All right, so I'm Chisa and I am the research and development technical program manager based in London for Pivotal and Today we are running a panel So I'm actually going to let the panel introduce themselves and I'm also going to let them describe exactly what we're talking about So I'll start with introductions and then we'll go through and discuss what the goals of effectively what we're talking about are Howdy, okay, so my name is Deborah Wood I am the product manager for the team that runs platforms in Pivotal one of the platforms that we run is for Pivotal tracker in production and the conversation today is around the platform that we ran for The sport relief campaign We ran the platform. I'm a queen he wrote the software to collect donations and we're just going to talk about Some of the things that we did to mitigate fear given that we were distributed into prosperous countries and The comic relief thing is a pretty high pressure night of TV donations collect millions for charity You don't want things to go up kaboom. So We just had a couple of pragmatic things that we did that we think might be helpful for yourself. So Deborah Hi, I'm I'm Xenon. I'm I work for our Makuni. We're a cloud native software consultancy I've been involved with this particular project for much longer than that for about the last eight years I've been doing the donations platform for comic relief. It's been quite quite a joyful journey and Yeah, I'm the COO of our Makuni, but I generally means we're quite small company that means just do all the crap So that's me My name is James win. I'm a staff engineer for Pivotal cloud ops in Dublin This was the second year. We did the comic relief platform out of Dublin office Had to do a few different things this time Great. So to start and we've already talked about the fact that we are effectively going to look at incident handling I'd like to start with Xenon and just tell us a little bit about the problem that you saw and the opportunity and Can you just tell us what happened? Okay, so for those that don't know comic relief for a UK charity and once a year they have a TV show that runs for about seven hours and They collect a lot of the money during that TV show. So we about eight seven eight seven years ago We had to rebuild the platform. It was an old platform I'll Java platform that had 12 different organizations that came together to help deliver it about 35 40 people Tin would arrive on the 1st of January. You'd kind of get everyone together, you know, some of the big players, you know Oracle Cisco some of the other kind of IBM, etc. They'd all come together and Patch the old platform together and just like hope for hell that it would still work and it kind of in 2011 It kind of reached the peaks where we it almost broke because of the level of traffic So we realized we needed to rewrite it and so I'm a coonie Pitch to rewrite it and tried a few of the kind of platform of service Providers out there and settled on cloud foundry. So for the first few years We ran it on open source cloud foundry across a private vSphere environment across AWS and then a couple of years ago we partnered with pivotal and we run it across PCF and so that worked really well and whereas before it was a single team that was Doing all of development and supporting the platforms as well the proper kind of in a proper kind of single single DevOps team It then changed when pivotal came in because pivotal running the platform and the team were under development So we had to change some of the practices and the things that we did and Yeah So Debra, can you be can you expand upon that and kind of be a little bit more explicit around the role that pivotal played in this particular incident Yeah ready so Pivotal was providing the PCF Foundation In this particular year so this year we changed it up a bit. So we had a multi foundation set up We had three PCF installations One was serving as a canary environment that we could just push Product updates to and then we had two PCF installations that served as two different regions for the actual production receiving of Donations What we did a little differently this year was we wanted to experiment with allowing internal product teams to liaise directly With application developers to just understand the use cases of how they were running the software that we write So this year we had pks which was our pivotal container service We were getting ready to go GA on that They were interested in participating just to learn from their views as Just get firsthand empathy of How it is to run software on pks. We also had health watch, which is the tool that we have to observe a platform Behavior over so that team was also participating actively so they were personally pushing their software to To the environment. We also had Redis So we what we were doing just from a product side of pivotal is we we saw this as an opportunity to have Internal pivotal teams working directly with our mccuny at dev teams to experience the the highs and lows and interesting moments of Getting ready for a a very high profile High sensitivity TV telethon. I mean, I think it gets much better to to learn how to do things, right? So that's what we were doing differently this year, but with the same objective and And then James can you start us off But then anyone can also add in in terms of how exactly that played out step-by-step I'm sure it's played out step-by-step, but I just wonder things as well. That was big very different for us this year was Debbie mentioned pks will be also had a mongo DB as well and we were running this on pks So this would have been the first It's probably the first production loads ever on pks to be run. So people are quite Anxious to say at least about this. So what we did was we decided to Put together a process to try to alleviate people's fear. So we started off with kind of simple the simple drills of just people receiving a page didn't have to do anything, but just Hey, I now know what a page looks like. I now get some sense of the feeling of Getting it to call at the middle of night and then we kind of increased the complexity Each time testing out things like access make sure people had the right permissions and so on the whole way up until we built an exercise whereby Someone had to go in and actually try to debug a fake mongo issue and True this we were able to build up an awful of confidence because a lot of people didn't actually want nobody wanted to support the mongo instance This was a big problem for us That's that like that was probably the That was the interesting part of this exercise is that in the previous years we had we were running mongo on a particular tile and We'd had to tweak that Tyler we but but That was how it had been done last year and there were clear understandings of who owns what Who who handles incidents in this particular component this year? Because we wanted to use the opportunity to run on pks. It was more complicated for the armor Cooney team because while they were the Experts in