Things are about to get weird in the Clay Dillon universe with the upcoming Gaslight Village. If you need to catch up on the series before it arrives, this bundle puts together the first three books, #1, #25, and #2. You won't find the three together for a better price, and you won't believe how different the story is when you can see all of it at once. This $45 bundle includes Nothing is Right, the Lambda Literary Finalist Defiant, and the epic Imaginary Friends. You can also treat yourself to the ebook bundle for just $25.
Note: Ebook delivery will be via a compressed folder (.zip file). You will need an app that supports .zip extraction to access the books. We apologize for any inconvenience, but this is our only way to manage multiple file delivery at this time.
If you are interested in supporting Gaslight Village and gaining access to it as a serial subscriber, check out Michael's Patreon.


Become a Wine Tycoon Running a Virtual Vineyard A new video game simulates the experience of wine, from acquiring land to getting it in the bottle.
The Game(s) of Wine Test your vino I.Q. with these grape-inspired games.


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Improving throughput in the deployment pipeline
by Maneesh Mehra Sat, 27 Jul 2013 | No Comments
Tags: DevOps, pipeline, tools —
During the last 18 months, the IBM Jazz Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) team has been undergoing a transformation around adopting continuous delivery best practices and methodologies, some of which you may already be aware of through our discussions at Jazz.net and this year's Innovate conference.
Through this blog, I want to share some of those experiences and showcase what we learnt, where we are today and where we want to be.
I got involved with this effort during summer of 2012 when I was asked to start looking at a nascent collaborative effort brewing between two teams from IBM Rational and IBM Tivoli around continuous deployment (For folks in the know, this effort eventually transformed into a product offering called IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery (SCD) and was released in October 2012).
The idea was simple: "Create automation that would allow our development team to request deployment of any CLM build into an environment that resembled a production-like environment."
And what would our developers do with them? They could use them to run manual tests, automated tests, do proof-of-concepts, run pre-integration tests, reproduce customer issues, verify patches, hot-fixes…. the list could go on.
However, that was not our complete goal. Using these automated deployment capabilities, we also wanted to auto-provision similar production-like virtual systems with every new build, run a series of automated tests whose complexity ranged from the simplest ones like unit or functional tests to the performance, system and reliability tests, record results from each of these executions in a human as well as report-consumable format. The goal was to identify issues much earlier in the development cycle.
As some of you may already know, we constantly "drink our own champagne" through our self-hosting efforts. Since we are the earliest adopters of our own code, we often notice ourselves running into issues that are show stoppers on our production environments. Some of these problems are extremely critical and need immediate attention. Often the only resolution is to involve the development team to spin up a hot fix, test it locally, bring down the production servers, apply the patch and bring up the servers. These unscheduled downtimes not only result in lost productivity for the dev teams, they are also a big cause for embarrassment around the wider consumer community who use these production servers for tracking our plans, reporting work items and defects, using forums etc. From our operations team's perspective, finding an appropriate maintenance window is a challenging task, given the global nature of our development teams.
When we teased apart this issue, we realized that most of the problems that we found in production should've ideally been found during our testing cycles. Talking to the test teams, we realized that they were over burdened due to the amount of code changes the development teams were putting in to support multiple releases. The test teams had a huge testing matrix of all supported combinations of platforms, OS version, product versions, upgrades, migration cases…The whole nine yards. The test teams could barely keep up with the amount of testing and were constantly struggling with integration builds that had broken features, regressions, version differences etc. This all came back to the development team and its practices for testing and delivering changes to the integration stream.
During development retrospectives, a typical theme that resonated was that the developers were trying to pack a feature rich release in a relatively short period of time. Most development teams were testing features in non-production like environments using borrowed, quickly-munged systems and were often running manual tests for validating their changes.
