Jenkins - offline, disconnect, delete

I learned a new Jenkins trick today.  When managing worker nodes, this bit of information is useful.

There are three high level operations that relate to the communication between the Jenkins master and the worker nodes; mark offline, disconnect, and delete.  

The high level difference between these three is as follows.

mark offline - stop taking new jobs and allows running jobs to complete.

disconnect - terminate running jobs, stops taking new jobs, and leaves the host online.

delete - shoots the node in the head.

As for background, we use Jenkins build pipelines hosted in AWS.  This setup is pretty nice because it allows you to configure Jenkins to dynamically created worker instances as needed based on and AMI image id.  We make new worker images frequently to update the functionality of the pipelines and add new configurations or utilities.  I had been waiting for the build queues to clear out on the nodes before deleting them to be replaced by workers with the new AMI image.  This new trick lets me offline the nodes and allow them to finish without running the risk of killing a node before the jobs are done or having to watch the console for a long time waiting for an opening to clean up.

todo.txt to google spreadsheet converter - step 1 - get grovy

[rant mode on]
because while I grew up with Java I never got over the wonders of onestep run from my perl days.  The whole Java compile then run just slows down the whole development process down.
[rant mode off]

Below are the direct links you could get from a quick google search to get groovy up and running on your mac.

http://groovy.codehaus.org/Download
which points to below and is really cool
http://gvmtool.net/

Back on Blogger

well I posted on LiveJournal back in 2011 that I would be moving back to Blogger.  (http://glblack.livejournal.com/8416.html).  Two years later is my first post back.  Well at least for this blog stream.  I have been working with the BTEC blog over the last couple of years.  We really need to figure out how we should cross post to Facebook and Twitter so the content has more reach.  The traffic to the blog is really not that high.

Anyway back on blogger to talk about some groovy, todo.txt, google spreadsheet conversions scripting.  Just got groovy installed on the laptop and will get the google java api libs to start on the conversion scripts.  more on that later.

Labor of love scanning slides and goodbye LJ

 So as of this morning I have scanned 1,300 of the family slides on the Epson Perfection 4490 Photo scanner.  I  have to say that the scanner was a very good investment.  It has taking some time to get into the rhythm of keeping te scanner busy.  Being able to scan 4 slides at a time is great.  With an average scan time of around 11 minutes after warmup, I've tried to not let the scanner sit tool long so that I have to pay the 4ish minute warmup toll.  There really is no way to bypass the preview step.  You really need the preview in order to decide which slides need color restoration and backlight correction.  It is nice that you can have separate settings for different slides on the same scan.  Typically I only use the color correction.

So this will be the last post to LJ.  On the next post I'll be moving back to blogger.  I've got a couple of Google Apps sites up and going and really need to get the site owners to start blogging.  I am thinking Blogger will be the easiest integration with those sites, so I need to start using it to get back up to speed on the tool.

Good luck LJ team, I do hope things work out for you.  One suggesting, you really need to find a business model where you do not cramp your bloggers space with ads.  Maybe sell general user behavior data, partner / rev share with bloggers to provide relavent ads.  Not knowing your revenue sources and not have spent enough time researching LJ options, it is hard to make better suggestions.

This blog has moved to livejournal.com.

You can find me there under glblack.

Blogger just has too many limitations. Somethings are nice to have private or only for friends.

Later

The Price of Gas!

This is an entertaining flash animation sent to me.
http://toccionline.kizash.com/films/1001/178/index.php
I found a couple of other ones by this same person.

Call me ignorant, but what has caused the price of gas to sky rocket?

In 2003 the cost of crude oil was around $28. Looking today, it seems to be around $65. That's more than double! The average price of gas in 2003 was $1.56. Does this mean we should expect to be paying $3 per gallon soon?

Source of 2003 numbers.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/analysis_publications/primer_on_gasoline_prices/html/petbro.html

Source of today's numbers
http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/commodities/energyprices.html

What has cause the cost of crude to go up so much? Is the cost of crude the major factor in the price of gas. Does it really cost this much more to produce gas?

At what point do we start buying big tanks and hoard gas like was done in the 70's?

Here is an interesting site that lets you see gas prices at various stations in your area.
http://www.gasbuddy.com/

Blogger profile
--Internal dialog on--
Okay this is stream of consciousness.. so stop obsessing over the fact that you can not name or cannot figure out how to name this post.... and write something
--internal dialog off--
Wow. I do not know what I should be more scared of here. The fact that blogger.com (aka Google) is asking me for all this information, the fact that I acutally entered a bunch of stuff, or the fact that it linked me to like 40,000+ other people by entering about 300 characters into three form fields and hit save. I've had conversations with a friend of mine about the fact that they liked google, but was starting to get a little scared with Google's obsession of being the planets single source for information. They may have a point.

That's all I've got time for this morning. I wonder how much I can put in this blog thing without getting in trouble at work. Anybody have any comments on that last part? Any sage advice here?

Okay blogger.com. your spell check sucks. why don't you use those connections at Google and integrate their GMail spell check. It is much better. Oh well folks you'll have to deal with bad spelling until I schedule more time for posting.

Stream of consciousness

So a first post. I guess most bloggers have to do this. I wouldn't say this is my first blog post ever, but I am a novice at this. For a while in college I had a website where I would basically blog on the home page. This was before the cool buzz work "Blog" was used. I was never very diligent at keeping the site updated, probably because of the fact that while I didn't mind writing html, it seemed too much overhead for just getting your thoughts down. A former coworker of mine did this about the same time, but had much more success at keeping things updated. Last I checked thou his site was down as well.

So why are we here. The title of this post and blog is "Stream of consciousness" see "WikiPedia" --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_of_consciousness for a definition.

This is what I hope to get out of this blog. Write down some of my thoughts that would otherwise evaporate into the ether.

Hopefully this is an average to better first post. I tend to think it is probably average or less than average so that may give you some incite into my personality. As with anything, skill comes over time. Hopefully my blogging ability and writing style will develop. As with anything feedback is helpful. So let me know what you think about both the content, topic, writing quality, or anything else that sticks out about this blog.

Let's see where this takes us!