Present Perfect

First day of work after a ten day holiday-that-was-not-really-a-holiday. More on that later. Our new sysadmin has arrived, so he will take some time to break in.

In my absence, a new customer has started on our platform, set up by my team. The customer has various radios and TV's. Today one of their radios hit around 450 Mbit/sec sustained traffic, with 7444 clients connected. And everything just worked, and they did it all without me!

I don't know whether to feel proud or redundant.

If you have a TV or radio, it is not too late to get connected and use up our bandwidth. Click now !

First day of work after a ten day holiday-that-was-not-really-a-holiday. More on that later. Our new sysadmin has arrived, so he will take some time to break in. In my absence,...

I'm at the EBU Open Source conference, in a presentation on Campcaster. The speaker raised a great point that I had never thought about before.

We all know lots of people use cracked proprietary software. Campware is creating tools for media producers in emergent democracies. Apparently, sometimes local police uses anti-piracy as a tool to be able to raid these media producers and shut them down when they need to. Obviously it makes perfect sense for the police to use this avenue to get their way, but I'd never thought about software licensing being used as a tool to quell free speech.

Another reason to contribute to Free Software, I guess.

I'm at the EBU Open Source conference, in a presentation on Campcaster. The speaker raised a great point that I had never thought about before. We all know lots of...

Hey people.

I am looking for software that allows me to track "things that have happened" over "large amounts of time". I would like to be able to categorize things, assign them some level of importance, describe what "objects" are affected by it, ...

I want to be able to hook up this software to simple scripts that can enter events into the system.

Examples of these are: software upgrades on machines (can be culled from /var/log/messages). Incidents filed in a bug tracker. Alarms reported by a monitoring system. Me noting down when we did a change in some config.

After that, the software would let me go look for patterns somehow, and zoom in and out on the data, and graphs made from it. It should let me track the history, so I can answer questions like "when was the last time we upgraded this piece of software", but also let me find causes and effects (what happened right before so many things started failing).

Any suggestions are welcome. I have no idea what sort of words I should be googling for to find the sort of thing I want.

Hey people. I am looking for software that allows me to track "things that have happened" over "large amounts of time". I would like to be able to categorize things,...

All this new mango stuff looks great, Olav and friends are kicking ass.

Obviously I wouldn't be writing this if I had only compliments to give.

We're supposed to run a certain command to get our password. This command can only be run once. The password is long and cryptic. It cannot be changed. And we're supposed to keep it secure.

Now, I'm no Joe Shaw when it comes to passwords, but I think this time I'm going to pass on this exciting opportunity to memorize arbitrary strings of letters and numbers. As a reminder to my future self, I stored this password in $HOME/private/doc/gnome/mango, because I'm 100% sure that otherwise I won't even be sure I'll remember where the password is by the time I will actually need it.

I hope Olav's not going to be too busy a few months down the line changing people's passwords because they've forgotten it, so that he has time to make Mango rock even harder.

All this new mango stuff looks great, Olav and friends are kicking ass. Obviously I wouldn't be writing this if I had only compliments to give. We're supposed to run...

Over the last month I put Lunya through two gruelling vet visits. The first was for some standard vaccination, as well as getting her chipped. The chipping is a necessary requirement for her to be able to go back to Belgium and make Kristien feel less lonely.

It was rather painful - so much so that we couldn't hold her still long enough to shoot the chip, or a tranquilizer shot after that to get her calm enough to shoot the chip. After half an hour, the vet gave up, and got this cage from the back room that has this cagey plane inside it which you can move inside the cage to press the cat against the other edge and keep her immobilized. I swear, Lunya was only an inch thick when squished inside this entrapment.

That allowed us to give her the shot, get her sedated, and shoot the chip.

This week was slightly less painful, only a shot against rabies.

The vet recommended I use a certain spray to sedate the cat before taking her on a plane, and that I test it some day before doing so, and note down how long it takes her to go calm and how long the effect lasts.

Today I spent some ten minutes trying to coerce her to open her mouth. Then when she finally did, I sprayed her tongue, and she managed to pull away and spit out half of it on the recently washed sofa blanket. I don't really know how much she actually held in, and I'm not planning to give her another dose because too much gunk will kill her, just as sure as none at all.

In the past hour, she has clawed her way through our tv cabinet two times, hiding herself behind the stereo (don't ask), jumping back and forth through the living room, chasing imaginary butterflies, and chasing her tail while lying on her scratching pole.

I'm not convinced this tranquilizer product is working out for her.

Over the last month I put Lunya through two gruelling vet visits. The first was for some standard vaccination, as well as getting her chipped. The chipping is a necessary...