So we explored the possibility of providing the development team with a mechanism where they could test product features and changes into virtual production-like environments. These new environments would be like a developer's own sandbox which they could create with the click of a button, own for a short period of time and release it once they were done. We also thought about providing them with various automated testing capabilities that our test teams owned. These would range from the most simple smoke tests to the most complex system and performance tests. We thought if the development team could consume the functionality of quickly deploying systems and running automated tests against them, we would be able to churn more reliable integration builds with fewer function breakages. Such builds would also free up our test teams to focus on advanced, complex testing and not worry about regressions creeping into them. They would also give the test teams more open cycles to improve the test automation and that would feedback into the same framework that the development team could use for their tests. Builds that would pass through the test team's gates would be of much better quality and would improve the self-hosting experience for our operations team, who could now focus on overall system health and its organic growth. And eventually, our production systems, our development teams and the wider consumer community would suffer fewer downtimes – Overall a win-win for all.
"EMPOWER" THE DEVELOPER
To successfully pull this use case off, we had certain imperative objectives around the common developer in mind:
It had to be a self-service model and must rely on concepts that the developers were already familiar with.
It had to have a normal, consistent flow using standardized patterns and system configuration definitions that we recommend to our customers and also use internally. However at the same time, it had to be flexible enough and could be changed easily.
It had to provide a rich catalog of functionality, configurations and topologies that one could choose from.
The deployment aspect of this functionality should be a like a background task that did not require user intervention.
It had to be like a request/response model where the system could notify the user when the environment was ready and was available for them to consume.
And finally, it had to provide capabilities for executing automated tests along with setup and configuration of the CLM product itself.
USE JAZZ BUILD DEFINITIONS FOR REQUESTS
Given that we were building Jazz applications using Jazz technologies, it seemed like the most prudent way of driving any automation in our development environment, whether consumed by an individual or by our product builds, was to use Jazz build definitions in Rational Team Concert. This thinking also aligned with the following two fundamental behavioral patterns that we assumed of our development community:
All developers know how to request Jazz-based builds: The deployment of a test environment should be very similar to that. The build definitions should contain any/all properties that would allow developers to tweak the target environment configuration.
All developers know how to read build results: Accessing the deployed test environment and automated test results shouldn't prereq any special knowledge on their part. All relevant references to host systems, provision requests, validation results etc should be captured by the build result (under Tests, Logs and External Links).
THE CLM "DEPLOYMENT PIPELINE"
Where We Are Today
Using a home-grown orchestrated build mechanism, we have a continuously running deployment pipeline for CLM that provisions six different production-like environments for executing the following types of automated tests: build verification/smoke, application/function test, system acceptance, and performance/reliability acceptance. We record results from each of these deployments and test execution cycles in a common build tracking record that our development team uses for collaborating on the state of a given build. In addition, this item records the approval/rejection state of each deployment and test execution phase and allows us to visualize trend data around the overall health of the milestone and release. A few sample charts can be viewed at the following team dashboards: Pipeline Metrics, Trend Data. This pipeline uses the IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery (SCD) 2.0 offering and integrates with Rational Team Concert for Jazz-based builds and IBM Workload Deployer as its "Cloud" environment of choice. All our orchestration and deployment automation code is written as OpsCode Chef recipes leveraging the Ruby programming language and is executed on systems running a Jazz Build Engine process.
Where We Want To Go
Earlier this year, IBM acquired a company called urban{code} that offers a few interesting solutions around continuous build, deployment and release. These are called uBuild, uDeploy and uRelease. We are currently exploring the possibility of swapping out our current deployment technology (SCD) with uDeploy and are running a few proof-of-concept demos around an end-to-end deployment pipeline for a given sample application. In addition, we are exploring the concept of using Jenkins alongside Jazz Build Toolkit for build, package and orchestration activities of our target CLM application on virtual systems. We are also trying to streamline our automated test infrastructure to allow for seamless integration with whichever build, package and deployment technology we use. We want to bring about a cultural and process change among our development teams where pipeline based deployments and corresponding automated test execution cycles help us drive the overall quality of our products higher and enable our customers to adopt them much more quickly and with ease into their production environments.
