Working abroad and the English complexes and insecurity of non natives

I write this article thinking in all my friends that feel insecure about talking in English.

They think about if they are pronouncing correctly, or if they are building the phrases in the correct grammar order. That’s school’s system fault, I think.

As Catalans we learn new languages easily. We talk Catalan native, and Spanish, and in the school we are taught French and English, and if things have not changed, we can choose between Latin and Greek. (I studied both)

But doing 1 or 2 hours per week of English doesn’t grant you a good level of the language, and in fact, few people in Catalonia and Barcelona speak fluent English with a good accent.

I learnt English by myself, by reading programming manuals when I was 5 years old. I also learnt to play chess by watching others playing and when I won the first time I played, against a guy 5 years older than me, he could not believe it was my first match.

I was 10, I think.

When I started classes in the school I realized that I already knew English.

Commands in Basic, like list, run, print, goto, had the same meaning than in the human spoken language.

I grew and I saw that the translations of technical books to Spanish (no Catalan was available) were horrible. They were actually translating commands, so since 15 y.o. I only read manuals in English.

In several jobs, for multinationals, I had to talk with colleagues from different parts of the world, so I was talking Portuguese, some times Italian or French, I could read a bit of German (Was head of Department in Volkswagen IT, gedas), and obviously English.

Still it is not the same when you talk using a subset of the language, basically referred to Hardware and Software, than fully living abroad.

Starting English is easy, you can use present and will for the future and did for the past, and you can make it work. But when you start with the phrasal verbs, the irregular verbs, different time conjugations… English is a context language and it is not a phonetic language, words that are written exactly the same way, sound different, and words that sound the same are written different. So it has a lot of exceptions.

But in this, in the exceptions, and in the fact that is widely expanded, is where we can find the strength to grow without fear.

Catalan is spoken very differently if we are in Barcelona, Lleida, Girona, Tarragona or if we are in València, or Menorca, or Alguer or the country of Andorra.

So the same happens with English. It is not only very different from England to the States, to Australia, to Scotland, to Ireland… also is very different from Dublin and Cork, or from different parts in The States, like Texas and California.

Also there are many people that talks it in Europe, in India… and all of them have different accent!.

So in my experience everybody will understand you. Specially because English is fully understood by the context. Maybe they need you to end the phrase to understand, but they will.

There are also annoying differences that can make you think that your are making mistakes.

Like:

  • Data Center (American) vs Data Center (England)
  • Color (American) vs Colour
  • Humor (American) vs Humour

Don’t be surprised if many native people find your accent exotic, and they love it.

That’s what happened to me many times.

Also I think the school is terrible teaching. They teach children all those rigid grammar expressions, when the live language is much more fluent and free.

For example, one person from Barcelona, will be nervous asking to a colleague:

  • Are you going to the cinema tonight?
  • Have you finally had gone to Disney World?

And he will be nervous thinking in real time if he is building the phrase right.

When, after 2 years will realize that people say:

  • You go to cinema tonight?
  • Did you go to Disney World finally?

The latest are very close to the grammar we use with Catalan, and so hence easy to express fluently.

I can share with you the process I follow to improve my English.

Since the 15 y.o. I was reading all the manuals in English.

I was watching some movies in English, at the beginning with subtitles in Spanish (no Catalan was available) and later with the subtitles in English.

Since 2013, when I was invited by Amazon to Dublin and by Facebook to Menlo Park (US), I started to watch all the movies and sit coms in English.

At the beginning with subtitles in English with the idea to correlate pronunciation and writing. To get my ears used to it.

I went to conferences, and I saw some people, with living years in English speaking countries, that had a much more difficult to understand accent than mine. They were people with reputation. And I understood that IT guys, we are very lucky to be valued by what we know. By our brain.

After all my life reading in English and 4 years watching all the movies in English, my accent had improved, but when I arrived to Cork I had difficulties understanding some the Irish. So I had to get used to the music, the cadence, of the way they talk, and to some words and expressions, and to the humor sense.

I asked my Irish colleagues to correct me when I pronounced wrong, and they were so nice to do it. And they did in a very polite way, for example if I would say:

Is a new Engineer coming to the Team?

And I would put the emphasis on the i of Engineer (the accent), Kevin would repeat the word in the right pronunciation. So I had the chance to learn how it rightly sound.

And I would repeat to make sure I got it.