mongo DB and troubleshooting that They were not and could not be expected to be experts on pks. So they were like grand I know how to troubleshoot a mongo DB issue I don't know how to necessarily get there and I certainly don't know how to get there under pressure It's like in the morning if someone goes bananas and so I can't reasonably be expected to Hold operational responsibility for this in the past. Yes, but now I can't and Like we were in a bit of a stalemate because we couldn't use the tile of last year because it had gone out of support We could use the latest and greatest and patched update of mongo DB if we ran it on pks But now the knowledge required to troubleshoot the incident was spread across three teams So we had the platform team, which is my team. We had the pks team So my team aren't experts in pks the pks team is experts in pks And then the armor Cooney team was experts in mongo DB. So there was this it took us almost six weeks to just With with night of TV coming up very quickly for us to decide worst-case scenario something happens on mongo DB It is a bit more complicated this year and everyone's very afraid of this hot potato No one can be expected to To have all of the knowledge should something go down. So that was It becomes an interesting challenge because It's that kind of separation of duty. So the last few years that you've run it with pivotal the operating The platform team haven't really known anything about the about the app, you know, it's 26 different micro services It's eventually consistent things going to queues and various mongo DB could actually go away And it wouldn't be a problem. We take the money It'd be harder to report on how much money we had but we take the money and that's the kind of primary goal of the platform so But then when you move into a situation that we had now where there was kind of like a lack of clarity of Not so much who's responsible just who's responsible for what but actually what the process is if something goes on How do you get the information? How do you get the place you need to get to to find out what's going on and where that responsibility lies? It led to some really interesting kind of challenges And I'd like to probably call out something you said earlier on the stage this morning She said when you were talking about that communication and about the kind of teams working together And I think a really big Plus point that came out of all the exercise to your running was about that developing a trust and developing that kind of feeling that even though We were in a way three separate teams or three separate responsibilities We're all working together to achieve that goal And we kind of sort of once you build that kind of trust and psychological safety between the teams and you build that kind Of confidence in each other's abilities That was a really important thing because under pressure if you don't have those things it can quickly quickly go wrong So one one of the challenges that you have all mentioned is that there was just this fear of Responsibility amongst the humans And kind of like a lack of confidence. I'm wondering are there any other challenges that stood out to you in in this experience This kind of goes back to the fear thing again a little bit One of the other things is our mccuny know their platform and have been doing this for many years as he not just mentioned Our team is an operations team the pks team was a brand new or in the development team and Their concept of kind of support. They didn't necessarily have a concept support They didn't have a concept of having to dial in somewhere and so on So it was really important to get their confidence up on doing this because even though they were the experts They weren't they were not necessarily the experts while they were in the trenches and that was that was important to try to build up that confidence with them And earlier we were we were talking and one thing that you mentioned was Having access to the right things. Can you expand upon that a little bit? interestingly our director so David Lang has a rich history and operations and his His kind of gem of understanding is that usually in incident management The biggest issue is getting access to the right thing once you've done that Then you're in your comfortable place. You understand the technology and you can get going so for us the The setup was quite intriguing. So we had the vpn to protect access to the two production regions So you need your you need the software and the credentials to log into the vpn Then you need to know Which region are you talking about? So are we talking about region a or region b of production? Then What are the credentials to get into pks? What are the credentials to get to manga db? I cannot which one of the manga db's so it's not so much Looking at the software that's failing. It's just getting to it And you don't really want to be learning that under pressure when everybody's looking at your software on tv and bbc And it's two o'clock in the morning and you don't know who to ping for a password so Probably the thing that built the most confidence in the various teams So generally what we did is we had a fire drill And it was a toy example and we said, okay I'm a cuny you you send us an email to this specific reserved email address. It's going to page Us operations team. We are going to do a mock triage. Okay, this looks like it's a redis instance or issue Or this looks like it's a blah issue We're going to call the people who are the subject matter expects of that bring them into this zoom call that we're going to chat But Ultimately, we're going to practice. So i'm going to say mr. pks person. Can you get me the last lug entry?  I'm not going to help you The point of the exercise is do you know how to get there? And if not, let's let's make sure that the software is installed on your machine that you're going to be using that night So basically I want to make it routine So by the time if anything does happen, you've done this so many times that you know exactly who what to get you have the password Passwords and some of the things that were surfaced in these fire drills is that it was a it was a silly as having the wrong Version of a cli that could have blocked you or not realizing that you didn't have the vpn set up on your personal machine at home That could have blocked you that's not Really that difficult to fix but if if under pressure that that has a lot of stress that can be avoided So the fire drills would basically just housekeeping. Can you get there? The other thing is just do it with fire drills is there was kind of a general progression So you kind of start off with your own workstation that you use every day And so you think oh, that's kind of pointless because I do this every day But then how about doing it from your laptop? Oh, hang on. Actually don't have the right version of tonal blink Okay, how about doing it from your laptop on wireless in starbucks? Oh, hang on. We need a firewall rule now and so on and it's