Sun, 29 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 29, 2008
iamcal.com - Parsing Email Adresses in PHP
That is one crazy regex.
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
"Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days alongside endless variations offering to teach Visual Basic, Windows, the Internet, and so on in a few days or hours."
[2008/06/29 / daily links permanent link]
Sat, 28 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 28, 2008
Renesys Blog: Cogent Becomes Transit-Free
"Cogent (AS174) has established a direct connection to the America Online Transit Data Network (ATDN) (AS1668). This long-awaited connection completes Cogent's effort to directly connect with every transit-free network in the world."
WWoIT - Wayne's World of IT: Find VM snapshots in ESX/VC
"Find snapshots of VMs in ESX and VC other than manually looking through each VM in the GUI. Query the db using SQL management studio, use sqlcmd from the command-line, list the files in the service console, or use the new VI Toolkit powershell snap-in."
xtravirt.com - SnapHunter
"SnapHunter is an ESX3 Service Console utility which can report back on the Snaphot status of VM's from multiple ESX Servers."
[2008/06/28 / daily links permanent link]
Thu, 26 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 26, 2008
Oil Price Fallout: Jobs Coming Home?
Sometimes cheap labour isn't enough... "As the cost of shipping continues to soar along with fuel prices, homegrown manufacturing jobs are making a comeback after decades of decline."
Virtual Geek: Answers to a bunch of questions
"I got a lot of questions on the 10GbE post, which is great. Some of the answers involve graphics, so rather than comments, I'm just going to do a post...."
Coding Horror: Revisiting the XML Angle Bracket Tax
"I wasn't trying to present it as "Oh, XML is bad...". What I was trying to say is why don't we think about what we're doing? ... Can we just stop programming for a minute to think about what we're doing and not make a blind choice...?"
Coding Horror: The Ultimate Code Kata
"Contrary to what you might believe, merely doing your job every day doesn't qualify as real practice. ... You have to set aside some time once in a while and do focused practice in order to get better at something."
Stevey's Home Page - It's Not Software
I do a lot of monitoring at work at this rang true: "... until you're actually measuring all your use cases, any one of them can potentially be unavailable without your knowledge. Hence availability monitoring always evolves into real-time QA."
[2008/06/26 / daily links permanent link]
Wed, 25 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 25, 2008
Marcus Ranum - The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security
Read this some time back but a mailing list post reminded me of it.
"Let me introduce you to the six dumbest ideas in computer security. What are they? They're the anti-good ideas. They're the braindamage..."
Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle, by R.P. Feynman
Estimates range from 1:100 to 1:100,000. Higher from engineers and lower from management. 1:100,000 would imply a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one. "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?"
Simulating the Cisco 7200 Router with PC Hardware
"Well, rejoice in the power of open source, as there is a project that will let you simulate the 7200 series on a normal server. Dynamips is a GPL-licensed emulator that uses standard IOS releases to simulate 7200, 3600, 3700 and 2600 series routers. "
VMWare ESX - How to clear a hung VM guest OS.
"I'm guessing that most ESX administrators have experienced at least one time where a VM decides to hang leaving them unable to shut down or restart it."
[2008/06/25 / daily links permanent link]
Tue, 24 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 24, 2008
CT3 - Disable optional IOS features on high CPU load
"The applet monitors the average one minute CPU load on the router (using the cpmCPUTotal1min SNMP variable) and disables optional features when the CPU load exceeds predefined value."
[2008/06/24 / daily links permanent link]
Mon, 23 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 23, 2008
Transcoding MTS/M2TS AVCHD Video Into AVI Files with Free Software | fsckin w/ linux
"When I opened it, the first question in my head was not atypical of a Linux users' train of thought: 'Is it compatible with Linux?'" I have a Panasonic HDC-SD9 and trying to convert the MTS files. It would be faster if my laptop wasn't a Core Solo.