One thing I think is that one has to be thankful for the time and interest that others dedicate to you. We have all a limited time on the planet, so when somebody invests some time in teaching you or helping you to learn, is giving you something that he will not get back. Even if you pay him/her, still that time will not go back to that person.

So I appreciate when people help me, and I don’t appreciate it less because I pay them.

Talking, listening, is the best real way to learn.

With 100% of reading in English, 100% of movies being watch in English, and nearly 100% of talking and listening in English my language skills reached to the next level. So I can talk in conferences, I can write books and technical documentation. And still I learn a lot of English every day. New words, or rich forms to express the things, reading the newspaper, for example. I really enjoy it.

But is like swimming or going in bicycle: learn by doing.

The Ethernet standards group announces a new 800 GbE specification

Here is the link to the new: https://www.pcgamer.com/amp/the-ethernet-standards-group-developed-a-new-speed-so-fast-it-had-to-change-its-name/

This is a great new for scaling performance in the Data Centers. For routers, switches…

And this makes me think about all the Architects that are using Memcached and Redis in different Servers, in Networks of 1Gbps and makes me want to share with you what a nonsense, is often, that.

So the idea of having Memcache or Redis is just to cache the queries and unload the Database from those queries.

But 1Gbps is equivalent to 125MB (Megabytes) per second.

Local RAM Memory in Servers can perform at 24GB and more (24,000,000 Megabytes) per second, even more.

A PCIE NVMe drive at 3.5GB per second.

A local SSD drive without RAID 550 MB/s.

A SSD in the Cloud, varies a lot on the provider, number of drives, etc… but I’ve seen between 200 MB/s and 2.5GB/s aggregated in RAID.

In fact I have worked with Servers equipped with several IO Controllers, that were delivering 24GB/s of throughput writing or reading to HDD spinning drives.

If you’re in the Cloud. Instead of having 2 Load Balancers, 100 Front Web servers, with a cluster of 5 Redis with huge amount of RAM, and 1 MySQL Master and 1 Slave, all communicating at 1Gbps, probably you’ll get a better performance having the 2 LBs, and 11 Front Web with some more memory and having the Redis instance in the same machine and saving the money of that many small Front and from the 5 huge dedicated Redis.

The same applies if you’re using Docker or K8s.

Even if you just cache the queries to drive, speed will be better than sending everything through 1 Gbps.

This will matter for you if your site is really under heavy load. Most of the sites just query the MySQL Server using 1 Gbps lines, or 2 Gbps in bonding, and that’s enough.

Troubleshooting a shell prompt irresponsible that locks/hangs intermittently

You do df -h or ls / and the terminal freezes and not even CTRL + C works, you have a lock.

Normally this is due to a lock of the system trying to perform an IO.

Could be a physical spinning disk failing, but the most probably nowadays is that you have a network mount point and it is timing out.

If you execute mount and you get a timeout, and when you finally see the list you see a NFS, iSCSI or another kind of Network mount (you will see an Ip Address), check for errors.

To do this in CentOS/RHEL you can do as root:

dmesg | grep -i "timed"

or depending on the System

cat /var/log/messages | grep -i "timed"

You’ll get something like this:

[root@compute01 carles]# dmesg -T | grep timed | head -n5
[Fri Mar 20 02:27:44 2020] nfs: server storage07 not responding, timed out
[Fri Mar 20 02:27:44 2020] nfs: server storage07 not responding, timed out
[Fri Mar 20 02:27:44 2020] nfs: server storage07 not responding, timed out
[Fri Mar 20 02:27:44 2020] nfs: server storage07 not responding, timed out
[Fri Mar 20 02:27:45 2020] nfs: server storage07 not responding, timed out

Please note I use dmesg -T in order to have human readable date instead of Unix Epoch.

You can count the errors today:

[root@compute01 carles]# dmesg -T | grep time | grep "Mon Apr 6" | wc --lines
3123

Lesson 0, learning to code in Python for non programmers

Please note: Even if I tried to make it easy, probably there are too many concepts for a non-programmer. Will try to deliver more basic previous knowledge and foundations, so people with zero knowledge don’t feel overwhelmed.

Start by installing Python 3.8 or 3.9 in your computer, and the IDE PyCharm. Install also Git, and create an account in GitLab so you can share code with other people and understand how Git works.

Here you can read the basic steps for setup PyCharm and GitLab.

Ok, so you can take a look at my video, and hopefully it makes spark your motivation to learn by yourself. :)

I’ve been asked why I used print(“”) instead of print().

