Cern Week 40

This week was spent partly at hepix
From hepix.org

The HEPiX forum unifies IT system support engineers from the High Energy Physics (HEP) laboratories and institutes, such as BNL, CERN, DESY, FNAL, IN2P3, INFN, JLAB, NIKHEF, RAL, SLAC, TRIUMF and others. The HEPiX meetings have been held regularly since 1991, and are an excellent source of information for IT specialists. That's why they enjoy large participation also from the non-HEP organizations.

Or I was preparing my presentation. Slides can be found here

Then on Thursday I gave my talk on 'The problem of managing 236 million user accounts'. This was a 30 min talk and I think it went quite well some people asked some interesting question so it was a success.

I listened to quite a few presentations but I didn't really learn as much as would have hoped. No further comments otherwise insults would be unavoidable.

The other main task for the week was to get good benchmark results of my implantation. I started looking for a time utility that would run a command n times and then give me the average run time but I could not find something like that. I had always done this with a horrible bash script, but this was now to inflexible as I could not pipe the output into a file that I then could parse with g
nuplot and so on. So I started the atime project. The basic idea is that you call it like time just with a number as first parameter. It will then run the command n times and output exactly like the standard *nix time utility would. Next post will have a full description. I wrote the tool in python because I didn't want to loose my python skills in favor of horrible Perl. I still don't fully understand why people use Perl for stuff like this. It's like hammering in a nail with the end of a screwdriver.