Maneesh Mehra
CLM Automation Architect
IBM Rational Software Group

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Trainer Shea Eden is awaiting his fate after the Racing Appeals and Disciplinary Board found him guilty on race day treatment and misconduct charges.
The RAD Board handed down their decision on Thursday but is yet to deliver penalty.
Eden faced a charge of stomach tubing Considering ahead of a race at Swan Hill on June 9 while also attempting to dispose of or destroy evidence relating to the matter.
Stablehand Jamie Dentith was also found guilty of acting with Eden in the stomach tubing of Considering.
Eden pleaded guilty to administering sodium bicarbonate, an alkalinising agent, to the evening feed of three horses on June 8 which was within the one clear day of the horses being scheduled to race and also of not recording multiple treatments and medications administered to horses in his care.
The RAD Board will hear submissions from counsel acting for Eden and Dentith as well as Racing Victoria at a future date before delivering penalty.


There is a public consultation tomorrow, Wednesday the 30th of November, at the Clinton Centre. It is a drop-in event from 4.30pm to 7 30pm.
Eventually, if approved by a local referendum, the Neighbourhood Plan will very significantly influence planning for the next 15 years or more. Currently, the plan is being drafted by residents and some local councillors.
Further information about the plan at www.seafordnp.uk/index.php and the Seaford Town Neighbourhood Plan Facebook page.


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Deseret NewsOpinion
Letter: Put term limits on Congress
Published: March 19, 2019 9:00 pm
unrepentant progressive Bozeman, MT
March 21, 2019 6:28 a.m.
Career politicians accumulate power and influence. Power brings home "the bacon" to their constituents. Constituents love "the bacon".
We have seen the enemy and he/she is us. Enough of the hypocrisies from both sides of the political divides. Each side of the political debate points to another "tenured" Senator or Congressional representative, belting out criticism of that person as examples of the evils of career politicians. But not mine, goes the retort. Not mine! He/she represents my interests.
If you want citizen legislators, then hire them at election time. If you want power brokers who manipulate the system for their own benefit (and that of their campaign contributors) and a few "backbites" to the folks back home, then keep sending the same old tired, compromised faces to Washington and your state capitol.
I don't have any confidence that the voting public can exercise that kind of judgment.
joe5 South Jordan, UT
March 20, 2019 2:54 p.m.
Confused almost hit the bullseye on what is really the problem with DC. It's not really so much the PACs, special interests, and lifetime politicians as it is the civil servants (bureaucracy) that run all the departments.
Administrations come and go. You go from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump and, guess what, that same civil servant has been at his desk the whole time. They never have to change policies or procedures. All they have to do is outlast the current crop of dime-a-dozen politicians until the next crew is elected and comes on shift.
Their main objective is budget (funding). They spend all the money allocated to them so they can ask for more next year. Whether they actually have any value is completely beside the point. They just want to protect their jobs for 40 years until they retire.
In Defense, we often refer to the "Iron Major." Generals and admirals may think they are making decisions and running things but it is really the mid-level officers running programs and determining how and why resources are allocated to programs. It's the same with these civil servants. The White House and Congress are illusions of power. The real power is in the bureaucracies.
Confused Sandy, UT
RJohnson - We already have term limits; it's up to the voters to enforce them at the ballot box.
Here is my theory why this happens....
Voters have come to the very sad conclusion that Elected Officials do not run Washington, but rather the political machine (made up of PAC's, long term politicians and special interest groups) does.
I remember Karen Shepard promising to break up the machine when she was elected to congress, once there, she found out just how difficult that would be and basically caved in to the "Process".
This is one reason that Term Limits might help, it would eliminate a lot of the political clout the "Machine" has.
Freiheit --
I like your observations and concerns. I know those are tricky issues to get around.
But one thing I think Term Limits would help is that when a Career politician like Hatch or Pelosi, the longer they are in, the more political clout they get.
In fact, there was an article not so long ago how Pelosi used her political clout and special interest groups to get the Speaker of the House nomination.
I think to break the "Political Machine" which may or may not include elected officials, Term limits is the only way to break the clout the machine has.