Is a good question. The reason is, when we programmed in Python 2.x the native way was to print without parenthesis, like:

print "Hello World!"

Python 3.x was incompatible with that and requires to use parenthesis, like:

print("Hello World!")

Fortunately Python 2.x accepts also to print using parenthesis. In order to have compatibility within Python 2.x and Python 3.x or for future compatibility we were using always print(“Whatever”) in Python2.

However, there is one difference.

If you user print() or print(“”) in Python3 that will generate an empty line.

In Python 2 print(“”) will generate too an empty line, nevertheless print() in Python2 will print two parenthesis. We don’t want that.

This is illustrated in this screenshot:

So all the people that are at home, closed down for coronavirus, you have a chance now to start learning Python and from there get a live as programmer.

You can download the code for this lesson 0, from:

https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/teach-unit-testing/-/blob/master/lesson0/tree.py

Capturing data from keyboard

In order to be able to do more samples, and then being a bit interesting an dynamic, I will introduce here how to get data inputted by the Keyboard.

print("Please enter your name:")
s_name = input()

This will add whatever we type, without the final Enter, to the String variable s_name.

Capturing numbers from Keyboard

How we do to capture a number, like how old are you, in years?.

The same way, and then we convert this to an Integer value. An Integer is a data type which is basically a number, not decimal. Like: 1, 2, 7, 1000 o -5.

print("Please enter your name:")
s_name = input()

print("Please enter your age:")
s_age = input()
# With int() we convert a String to an Integer, as long as it is possible.
# Wit str() we convert a Integer to a String, as long as it is possible.
i_age = int(s_age)

If you enter a number incorrectly and so that cannot be converted, you will get an Exception Error. That is something that happened in a way that was not expected. These error can be trapped, and we will see this later, in the future.

You know:

  • How to capture data from the keyboard with input()
  • How to convert data entered as String to Integer with int()
  • How to sum two numbers, like 2 + 3
  • How to subtract two numbers, like 2 – 3
  • How to multiply, like 2 * 3

So know, you should be able to solve a basic arithmetic exercise in Hacker Rank:

https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/python-arithmetic-operators/problem

More sources with explanations

I’m teaching Unit Testing, Refactors, Quality Code and moving from Procedural to OOP to some colleagues, you can find source code for our classes here (please, be aware that there are some error made on purpose to show why and why not do things and hot to apply proper unit testing)

https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/teach-unit-testing/-/tree/master

More resources

There are many free useful resources to learn Python:

I cancelled my Amazon Prime subscription

I was using a lot Amazon. Sending parcels to my previous job offices, and now to Blizzard offices, so I subscribed to Amazon Prime. With COVID-19 virus we were sent to do Remote Work, and now with the lock down basically I’m 99.99% of the time at home.

I did a test to see how it works sending to home during the pandemic.

I choose two different items, I reviews the order, they were going to be delivered separately, one day of distance.

I choose two items that will fit in my mailbox, separated or together. One USB3 3mts male female and a Blu-ray movie.

My surprise comes when I go to the mailbox one day before and I see that I have a paper from an-post telling that they pass by to deliver my parcel, and they did not leave because it doesn’t fit the mailbox and they did not want to leave it a common space. For my surprise both Amazon parcels were grouped and sent before time. Maybe in a bigger box. But the mailman did not ring my door.

The paper tells me to get my parcel in the middle of the city, during the lock down. No way! I’m not going to risk my health and specially from elders, just to grab a cable and a movie.

I had the chance to request re-delivery to an Post, so I do. I fill all the info, I inform my phone number, email, I indicate which door to ring, and two days after as promised… a paper from an Post!.

They did not even rang my bell again.

I go to Amazon to cancel the order, but the process is only created for if you got the items.

Fuck it. I’m not going to order anything else to Amazon until that COVID-19 passes.

I don’t know if the postman just avoids people for fear to contagion or the process of an Post is awful and he didn’t get any information. But I’ll not buy anything even if I cannot buy in other places cause the lock down.

I was going to maintain my Amazon Prime subscription, even if I know that I’ll not use it much with the lock down, but makes no sense. Also:

  • I use Netflix and my Raspberry Pi 4, I was not using Amazon Prime Video.
  • I use Spotify, I was not using Amazon Prime Music.
  • I like to read in paper, not in eBook, so I was not using the eReader options.