Disaggression meant we kind of were able to head off these niggly little problems That as we keep stressing you don't want to find out when the world's on fire um, so I think for me was what was really enlightening was the So we're great believers believers in the concept of observability within our software being able to know what's going on From the outside just simply by looking at the outputs that it's producing. So I think What was really interesting for us was being able to go through a process And so we run fire drills kind of game days quite a lot And then we have days where the role of one person is to go around through the platform You're doing a bit of chaos engineering taking things out of the loop knocking out a red is seeing what happens and getting the understanding under a kind of not real pressure but kind of uh, fake kind of pressure of Okay, when we spot this thing in the app when we spot that we're getting loads of kind of 403s from one of the payment service providers It's showing this and it's appearing like this for the platform team And this is what it means and kind of going through those scenarios so that you get kind of A shared understanding of what a problem looks like what a possible problem will look like for us as an app development team For the platform team and for the pks team and kind of really Practicing that and then practicing the loop between us all of how we then communicate that things You know rather than you know sending somebody sending the platform team like a snippet of a log That might mean nothing to them at all rather than like well What information is of use to you to help you identify what the issue is and so really it's about that kind of I don't like use a sort of term that comes to mind is that kind of sort of human glue of kind of Gluing everything together not that I want to melt people down But you know So and I think you call out the one of the third challenges that you mentioned earlier Which is effectively getting rid of the silos between people so it sounds like the three things were Just making sure that there weren't silos making sure that people actually are ready to walk out the door When we say we're leaving And then the third one was just making sure that we're mitigating for the fear Yeah, that people have So then Out of that, what do you think ultimately were the biggest learnings that you took from this? I think for me just for No, no one team can be expected to be the experts and confidently able To troubleshoot these very diverse areas of software So my team were Because of the amount of work that we all amount of time we spend on pcf We are experts in troubleshooting pcf. We know that Um pks having built that entire tool set are experts in where to start looking and what symptoms are there La la la i'm a cuny. No exactly What mongo db is being used for what what queries they're running all that jazz No one team could be credibly expected to hold that hot potato So we had to collaborate and make and make it explicit and practice that the three teams together are gonna Are going to be available experts from all three will be available on call And we are we are we were actually in the room With our mccuny in london But everybody is available and we are two seconds away. We're all actually Gonna be holding and just the fact that everybody knew that Someone who is an expert in that particular area can get me to where I need to be under pressure. So if I'm like There's a there's a pks thing somewhere and on that is a mongo db And I gotta get their help then there's a mongo db person in the room There's a platform person in the room and there's So just the fact that it was shared was that was a that was a massive thing shared and practiced Yeah, I think um, I think I'd call out in particular. There's there's something that kind of Sounds like it's against the kind of whole principle of dev ops and kind of shared ownership It is the idea that within that having that culture of shared ownership and collaboration and working together to achieve that goal But having a really clear explicit separation of duty so that everyone is really sure about what their Little spaces and not in the kind of their little space like I want to stick my elbows out and protect that little space And not gonna let anyone know what's going on inside of that space But more of that I know what I have to do. I know I'm responsible for when something moves outside of that space I know who I need to talk to and specifically how they want to be talked to Under pressure in this moment what information they need from me in order for them to be able to do their They're part of the kind of magic circle if you want to call it that and then just practice practice practice You can't be you can't kind of beat it I think for me like as you know mentioned this is was the building of trust at like the teams Only worked together once a year for a few months and various changes But for us going through this process we all learned about each other and we built up that trust So we weren't kind of going. Oh, I hope the army Cooney guys really have their stuff together tonight But we worked with them. We got that trust. But the other thing is it also Individuals learn to trust themselves That this wasn't an overwhelming thing I I've done this 20 times and there are lots of different circumstances So I can trust that I will be able to competently do my job If something bad happens under this high pressure and that means a really positive outcome I think it's amazing that You know, you we know that we want to have confidence in our technical solutions But we oftentimes don't reflect on the fact that we need to have confidence in our human solutions And you need both to have a fully comprehensive solution. So that's a really interesting point to make and I think that's a part of the xp manifesto is It's the person over the process as well and focusing on that. Yeah, absolutely So I do want to make sure that we have time for questions and we have a few minutes left Are there any questions in the audience for the panel? No, anyone else What actually happened on the night? Did anything go wrong? Did you have to use any of these processes that you put in place? It was really boring Yeah It's what we like. We like boring So the first year that I ever did this was with the old platform and it was singly the most exciting Even with my life from a work perspective But it's not like I'd ever want to relive again Lots of things went wrong lots of things just weren't tried lots of things under pressure Which we had to kind of resolve then and there with a new solution Which is something that place I'd never want to be again So I learned my lesson that night and so with with a new platform. It's come increasingly more boring. Yeah So the context of of this is with a short event of very high importance I'm curious as to how that influences the team for The non like dealing with millions of pounds in a short in a few hours and the more like Continuous nature because