It’s summer, we’re in the US, and I’m thoroughly enjoying the time with my family. It’s been quite a while since we’ve seen everyone here, and we’ve all been having a blast. The one downside (though my wife is convinced it’s an upside) is that my parents have limited internet, so my work time has been, out of necessity, minimal. It has nothing to do, I assure you, with our beautiful beach on the river.

I have managed to push through a bugfix LizardFS update for Fedora and EPEL, and I’ve been working on some benchmarks comparing GlusterFS, LizardFS and NFS. I’ve been focusing on the compilebench benchmark which basically simulates compiling and reading kernel trees, and is probably the closest thing to our usage pattern at the school (lots of relatively small files being written, changed, read and deleted).

Using NFS isn’t really fair, since it’s not distributed, but it’s still the go-to for networked storage in the Linux world, so I figured it would be worth getting an idea of exactly how much slower the alternatives are. If I can get Ceph up and running, I’ll see if I can benchmark it too.

In other news, I have the privilege of attending Flock again this year. I’m really looking forward to getting a better feel on Fedora’s movement towards modules, something that I hope to put into practice over the next year at the systems in school.

Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to get my benchmarks out within the next couple of weeks, and I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about Flock.

For the fifth year now, our grade nine students have been doing 3D modeling using Blender. Our students finished up their first assignments over a month ago, but it’s taken this long for me to get the top models together. So, with no further delay, here are the top models from each of the three grade nine classes (click on the pictures for Full HD renders).

We start with this nice mix of color and reflection.

Next is a double-lock combination.

And I love the addition of a key in this lock.

Next is the missing link. I really like the mix of pink and black.

Here we have safari-themed locks. Nice choice of textures!

And here’s a lock in a cave. The cave itself is a proper model, not just a background image.

Here we have the lock on the Pearly Gates. I would have loved for the lock texture to be of better quality, but I really appreciate how @david190 has shaped the lock to match the texture, especially on the top.

And here we have a beautiful lock in a velvety box. Very nice!

We can’t have a lock assignment without the obligatory pirate’s treasure chest. I love the attention to detail!

And, our final submission includes a monkey. Because… monkeys rock? What a wonderful level of detail in this scene.