I came really close to making some large purchases to improve my video call situation, and I may still do so, but I did spend some time and found a few quick wins maybe will help others:

1. I use Fedora as my workstation.  Won’t change it.
2. I have a Logitech C930e.  Logitech doesn’t publish anything on how to tweak the camera on Linux.  Figure out how to tweak it.
3. I like (love) working in the dark.  So I never have any lights on.  That has to change.
4. I have a window behind me in my home office.  Shutting the blinds is not enough.  Repositioning my desk won’t work in the space I’ve got.  Get a blackout curtain.
5. My webcam is sitting on top of my monitor, dead center.  This makes it really awkward to look directly at.  It’s about 8″ above my eye-line.  I don’t think I’m going to change this. My eyeline has to remain at the center of the monitor or I get neck pain.

Here are the tweaks I made that do seem to have improved things:

Continue reading “Tweaking my webcam setup (Logitech C930e, Fedora Linux, v4l)” →

Hey all, happy new year!

Been a quarter or so since my last post Wanted to share some updates info about the Service Delivery, SRE team at Red Hat for 2020!

Continue reading “Red Hat SRE 2020 Goals and Projects (and Hiring!)” →

[I’ve been meaning to write this post for several months]

Earlier this year I changed roles within Red Hat.  My new role is “OpenShift SaaS Architect”, and organizationally is part of Red Hat Service Delivery.

Continue reading “Maybe Stop Sending Me Emails about Performance :-)” →

Here are the official docs for building Grafana from source.  And below are my notes on how to build Grafana, starting from a clean Fedora 27 Cloud image.

Continue reading “Building Grafana from source on Fedora” →

As any respectable software performance person knows, perf is your best (only?) friend. For example, perf report -g has shined a light into the deepest, darkest corners of debugging territory.  Since you asked, it can happily run in a container, too (albeit requiring elevated privileges, but we’re debugging here…).

Typically console formatted output is fine for grokking perf reports, but having recently become addicted to go’s pprof visualization (dot format), handy flame graphs, and on the morbid occassion, VTune, I started looking around for a way to more clearly understand a particular perf recording.

Googling turned up an interesting QT-based tool called hotspot by a company called KDAB.  Screenshots indicate it might be worth kicking the tires.

After some bouncing around figuring out Fedora equivalent package names, I was able to quickly build and run hotspot.  I ran a quick perf record to see if it was going to work at all:

Continue reading “Building KDAB hotspot ‘perf’ visualization tool on Fedora” →