it sounds like there was also a lot of build-up in prep. Mm-hmm that sort of matched the Urgent or not urgency But like the the care and important relevance of of this short event So within our cloud ops team We do the same sort of thing nearly the whole time Especially when we're onboarding new people we start them off with Getting a page to do something really silly or trivial like target a particular Bosch deployment and We run these unclawed people get pretty confident and then we give them a problem which is unknown to them and They use up these things that they actually always talk about muscle memory. They've developed so much muscle memory that when they see this unknown They're automatically almost Setting up the vpm targeting the Bosch deployment Checking the vm health check and then they suddenly realize. Oh, hang on. I've almost got this problem solved And I didn't I still don't know what it is And that that's pretty important And like for the two that we do use it for training so In Dublin and Pivotal at the moment Some of the products that we run Or are developing be that CFCR, which is open source Kubernetes running on Bosch and pks members of those teams have been kind of There's an understanding that they will at some point need to be going on to the pager They will have to be that expert team in this for for our customers And these are engineers that have never really Been in any kind of operational Activity and it's very frightening for them. Yep and legitimately so So we use what we used with our mccuny to train those teams to not be scared of the pager just practice It's not The fear of the unknown is probably the biggest thing here. So if I can just get you past that Then you'll feel more comfortable and I think in a microservices DevOps world. That's probably going to become more routine Yeah, and I think um For me, it's I'm sure debbie and james will want to be sat in a room with me looking For that night every day And sort of I don't think anyone could possibly have a team You could just sit there looking at graphs and tailing logs to see when the arrows are coming up but you can automate that aspect of it and And the more that you practice your response as a team to getting that pager to getting that email or something about an Outage about an issue the better more slick your team are going to become and again that kind of your confidence will increase And then I think once once you start getting that sort of stuff as a routine the team I think then you can start Pushing out as an operations team saying what else can I do to ensure the reliability and resilience of the platforms that are under my control? You know do I can I start moving into a bit of chaos engineering? Can I start actively looking to bring my system down? And then you start I think going to really really good pace and really thinking about the kind of resilience engineering Like one thing just to that point We we are in our team we we prioritize Making changes to the production platform during office hours so that everybody's awake caffeinated another desk and The beauty of it is that when you are in your comfort zone you have the support of the people around you Figuring out an incident like that is actually quite thrilling. It's actually quite like I have no idea what's going on. It's like this inspector gadget kind of moment, but And it's it's fun There is actually an adrenaline bump in it when you when you sort this out so if you can do it during office hours It's actually quite interesting so fire draws like that Take the the boring turning logs thing to this is actually a pretty pretty cool exercise to play with We've signed up in our office. I think it's something along the lines of don't panic when they're What's don't panic when the failure happens because you won't enjoy it and that's something that we we try to push How did you plan capacity and what was plan b if there is too much traffic or data? So we built the platforms Individual what we call a shard so in each instance each foundation with the platform running on it could take 500 donations a second So we've got two of those so if they actually could take a thousand now I read a figure that at any point the kind of peak of actual all credit card transactions across the whole of UK is about 450 a second. So we would if that happened Our finance director would have been over the moon Thrilled but essentially what I think the the platform is designed to cope with failure at every level so You know You can lose front ends. It's going entirely stateless. It's eventually consistent So you can lose the whole mongo db and yet you it makes reporting a little bit more difficult Because you have to pull the numbers straight out of redis, but you can do that You can lose an individual redis. You can lose multiple redis. You can lose a whole you can lose a whole Foundation and the other foundation will still will still work and cope. So you kind of designing for failure Uh, but ultimately if everything failed and it all went down There's also a backup system that another another kind of tech partner provides just in case so But we did do a lot of low testing and yeah stuff like that beforehand as well Yeah We've got an There's an automated overnight performance test not the full thing and that runs over nine kind of let's let you know If there's been any degradation service and then we run regular like In the run up probably three or four times a week we're running low tests against So we are at time, but before we leave I do just want In terms the last question I have is just what's the one thing that you want people to leave with so Twitter worthy. So keep it short Okay, keep it short Yeah, um, but what's the one thing that each of you would want the audience to leave but today Um Failure will happen That is epic. It's like 180 characters. I'm sure practice practice builds trust Practice builds trust. Yeah Remember Twitter Twitter Okay, Twitter takes more than 180 characters Identify your fear that what was it? identify your fears and then Overcome them with practice. So just don't don't don't dread this thing. I'm over 180. Don't dread it identified acknowledge it and Be con be conscious of the people in on the other side of the request that you're making Okay, well, thank you everyone and thank you panel I should have been clapping myself


And the question is whether or not we only want to give our police officers one response to crime, which is handcuffs, because most of the time when they put handcuffs on a person and take them to the police precinct, those are folks that could have easily been served in our public health system. So people who are addicted to drugs, people who are engaged in prostitution to pay for drug addiction, people who have mental health issues.


Georgina, what you're eating? I've came to pass, not to stay. And what made you pull that out in the midst of all this? It's a break. It's a break from thinking, I guess, but it's more thinking of another kind, I guess. Very good. Thanks.