[2008/06/23 / daily links permanent link]
Sat, 21 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 21, 2008
Economist.com - The future of the European Union
"...a case can be made that EU treaties are too complex to be readily susceptible to a simple yes/no vote. 11 EU governments promised such referendums on the constitution, and ten of them have been dishonest in pretending that Lisbon is wholly different"
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Two aphorisms and a few notes
"Twitter is referred to as a "micro-blogging platform," but twittering seems more like antiblogging, or at least an escape - retreat? - from blogging. Blogging is the soapbox in the park, the shout in the street; Twitter is the whispering of a clique."
EmailKarma.net: Yahoo! Announces Global Availability of Two New E-mail Domains
"Yahoo! announced two new e-mail domains ... ymail.com and rocketmail.com." Hello?!? Rocketmail isn't new, it's so 1997.
Virtual Geek: 10 Gigabit Ethernet and VMware - A Match Made in Heaven
"Consolidation of I/O becomes a core design bottleneck. ... So quick math - 60 old physical NICs are now consolidated on 10 NICs"
Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!
If you have Firefox 3 enter "about:robots" in the address bar.
Five Tools I Use for Listening | chrisbrogan.com
"...companies will spend anywhere from $20,000 to $150,000 on a good website design, but will fail to implement even the most rudimentary listening tools to .... understand the impact of such a site beyond the realm of hits and clicks."
William Vambenepe's blog - SaaS management: it's MUWS and MOWS all over again
How now brown cow? "So far, we don't have good names for them. And the MUWS/MOWS experience shows that good names matter. IMaaS (IT Management as a Service) and MoSaaS (Management of Software as a Service) won't cut it."
VMware - Scalable Storage Performance
"... the results of studies on storage scalability ... with many ESX hosts, many LUNs, or many of both. It examines the effects of I/O queuing at various layers in a virtual infrastructure as more and more virtual machines share the same storage."
VMware Communities: vMotion Compatibility ...
"Put on your pajamas, 'cuz this could put you to sleep. If you happen to be a fella like me with a software background, the following might be helpful for the below discussion of vMotion and CPU compatibility."
[2008/06/21 / daily links permanent link]
Fri, 20 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 20, 2008
CT3 - BGP default route
"BGP default route origination, advertisements and propagation. This article describes the functionality and caveats of BGP default routing."
VM /ETC - Matrix to Determine VMotion Compatibility by Processor
"Dell's paper titled VMware VMotion and 64-bit VM Compatibility Matrix for VMware Infrastructure 3 and Dell PowerEdge Systems contains a VMotion and 32/64-Bit VM Compatibility Across Processor Models matrix that is easy to decipher."
[2008/06/20 / daily links permanent link]
Thu, 19 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 19, 2008
Cowboy 2.0 - Salesforce.com No Longer Playing Nice
"I guess it was inevitable, but I did not want to believe it could happen. Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com founder, chairman and CEO) was apparently lying to us all along."
Cisco IOS hints and tricks: Display locally originated BGP routes
"Displaying the BGP routes originated in the local AS is simple: you just filter the BGP table with a regular expression matching an empty AS path. Displaying routes originated by the local router is tougher."
Bruce F. Webster - Anatomy of a runaway IT project
"The following document is the actual text - carefully redacted - of a memo I wrote some time back ... The memo itself provides an interesting glimpse into just how a major IT project can go so far off the tracks that nothing useful is ever delivered."
VMware Land - Top 10 Lists
That's a lot of lists!
[2008/06/19 / daily links permanent link]
Wed, 18 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 18, 2008
Eight Black - Going. Going. Nearly Gone.
"To put this into some sort of basic perspective, if you had purchased $1000 worth of BlueFreeway stock exactly 1 year ago, that would be worth the princely sum of $42 as of close of play today."
Virtual Geek - So, how **EXACTLY** does VM HA's admittance algorithm work?
"What's the symptom - you can't create new VMs without violating the availability constraints - even when you think you have plenty left, or you upgraded from Virtual Center 2.0.x to 2.5 and can't shake the "Insufficient Resources to Satisfy" HA error."
xAnalisys - VMware Infrastructure 3 in a Cisco Network Environment
"VMware has collaborated with Cisco to produce a guide for deploying VMware Infrastucture 3 with Cisco switches. This guide covers the physical and virtual data network and storage network deployment ... with suggested topologies and designs."