Frozen Fractals Salt Lake City, UT
March 20, 2019 11:14 a.m.
We'd also have a much more disorganized legislature if term limits are set too low since you need experience to be able to run committees effectively. If there are to be term limits set it should be at something relatively high to allow for smoother committee leadership (like 6 terms in the House and 3 in the Senate). That would make the longest career possible legislative career 30 years (and only a tiny portion of legislators would get to that except in small states where the number of House and Senate seats are about the same).
If everybody who says they are in favor of term limits ALWAYS voted against the incumbent when his allocation ended, we would have term limits. But even the hardiest advocates are not being truthful in their hearts or their actions. They claim to be for term limits but they keep voting for the incumbent.
After seeing this year's crop of House freshmen, I would be terrified of term limits. That is one scary group.
Flipphone , 00
There is only one problem establishing term limits for congress and the problem is congress has to approve term limits and their is no way they will vote to stop their grave train.
One more time Spanish Fork, UT
Term limits sounds good, but you will end up with unintended consequences. Best to hold our legislators in check through the ballot box.
Way back in the '70s Orrin Hatch ran and won on term limits. He flipped and we refused to do our duty and vote for someone else. The best things we could do is throw the bums out. But We the People refuse to do our duty. We are the keepers of Congress and keep re-electing these do nothing candidates based on party politics. The fault is ours, not term limits.
ConservativeCommonTater Salt Lake City, UT
Term limits would be a great idea for several reasons. People making less than $200K a year somehow become millionaires after a couple of terms. They concentrate too much power and use it to intimidate others in government and civilian jobs. They spend too much time on their "Beg-a-Thons" or selling themselves to the highest bigger
Preventing future Orrin Hatch's, Mitch McConnell's, Diane Feinstein's, Strom Thurmonds, Maxine Waters', and the list goes on, would be a good thing.
Some would say that longevity gives them more power to get things done. Enter the millionaire status goals.
We don't need or want career politicians enriching themselves at taxpayer expense.
Thomas Jefferson Salt Lake City, UT
I agree with you but we will always have the excuse makers whenever this comes up. Sure, the excuses are poor (like 'we already have term limits, voting) but that doesnt mean the person doesnt really believe in those excuses.
Good enough for the presidency, good enough for congress.
Freiheit Salt Lake City, UT
While term limits sounds good at first glance, there are a couple of issues that should be considered:
1) Is there any evidence that first-term representatives or senators vote any more responsibly than those with longer tenure?
2) If the elected office holders are for the most part newbies, this would mean that veteran unelected staffers would be the only ones who "know the ropes" and would play an even greater role than they do now.
3) Do we apply this no-experience-is better principle in other areas of life? Do we seek out the least experirenced doctors, lawyers, plumbers or mechanics when we have a problem?
While career politicians present a real problem, the answer is not an arbitrary term limit, but rather the development of an intelligent and knowlegeable electorate that makes real choices at the ballot box. And maybe a couple of unicorns to help us.
RJohnson Salt Lake City, UT
We already have term limits; it's up to the voters to enforce them at the ballot box. Mandating limits, however, deprives all of us the right to vote for those whom we think best for the job, those we want representing us.
No one really wants them anyway. In polling, 80+% say they favor term limits yet continue to return the incumbents. That tells me that either most polled are lying or they support term limits for the other guy but not their guy. My money's on the latter.
No One Of Consequence Salt Lake City, UT
Great idea. How are you going to convince Congress to send that amendment out to the States for ratification? They don't want term limits.
The only way to make that change is through an Article 5 Conference of the States.
Happy Valley Hillbilly Alpine, UT
March 19, 2019 10:53 p.m.
Agreed. 12 years for a member of the House or Senate. Maximum. No more career politicians. Also, consider a partial year for Congress as is done here in UT. It would speed up the legislative process considerably.
high school fan Huntington, UT
Term limits is a great idea, twelve years is enough of anyone. Retirement pay should also be eliminated but we could pay them six to twelve months after they leave office to allow them time to reaclimate.