I'm Corbin. I'm Rick and you can follow Tony. It's the guy on the Twitter There's gonna be something spinning on the top of it. I don't know Yeah, I've got some pretty cool reading glasses.  Uh Look, thank you so much that make sure to follow some official Twitter check that out.   Really? Yeah And there's two both videos that are about a minute and a half So we're at to one and then we're at the other and a half. Yeah But they wanted you to react to these so that's what we're doing. Okay. Okay, so yeah I don't know what type of class combination of Indian classic classical dance fused with what what what form of Western dance Hip-hop I guess Crunking crunking jazz. Yes. Like you said the other day Crunking Indian yes, right in classical dance contemporary. Let's see. I mean, but a minute and a half. All right, whatever Here we go. Let's first one Six It was the tap dance. I'm glad you didn't tell me. I wanted to see her Yeah, those of you who don't know or are new to the channel. I'm a tap dancer So I have an appreciation not just for tap but the fact that those people are legit tappers Those are good tap dance and I don't know what type of classical Indian dance that was it doesn't tell me So I'm sorry you can let me know but I loved we can then we'll go on We have another video that also has some tap in it as well but I want to do that number but this oh it was really cool the way they did it because They kind of all did it at once and then they kind of split up and one kind of yes almost copy It was a copy. That's what I loved is it was the same dance moves, but it was done in the Indian style And it was done in the tap style so they were complimenting each other was really kind of like I For what I'm remembering of that it was they would do the girls doing the Indian classical would do their thing There was a couple of segments like that and then the tap dancers would do the tap version of the same choreography Yeah, it was beautiful and whoever did the tap choreography not only do they know how to tap Yeah, the choreography was done by Ramita Ravi and because I wrote I don't know who did which and the tap dancers Is one of the tap dancers is one of the choreographers because I remember Becca Kennedy and Maddie Murphy The tap on that was excellent both in the choreography and in the execution. Those are good tap dancers Those are those are excellent tap dancers. They should and I'm not me. I don't know anything about tap outside of it Probably started from the Irish Yeah, she's that correctly. There's Like Lord of the dance when Michael flat flatly that's probably correct Right, they probably started that version at that which actually may even be predated by clogging in Denmark You know the the clogging shoes and the sounds of the shoes which actually is predated because there's a lot of stuff in Spanish dancing that does stuff with the feet Yeah, so who originated this this that yeah, that I don't know But we got one more video. It's about right now in half and I believe it's different people Okay, it's it's also an Indian. That was so beautiful I'm glad because they sent me these and they were like we want really want Rick to react to this He's been asking for tap and well, this is great because we'll talk about this at the end But I want to talk about Watching the blending of East and West like that. Yeah, it's just gorgeous. Yeah, that was that one great I love that one. So here we go. Okay Because I run same guy. Oh, is it or girl? Forgive me. I would have said I think that I think Vickus is that guy We'll see I got you like the song already though It's really you can tell me all the Fikas all around is the tap dancer in all this and choreographer I'm sure again and Rebecca Candidate Maddie Murphy So the same tap dancers when they added a couple more and it was beautiful to see the This is the type of dancing that the classical was in this one But rata not young. I think we've seen one. We have seen one of them seen that that discipline But man, I applaud you guys for doing something that's never been done I don't we've never seen because I mean it's this is like the only time I've ever been sent any type of Indian tap dance in The same video. Yeah, and so I'm guessing it's never been done So to do something that you're doing and doing really well fusing the yes I love the fact that you could hear the tap and then you can also eat the bangles Yeah, I believe that's what they're called the bangles. I love that you can kind of hear both of those Because that's basically their version of tap is bangles on the feet As opposed to the sheet as is the percussiveness and I noticed this the first time one of the first times You were watching the dance is the vocalization of the digga digga digga digga digga digga digga Compliments what sounds are being made with with feet and tap Yeah, that works with tap. Yeah, the the second one I Loved I had this dual thing going on. I love the sound of the bangles I also there was one moment where the tapping was sloppy as far as the synchronization together And I got kind of like blurred for a moment, but that's my only like quote-unquote critique Yeah, the rest of it is still the the tap choreography and quality of execution is excellent and The my most favorite part of this And it's made favorite because of the level of excellence of the execution is the seeing The blending of east and west how you can have and that's our That's what we want with everything that's this channel is celebrating with India is to see The the celebration of east and the celebration of west without either one of them losing their inherent identity and Recognizing that we have so much more in common than we have that's different and now writing the art Yeah, and celebrating the art of both and be so beautiful to see two very very different dance forms Come together and celebrate artistry together And that's that's that's what I want to see happen for Hollywood and Bollywood And I don't even like to generalize it as Bollywood because it's all of India It's not just the Hindi language films Yeah, every language film in India and big studio independent film anything you've got in America Just not being seen as separate worlds, but being blended together without losing their inherent identity That was beautiful too short and I do sure I knew the song in the second one Apparently it is by air ramen, but I don't know the exact song name that it seemed familiar. Yeah But that one I love that we also got to see a male classical dancer. Yeah, that was nice change We hadn't we've talked about that. Yeah, I would love to see like an entire dance with just a male classic Great, I'd love to see a full blown all the way choreographed thing with both of them and And I just I so need to see if people are gonna tap I need to see that they know what they're doing and they're they're they're really good because Tap done bad is annoying to tap dancers and these are good tap dancers Yeah, these are really good tap to my untrained ear. It seemed really good to me I enjoyed that whole few you would put together that's one of the great things about tap Is you don't have to know tap. You can hear the sloppiness. Yeah, it's not good. Yeah You can tell yeah, you can hear it and see it because it they were not sloppy. They're really good tap Yeah, I would love to give us more of that some film Anywhere in India do like almost a fusion of having tap in a