Pawprints of the Mind - Getting Xen up and running: part II
"This post is intended for people who are trying to set up a private network with Xen virtual machines." Virtual networks are unsupported in base Xen but this is a Debian centric how-to which worked first time.
[2008/06/18 / daily links permanent link]
Tue, 17 Jun 2008
Firefox 3 Download Day
"Set a Guinness World Record, Enjoy a Better Web. Sounds like a good deal,
right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the
record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it's that easy."
[2008/06/17 / tech / software permanent link]
Virtualisation Buzzwords
So I was thinking a bit more about virtualisation buzzwords after my discovery the other
day.
"Virtualisation 1.0" appears to be the concept of virtualising physical hosts
onto a defined set of infrastructure. Whether the VM farm is in-house or
outsourced is largely irrelevent. What is important for buzzword compliance is
that there is still a farm with limits, location etc.etc.
"Virtualisation 2.0" appears to be the concept of virtualising physical hosts
onto "clouds". The VM farm is provided by infrastructure-as-a-service and it's
implied that limits, location etc.etc. are non-issues because they are "someone
else's problem".
The problem is that the possibilities in this space are not easily pigeon-holed
into only two catergories. It just does a disservice to whatever you are trying
to describe to fall back on these kinds of buzzwords.
[2008/06/17 / tech permanent link]
Links of the Day: June 17, 2008
smh.com.au - Cut fuel price, say voters
Why do people think the government should intervene in the supply/demand determined pricing of a scarce resource? Did everyone fail economics 101?
Acer Aspire One notebook review
"if Acer wants it to be seen as anything other than a mini-notebook it needs to quickly launch its connected version as this edition is only a success on the price point, lacking the usability and build quality we've come to expect from this market."
TrustedReviews - Asus Eee PC 901 20G Linux Edition
"Brimming with features and with a new CPU and better battery, the Eee PC 901 personifies exactly the spirit in which the original was created. ...bit more expensive ... lack a more comfortable keyboard, but ... the 901 has once again set the standard."
TrustedReviews - First Look: MSI Wind
"...though the Wind lacks the classiness of the Mini-Note... it's a good looking machine that shares a visual style with the Eee PC - albeit in a slightly larger chassis. ...it looks as though MSI has put together a very commendable effort..."
VM /ETC - Can you Vmotion between different physical data centers?
"Chad goes on to point out that he feels stretching ESX Clusters is a bad idea in general and lists 4 solid reasons to support why. Check out all the whole post at the link above."
Building a Low Cost (Cheap) VMWare ESX Test Server.
"My job now involves more and more virtualised (or virtualized if you're one of our American cousins from across the pond) server implementations so this is a good excuse to go and build my own VMWare ESX test environment."
Virtual Geek: Building a Home VMware Infrastructure Lab
"This is something I consider mandatory if you're going to take VMware as seriously as I think everyone should :-)"
Connect VMware ESX Server to a free iSCSI SAN using Openfiler
"In this article, we take a look at how you can download a free open-source iSCSI server and use it as your SAN storage for VMware ESX and its advanced features."
Openfiler (The link in the previous article is out of date)
"Openfiler converts an industry standard x86/64 architecture system into a full-fledged NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway and provides storage administrators with a powerful tool to cope with burgeoning storage needs."
[2008/06/17 / daily links permanent link]
Sun, 15 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 15, 2008
Virtualization 2.0
So I only came across this buzzword for the first time today. A quick Google search and it became clear that it's been thrown about for almost two years. Why not call a spade a spade and bang on about "infrastructure virtualisation" instead?
Rolling Stone - The Battle For Facebook
Short on technical detail, long on melodrama.
