In honor of November, which used to be my NaBloWriMo (“National” Blog Writing Month), I’m determined to exceed my usual output of zero posts per month.

A haphazard introduction to Docker

My latest hobby project has been changing this website to use Docker. For anyone who doesn’t know, Docker is a containerization system, which means that it lets you run programs in their own individual “containers” that prevent them from interacting with other programs running on the same computer (except when you specifically allow it). For example, a file stored in a container is typically accessible only within that container, each container has its own set of network ports to send and receive communication, and so on. Containers are a lot like virtual machines, but whereas a virtual machine runs an entire operating system — that includes a kernel plus any number of programs — Docker runs only one primary program in each isolated environment, and when that program needs a kernel to do something like reading data from a file, it uses the underlying host system’s kernel. So you might think of containers as “partly-virtual machines”.

The isolated environment of a container works the other way around, too …

The blog has been pretty quiet the last few months, because I’ve been getting ready to move to Wuhan, China, where I’ll be starting work as a postdoc at Central China Normal University.

It turns out that moving to another country - in fact another continent - takes a lot of preparation. Shocker, huh. Airlines put pretty restrictive limits on both the amount and type of things you can take, so I had to pack light. I’ll basically be living out of a couple of suitcases for the next six weeks. But at the same time, shipping things to China is unreliable, expensive, and impossible until I find out where I’ll be living, so I had to make sure to take everything I needed. It took some planning to figure out how to fit the essentials into those two suitcases. My old habit of making a checklist of what to pack really came in handy!

Then there’s the whole issue of getting permission to enter the country in the first place. Officially, to work in China, I need a work visa. For that I need a work permit from the university. For them to give me the …