song. Yeah, I'm really I'm actually I shouldn't be surprised But I am that some that that either Jean Kelly or Fred Astaire Didn't involve something like this at some point and my guess is because the world was so much smaller than without you know They didn't really see the different dance disciplines because they were both such lovers of dance and especially Fred Fred Astaire was such an inventive creative choreographer like he does a beautiful Dance with a partner. That's a coat rack That's cool. Yeah, and he does a dance with a mop really yes And so I would I would have loved to have seen people with that level of excellence matching them But these guys could get there these guys are really done in New York It was done at a buzzfeed spotify us more 2018 Diwali party give us some more. Yeah, I would love it to see the harmony and the fusion between the two worlds Yeah, and both obviously we don't know the discipline of the classical dance So based on what we've seen those other the classical dancers looked legit clap They look like what we've seen yeah us that was great If you know any more videos kind of like this that are blending the two. Yeah, no, obviously we love Any type of art whatever it is that we will yeah, this was special this was special. Thank you for sending it to us


All right, this week's IonMPI is Sorcombe and Ada, what is the new product of the week Okay. Introduced by you. Yeah, so we're back doing the weekly IonMPIs to last week. This one we're back to doing just one, but I really like this one. This is from Sorcombe and I actually was going to show, like they have a new IOT service but actually maybe I might do that in a couple of weeks because I actually really just liked this Onyx USB cellular dongle, which is from Sorcombe and it's actually kind of a cooperation between Sorcombe and Quectel because inside is a Quectel cellular modem, but they made this really nice little dongle. It's like really beautifully designed. It's got this like cool, like angular design. This is what it looks like. You can kind of see on the back there's this cellular module and on the top there's a couple of components, power supply, SIM card holder. It's actually not like technically that complicated because the modules do come with USB interfacing so there's no microcontroller. You're actually connecting like directly to the cellular module, but that said, like it's in a really nice case. It's got the SIM holder. It's got little antenna add-ons and it's got a USB plug that just like thunks right into your board. So this is the cellular module inside. It's the Quectel LTE-EG25.  It's LTE-CAT4 so it can do like pretty fast upload and download. You'll have to have a SIM card that of course has that kind of high speed internet connectivity. It's also good for IoT projects because it's got worldwide LTE, UMTS, HSPA, and it's still got GSMGPR edge coverage.  So it's got like very, very wide coverage worldwide and it looks like it's also, it doesn't necessarily, this does not have the GNSS receiver, I don't believe, but you know, maybe they'll make a version that does, but again, it can go very, very fast, but it's also very inexpensive. And what I thought was interesting about this and what I really liked is like, you know, even the advertising photo for it says like, hey, you know, you just plug this into your single board computer and now, you know, it's trying to integrate cellular into a board as a real pain. You can do everything over USB and just use like a USB modem driver. Now you have a fully cellular connected IoT device and it's like no soldering, no design. You just plug it in and go. So I actually got this set up and working on my computer in like 15 minutes or less. It was really easy. So when I bought it, it actually came with, I also got the SORCOM SIM card, which I think is a global SIM card. Think about, you know, how many messages and how many megabytes. I think it's actually IoT based, so it's not like for data streaming video. It's for like setting data MQTT. You register on SORCOM's website. You do have to add a credit card. So you do that once you've registered.  What I thought was interesting in addition to this is that there's also, for everything that they do, you know, there's a web interface, but they also provide a back-end CLI interface.  You don't have to use the console. You can actually automate everything using their CLI. And it's kind of something I noticed is that there's there's always an easy way to do it, like using their web interface. And there was also an advanced way to use it that was more powerful using scriptable tools. They do have multiple different dongles. The only one I, you know, used is the Onyx LTE dongle. One thing I liked is that they have the device manual, which I'll talk about in a bit. So, you know, the cellular modules are not just modems. They actually have a lot of stuff built into them, like an MQTT peripheral or an FTP, TCP API or HTTPS. So you don't even need to have the stack on the device. You can actually use the stack on the cellular module, not on the computer. And they have all that available, which is really nice. You don't have to sign an NDA, which I can really dug. And then for Linux, it shows up as a comport. It is a composite CDC. So on Windows, you have to install a driver. I'm on Windows. Yeah, installed it. It worked. And then it shows up as a modem. And then you get the three comports. Like, again, I don't believe this one. I don't think it has the NMEA, the GPS. It still shows up, but there's no data that comes out of it. And you've got the AT port, which is the control port. And data, I think DM is for the data port. And then it also shows up as a plain like USB modem. And then what's nice is all I had to do is, like, turn on roaming. And then I just selected the sortcom. And I unplugged Wi-Fi. And I disconnected ethernet. And I was on the internet through the cellular connection. So it's that easy. It's really fast, very simple. And so especially with silicon shortages, if it's like you want to add cellular connectivity, but it's impossible to get cellular modules, or they're constantly changing, or whatever, don't make a custom board. You may not even need an M3 module. Just plug in USB. It just works, and it was plenty fast. For Linux, what I thought was really nice is they have a shell script that is for Raspberry Pi. And you basically, I think they borrowed this like we did from Pimeroni, where it's like setting up something takes so many steps. And it's easier just to give somebody a shell script. Tell them to pseudo-curl it and run it. And it'll install everything. And then you basically have an interface that is basically internet connectivity. But again, through the cellular module, it's like the easiest, fastest, no-solder way to add to single-board computers. And if you have a Windows-writing single-board computer, you use the other driver. Linux single-board computer, you use this. Either way, now you've got world-wide connectivity. And I did check the AT port. And you can absolutely use it. And yes, that's the ICCID. But don't worry, I'm going to cut it in half in a moment anyways because I'm done using it. And you can use this with, they had a really nice tutorial that's linked, that'll be linked from the blog post, where you can use it as a low-level modem. So you have as a modem, and then you connect to the internet service. And then you have to have all