[2008/06/15 / daily links permanent link]
Sat, 14 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 14, 2008
smh.com.au - ACCC thwarts eBay PayPal plan
A win for common sense! "The [ACCC] has flagged its intention to scuttle a plan by online auctioneer eBay to force its Australian users on to a PayPal-only payments system. Citing concerns about the 'anti-competitive effect' of the proposal..."
Coding Horror: ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
Be sure to read the comments too... "What the heck is an octothorpe? I know this as the pound key, but that turns out to be a US-centric word; most other cultures know it as the hash key."
PostCarbon Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
"... ICT is ... completely dependent on fossil fuels. IF this ... is not changed ... there will be no PostCarbon ICT, period." Original has horrible formatting.
[2008/06/14 / daily links permanent link]
Fri, 13 Jun 2008
Links of the Day: June 13, 2008
37signals - Git smart: How we're using Git to track our source code
I've been using bzr a lot lately but every man and his dog and their source code seems to be switching to git. Must take a deeper look one of these days.
Changing the IP-address of an ESX host and HA - Yellow Bricks
"...changed the ip-address of three VMware ESX hosts. ...standard VMware procedure, which usually works... In this case after the ip-address was changed HA did not work..." See also http://www.booches.nl/index.php/2008/06/05/change-esx-host-ip-address/
NAT caveats in IOS release 12.4T - CT3
"The Network Address Translation (NAT) in IOS release 12.4T works significantly differently from the previous implementations (including mainstream IOS release 12.4)."
Cloud Computing vs Grid Computing
"...the term 'Cloud Computing' is relatively new to the Technology buzz. But just how new is it? ...analyzing search trends of different computing keywords to try to put everything in perspective."
Audi TP52 crash gybes to avoid broaching Cristabella - 1 of 3
Crazy!
Audi TP52 crash gybes to avoid broaching Cristabella - 2 of 3
Audi TP52 crash gybes to avoid broaching Cristabella - 3 of 3
[2008/06/13 / daily links permanent link]
Thu, 12 Jun 2008
Daily Links Automated
As can be seen from the previous post
I'm back!
The best bit is that post was created automatically. I use del.icio.us to bookmark
interesting things I read day to day. It has support for daily links posted to your blog but
that requires XML-RPC support which Blosxom doesn't have out of the box.
So I wrote a small
perl script which downloads links daily and creates a post if there are any
for that day. Most of the heavy lifting is done by Net::Delicious (which I
turned into a deb package
for Ubuntu Hardy) and to save time a lot of inspiration was drawn from Edward de Leau's WordPress
script.
Final problem. I want it to run at midnight UTC (del.icio.us' "get by date" API
works in UTC) in order to grab all the links for an entire day when they are
fresh, fresh, fresh. But how do you run this out of CRON on a system that is in
timezone "Australia/Sydney" with all it's daylight savings fun, fun, fun?
# Only want this to run just before midnight GMT 59 9 * * * /bin/date +\%z | /bin/grep -q 1000 && /path/to/delicious2blosxom.pl 59 10 * * * /bin/date +\%z | /bin/grep -q 1100 && /path/to/delicious2blosxom.pl
Run it twice a day but check for the current UTC offset first. The first covers
normal Sydney time, the second daylight savings. Sweet!
[2008/06/12 / meta permanent link]
Links of the Day: June 12, 2008
del.icio.us/help/api/posts
Blosxom doesn't have XML-RPC support by default so I'll need to script an API call to download daily bookmarks.
Aaron Straup Cope / Net-Delicious - search.cpan.org
Someone may have already done the heavy lifting for me!
Publishing Links With Perl, by Jeffrey Veen
Just in case I get lazy and need a cheat sheet...
http://edward.de.leau.net/code/wpds.txt
Actually this one turned out more useful.
net::delicious bug #30310: Error messages when used with warnings on
I was getting an error ("Use of uninitialized value in -f at /usr/share/perl5/Net/Delicious.pm line 228.") from my script, seems there is already a bug filed for it.
Royal Pingdom : Javascript framework usage among top websites
Caught my attention because the name MooTools sounds like something JohnF would nave named.