A nice way to loss a customer.

Datacenters, D&R and coronavirus

I’ve been working for years within Data centers, with D&R strategies, and then in the middle of COVID-19, with huge demands on increments of bandwidth and compute, some DCs decided to do not allow in the Engineers of their customers.

As somebody that had my own Startup and CSP and had infrastructure in DCs and servers from customers in colocation, and has replaced Hw components at 1AM, replaced drives from broken RAIDs, and fixed systems so many times inside so many Datacenters across the world, I’m shocked about that.

I understand health reasons can be argued, but I still have Servers in Datacenters because we all believed they were the most safe place, prepared for disaster and recovery, with security, 24×7… and now, one realise that cannot enter to fix or upgrade the own machines.
Please note, still you can use the remote hands from the DC, although this is not a good idea many times, I’m not sure this will still be an available option when the lock down in those countries becomes more strict.

I’m wondering if DCs current model have any future at all.

I think most of the D&R strategies from now will be in the cloud, in different regions, with different providers, so companies can resist providers or governments letting them down.

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backup_partition_in_files.sh
Compressing an unmounted partition to a image file while compressing on the fly, and breaking into 1GB gz files.
Also explains in a funny way about STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR and methodology investigating in deep.
Published: 2020-May Views: 12,827 views
iostat_bandwidth.sh
See the aggregated bandwidth used by all the drives, and the maximum speed achieved.
Published: 2020-Aug Views: 10,985 views
count_lines_of_code.sh
Count the lines in .py Python source files recursively and displays individual and total results.
Published: 2021-Jan Views: 11,276 views
One line script to log the temperature of HDDs and CPUs in Ubuntu
Published: 2021-Jan Views: 10,029 views 		compress_old.sh A simple Bash script to compress files in a directory, older than n days
You can use it to delete older files, or perform other commands.
Published: 2021-March Views: 10,299 views
A simple script to upload a pypi/pip package
Is what I use to maintain packages like cmemgzip, carleslibs, etc…
Published: 2021-March Views: 8,471 views
Backup and Restore your Ubuntu Linux Workstations – with support for Wine and Docker
Published: 2022-October Views: 6,898 views 		My talk at OpenZFS 2018 about DRAID (San Francisco, US)

Published: 2018-Sept Views: 13,748 views
Google Compute Engine Talk for Group Google Developers Cork, Ireland

How to do autoscaling from 0 using Google Cloud.
Published: 2019-Feb Views: 11,581 views 		How is: Working in Cork for IT Engineers
Published: 2020-Feb Views: 12,450 views
A mistake that all the universities are doing
Published: 2018-Jun Views: 14,407 views
Some advice for WFH (Working from Home/Remotely)
Published: 2020-May Views: 16,314 views
My radio program at RAB 2022-06-27 [Catalan and English]
Published: 2022-June Views: 2,279 views
News from the Blog 2022-06-22
Published: 2022-June Views: 6,254 views
News from the Blog 2022-05-22
Published: 2022-May Views: 5,923 views
News from the Blog 2022-04-22
Published: 2022-April Views: 6,599 views
News from the Blog 2022-03-22
Published: 2022-March Views: 6,996 views
News from the Blog 2022-02-22
Published: 2022-February Views: 7,330 views
Old News:

Media Player in my Raspberry Pi 4

Just installed a media player in my Raspberry Pi 4

So I mentioned it was one of my pending tasks, to do while I’m confined here, at home, to help the Irish government to stop the quick spread of the coronavirus.

I’m happy that the situation in Ireland has stabilized, unlikely in Spain, where that historical lack of discipline and selfishness and super ego to believe Madrid the capital of the world, and so deciding not to close it for quarantine, will cause a lot of pain. I hope the closing of frontiers in Catalonia works.

Well, what I do you’re probably asking yourself, so I installed LibreELEC https://libreelec.tv/.

They have a very nice SD image writer for Linux, Mac and Windows, that will install the proper image on the micro-SD for your ARM device.

This Raspberry Pi 4 comes with Wifi integrated and a Gigabit Ethernet network port.

When I was in Barcelona, I had Kodi with Raspberry pi 2 and version 3.

This model v. 4 is much more cooler. I bought the 4GB version, and has 2xHDMI 4K.

So it is great to connect to any modern TV.

In Barcelona, I have Linux tower as NFS Server sharing my files with the Pi. Work good, even for the 100Mbit NIC of the version 3, but at that time I was only playing Full HD as the Pi didn’t supported greater resolution, and I only had that resolution on my displays too.