of your TCP-IP packets go through it. Or what you can do is you can use the built-in, say, MQTT client. And this uses a lot less data because you don't have this overhead. So it's going to be a little faster, a little less power. But you have to script each command in. So for example, they have their own MQTT demo here. Sorry, MQTT broker on beam.sorecom.io, 183, which is MQTT port. And then you can connect to it, log in, and also automate it with PySerial. So this is a shell script, sorry, a Python script. It uses PySerial. You can see it connects to the serial port, TTY USB2, which is created when you plug it in. And it just sends in the raw data to publish to a topic. And then you can then use their web interface to the MQTT broker to see the data was published. So again, if you don't want to use a full TCP-IP stack because you want to save power or you want to save bandwidth, there's nothing lighter than just sending the raw commands. I mean, this is like it'll just do the bare minimum to send the data, connect, send the data, and disconnect right afterwards. Available on Digikey, as in you can really actually get it, that's why this is MPI. They actually have a lot in stock. And the price is very good. It's like under $100, I think. And then we want to go to the overhead. So this is what it looks like. It's got this nice design. There's two antenna ports. You can connect to if you want to have external antenna. And then this is the SIM card that goes in there. So you can use any SIM card. They sell some cards, indicator modem, and then yeah, this is just USB. So it's a very convenient, easy way. And so many electronic projects now are just a Raspberry Pi. You can attach whatever custom hardware or controller you want. And then with internet connectivity, so complicated, you want something that has a full Linux TCP-IP stack to handle connectivity for you and reconnection and your certificates and whatever and remote control. You just plug in this and now it's cellular connected. OK. And I think in the blog post, we'll embed that three minute long video so folks can watch. There's a really good comprehensive vision. It's a good video. But yeah, we'll have it on the blog post because it's three minutes long and I've rambled enough. Yeah, that's all good. And that's on MPI. On MPI.


Hello, thank you Actually, I decided to forego slides entirely just that I can squeeze a thought a single thought into these five minutes a Thought about something that suzer cares about and let me start with the story. It was in 90s sometime still before my suzer time That two friends of mine were developing a interesting project. It was a hardware project It was a free space optic device that would allow a 10 megabit Bandwidth across a couple hundred of meters for internet connection It was it in the time of dial up So that was actually pretty amazing and they had it working and they wanted to attract the community to it some somebody That would help them to actually expand it and make it work better So they were coming to me and said well, you know, we saw this open source software movement We want to do something like that And I said, okay. Well, then you just publish the source for your device and that's it, right? But what is the source for a hardware device? So initially they just published the list of materials all the steps that you needed to make the device this the actual Photos of the machine and well nobody really did that because nobody did understand how it works So then they talked to me, okay But that's not enough you actually need to go deeper. You need to publish at least the schematics So the schematics was out. It was actually done in a nice open source Open data format such that you could use open source tooling to do all the steps to create a printed circuit board and make your device And still that didn't work so They were flabbergasted right there was there was all all out there and there was nothing and So the last thing actually You need to explain why it works the way the way it works. Why have you designed it? Why have you added this particle component here and that particle component there because without that understanding? nobody can really expand on it and Actually that worked that device became rather successful until well Wi-Fi came around and It was a happy project so Where this brings me um? if you are Doing open source It is important to be open. It is important to actually give out everything that you have all the thoughts that are going to do that Go into your project Not just the source itself Fortunately today we have Source code repositories we have get we have subversion we have all those so actually a lot of that thought goes right into the commit commands so The gpl actually nicely captures that you need to share your source code the gpl v3 Actually nicely captures the fact that what the source code is that it is actually the form of the code that is the easiest for modification But still it does not tell you that the one component that is also needed is the how component How do you come to these conclusions? How do you actually find out that this is the best software? This is the best way to do it and Well, that's the message that I want to share today actually I'm also a manager right and so I've been taught that if I want to keep a Developer a employee working for me I need to teach them everything they need to know for the next job and then they will not leave because they are all Safe, so it's the same thing for your project. You actually need to give out everything for people to be able to fork it And that's what makes it healthy Um once more about Susie we actually do practice that at least we try and So when my department is releasing the Linux kernel For customers obviously paying customers. We also release the sources and we don't just release the SRPM with One big terrible of kernel sources and one huge patch of what we have changed But we actually already during development make public or of our internal git repository so that you can see What and why we changed along the road to make an enterprise quality distro You actually are able to replicate all that if you like and so again the message to you is It's the nature of people it's a nature of business That people try to keep the secret source to themselves Don't do that. It is counterproductive If you see wall gardens being built For contribution if you see that customers are actually not treated as potential contributors to the project Tear down those wall gardens and always think about being open. Thank you


This is the only franchise in the history as far as I know that can get away with rebooting itself and having it make sense inside the movie. So just call it Matrix Rebooted. Let's have a new cast. Let's have a completely new story. Don't do the one. We don't need a one storyline that's been done three times, four times over. Let's have a new lore. Let's put it inside of a matrix and that'll be the connection and that's all we need. Will they do that? Of course not. Because Hollywood's all about soft reboots. They gotta do nostalgia. They gotta get buckets in the seats. So my prediction, this is the jaded part coming out again. We get Keanu back. Maybe Carrie Ann Moss comes back. Fishburn's back. We love our fish. We love our Lawrence Fishburn. We bring Morpheus back and we just have these very small limited roles for them. It's gonna be a soft reboot.


