, but I was committed. I had a phrasebook. Some days were great, I did everything I needed to do and felt on top of the world. Some days I felt clumsy just trying to do normal tasks like food shopping. But I kept on going.

One day, I found a group of ex-patriots from the US. I went to the first meeting, a bit nervous, not quite sure what I was seeking out. What I found was relief. I could speak English without worry about how fast I was talking, or that anyone would assume I was a tourist. I could speak broken Garistanese without worrying about my accent and without worrying that I was being judged. …

Mozilla has a great presence at SCALE11x, the 11th Annual Southern California Linux Expo. This annual conference is completely volunteer run and one of the best Linux conferences around. Mozilla sponsored Friday’s DevOps Day LA and were part of the selection committee for MySQL Community Day.

See Firefox OS phones
Want to see a FirefoxOS mobile phone in action? Want to learn how to write apps for FirefoxOS? Come visit us at booth #14 and we will show you the phones and how to write a great app.

Giveaways
Also at booth #14, we are giving away swag! Get the traditional Firefox logo sticker or the new blue rocketship …

My Mozilla coworkers Ben Kero and Dan Maher gave a standing-room only presentation at Linux Conf AU about “How to Use Puppet Like an Adult”. It was fantastic!

Data != logic
Business DATA does not belong in modules, but business LOGIC is OK.

What are the data sources, then?
Hiera – lightweight pluggable, hierarchical databases. External to the modules, you can use many backends, including MySQL. New feature, standard in puppet 3.0. If you like YAML (and you should), you’ll like this.

$var = lookup('something') # unscoped (complicated)
$var = lookup('namespace::something') # scoped (yay!)

Another data source is puppetdb. This is a bigger topic, but the important thing is that it can be used for high performance store configs.

Where to find pre-built modules for puppet?
…

This is not quite a liveblog, but a set of notes about the points I found most interesting in this morning’s Linux Conf AU keynote, given by Dr. Andrew “bunnie” Huang, best known for Hacking the Xbox and developing the chumby.

The talk was a fascinating look at how complex developing embedded Linux devices is. Let’s start with the takeaways:

One of the points bunnie made was that customizing embedded devices is really a frontier at this point (though he did not use the word “frontier”). There are not a lot of folks doing it. The “Sustainability” bullet point emphasizes this – bunnie talked about how people create custom environments for the device and want updates pushed to it, but that’s difficult because the environment may mean special tweaks to the updates.

The cost point was interesting …