For now, I’m going to explore how is reading from a USB 3.0. Let’s see if it’s able to play smoothly.

The cool thing also is that I have SSH access, and so I can use the Pi for many more things. :)

I have my first update, I noticed that copying to that USB was not the best for me, as I tried to copy a .MKV file of 4.9GB and I encountered the limit of 4GB of FAT32. I could format the USB as ext4, but what I did is, SSH into the box, I see that I have two partitions on the SD for booting the Pi, the second one is a ext4 called storage. So I copied to the SD, through the network, using sftp the file I wanted.

The Gigabit connection was fast, but when the buffer fulled it started to show the real speed of the SD which is 15MB/s for writing.

Ext4 has no problem in holding a file 4.9GB so I’m watching my movie now. Will think about setting a NFS for the Pi as it will be very convenient. :)

I have an external, remote, keyboard logitech, but it happens that LibreELEC recognizes my Sony command, from the television. I don’t need the keyboard/mouse. Nice.

Here you can see my Raspberry Pi 4, connected to TV, in “combat mode”, naked, as PoC, before setting in its definitive place behind the TV.

Playing from the external USB 3.0 stick was also fluid, allowing 4K perfectly.

The only problem I has was when I was pushing movies to the USB through the network, and playing at the same time from the SD. It seems like the Raspberry reached its limits doing this and playing stuck frequently.

Remote working is here

So remote working is here.

After years in which many Engineers requested to the companies to be able to Remote Work, with most of answers No, now it happens that not only is good for the company, is the only way to ensure continuity of business, of many businesses.

One of my colleagues from Denmark, which government has shutdown the country by sending all the public servants to home, in order to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, told me:

“Yes, remote working is here, but has been necessary the four horsemen of the apocalypse”

It is curious, how Remote Working has arrived, no thanks to that was obvious, but due to external emergencies. And I’m glad that my company was prepared for business continuity.

I’ll be staying home, working remotely, in order to contribute to non-spreading the virus, specially among old people. I’m perfectly healthy but that’s a use case, many people will not develop the symptoms and still be able to spread to others.

So I have some plans related to technology to do at home, including few improvements to the blog. What are your plans?.

Update: 2020-03-13 23:16 UTC I’m thinking in all those business which are forces to close, and all the employees that will not get a salary, or will be fired, or will get a salary and the business owner maybe ends in bankrupt as is paying the salaries and no income is being generated.

Update: 2020-03-19 10:58 UTC Some of my friends, even in Human Resources/Recruiting, are starting to remote work for first time. So here is some advice:

I would recommend to get an external monitor, at least 22″, so you neck is not forcing position looking low and your eyes don’t suffer, good light (don’t in dark), a nespresso can be a good friend in the morning, and to have your hands and arms aligned correctly so you don’t suffer from a bad position. Watch the position of the wrists, your arms should be comfortably at the same level than the table, similar in an L, and your eyes be aligned to the top of your monitor. Finally I would recommend to follow a routine, like if you were going to work, so dress like you would do. Don’t stay at home all day in pijamas! ;)

News for the blog, upwards and onwards

2020-03-06 Heya, I’m doing a set of improvements to the blog.

One, you can already see. I added a new section to the CSS @media, so now screens bigger than 1,800 px in width, will use that width for rendering the page. The original WordPress theme at 960x was too small for our current screens. I will add a new CSS @media for 4K screens promptly.

Other is about the organization of the content. I want to separate a bit the contents, now articles are sequential and is difficult to discover nice contents if they have 2 or more articles more recent, so I will group articles by content and provide a small index on the top page. Also I will provide more areas for Operations, SRE, where it will be easy to locate code, scripts, tricks… things that are useful to our day to day. I also want to make visible the articles about living in different cities, for IT Engineers, with useful tricks and tips. And keep the more complex and more interesting Engineering matters in the main page.

Updates

2020-03-13 15:49 Added SSL to the blog

With more delay I wanted, I bought a SSL certificate, configured Apache, and after few changes to the blog has been set. One very annoying is that WordPress linked the images statically pointing to http://blog.carlesmateo.com so I changed the latest article’s images to point to relative path so they will work nice with http or https.

My reflection is that everything negative can have its positive output. With this coronavirus thing, I decided to focus into improving things. And so I’m doing. :)