Hey guys, welcome back to Coming In. TV the only place on YouTube where all geek culture collides. I'm Shannon and today on the show, we're taking a look at Gremlins Ultimate Stripe. I got this at GameStop for $30. As you can see here, we have the original movie poster. We're here, got the box holding Gizmo and Stripe popping through. Then the little cute and then crossed out clever, mischievous, intelligent, dangerous. On the sides says Gremlins. Same with the other side and Ultimate Stripe. On the back, we have a gadget salesman is looking for a special gift for his son and finds one at a store in Chinatown. The shopkeeper is reluctant to part with the Mogwai, but sells it to him with the warning to never expose him to bright light, water, or to feed him after midnight. All this happens and the result is a gang of Gremlins that decided to tear up the town on Christmas Eve. And there you see Stripe in the film. Very cool. And this opens up, it's a window box. There you see him in all his glory. Holding the chainsaw comes with an electric chainsaw. Obviously not real, but you can tell it's an electric chainsaw because of the plug. Skateboard and a skillsaw blade. So let's go ahead. Also, the packaging, it does have a Velcro thing on there so it stays closed pretty well. However, I'm gonna take it out of the package so that we can go ahead and review this bad boy. Stay tuned. Okay, so as you can see, he comes in half a clam shell. Little extras are taped in here. First we'll take a look at the chainsaw if I can get out of there. Chainsaw looks pretty cool. Kind of looks like a DeWalt. But it's Braddington power cutter. 14 inch by 200. Love the detail they put into this thing. Burn lower hand guards, nighttime tree cutting, tub curb catcher, guard link chain made in the US. All right, and then shop master serious business dove. Is that what it says? Serious business Dave, heavy duty plug, two prong plug, doesn't actually work. Stationary blade, just plastic. But the detail is really nice on this. The button does not push in, neither does the trigger here, but still very, very nice attention to detail. Very cool. And this, of course, was made by NECA, which are known for their quality adult collectibles. Then we have this skillsaw blade, which again, it's plastic, not much to that. Skateboard, let's angle this down a little bit. Skateboard does roll, rolls very smoothly, really. And then stripe is held in here by a series of rubber bands.  So I'm gonna have to use a pocket knife to cut these rubber bands. Bear with me a minute, guys. Okay, so that took a little bit more effort than I was hoping for. I pretty much had to rip them out of that package. So here's stripe, my favorite of the gremlins, and really many people's favorites. He was the leader of the original gremlins. And in gremlins 2, there was another stripe-like character called Mohawk that started out as a leader, but then went rogue and became a spider gremlin and kind of went off on his own. And the brain gremlin took over from there. But stripe, who I always called Mohawk for the simple fact he had a Mohawk when I was younger, but he looks really great. Very good attention to detail. His mouth is on a hinge, opens and closes. That's as far open as it can go. And then closed like that. The hair, it's only attached to the top of the neck, or the bottom of the back of the head. As you can see it flaps. And that's because the head is kind of on a ball joint. It looks like, you can turn it, you can move it up and down slightly, not too much. Then the neck is also on its own joint as well. There's two joints, one at the head, one at the neck. The ears are also kind of movable. I wouldn't risk moving them too much because it doesn't look like they're really supposed to. It looks like they might be on a hinge, but I wouldn't wanna risk it. The arms, they do not move out to the side, but they do move around just like that. The elbow is on a hinge, very tight hinge. Be very careful. The more you work it, the easier it gets, but I would be very careful with that. Especially the first time, but loose. All right, there we go. And then the hands are on a ball joint. A ball joint hinge it looks like, rotated around. And then that hinge, I don't know, I don't wanna risk it. As you can see, there is a hinge there, but it's so tight, it's similar to these up here. So tight, I don't wanna risk trying to bend it, really. Same with that one, so tight. The legs turn just like that. Knee, there is a knee joint. Ankle rotation. There is also an ab crunch, very nice. He does have a little trouble standing on his own. You almost need a stand for him. However, most of the time the Gremlins, they walk like that, which is okay, I guess. However, standing on the skateboard, you can't really, there, there. He's kind of, nope. They need, he's got peg holes on the bottom of his feet, but there's no pegs on the skateboard. This should fit in his hand, just like that in his right hand. And then this one, let's see, it does his thumb fit in the blade hole. There we go. And he does balance just like that with the blades in his hands. It's balanced well like that. He is not wanting to balance on the skateboard though. Let's try moving his legs around a bit. He's not gonna be able to balance on that. It's gonna take far too long. Then I want this video to be to try and balance him on the skateboard. So, I don't know, they made him really top heavy. There we go, we'll just, we'll have him just like that. All right, so I hope you enjoyed this video of Nekka's Gremlins Ultimate Stripe. You can find these at GameStop for about 30 bucks. Not a bad price, I love the paint job. The articulation is pretty stiff and he's not that well balanced. They really should have included a display base or display stand. So anyway, that's it for today. If you have this figure, tell me what you think about him. Like I said, it's great sculpt, great paint job. The articulation is way too stiff. He needs a little bit more articulation, but that's just my opinion and he's not very well balanced. So, take care guys, don't forget to subscribe, like and share with your friends. Have a good one. If you enjoyed that video, make sure you hit the subscribe button right there so you can stay up to date on all things geek culture. Also, make sure you check out one of these two playlists on the side for more videos, just like the one you just watched. I'm Shannon for Comic-getting TV, the only place on YouTube where all geek culture collides. Take care geeks.