adrift on a cosmic ocean

One of the things that is pushed here a lot is the necessity to make all new applications really production-ready before being deployed as a service. There is of course the adage "If it's not monitored, it doesn't exist" but beyond that there are a lot of other little fiddly details just to make something run. I'm talking about things like init scripts, logging etc. It's very easy to get wrapped…

Last week I spent a bit of time scratching an itch I've had with doing maintenance. We use Nagios for our monitoring (without any addons, plugins or frontends) and scheduling downtime is a pain. Not only that, but deleting downtime is impossible short of screenscraping or (shock) actually clicking in the user interface. When I'm done doing maintenance I want to delete all the downtime (regardless…

I'm trying to take every opportunity that presents itself to blab about what I'm working on, so I gave an Ignite talk at the recent DevOpsDays in Göteborg, Sweden. The videos are now up, and fortunately for you I spoke first so I'm right at the start of the video. It was my first Ignite talk and my memory is always hopeless so there was a bit of slide confusion but it resolved itself quite nicely…

Today at DevOpsDays Göteborg we rounded out the day's events with an Open Space session on Cool Tools. Basically I wanted to have a session where as experts in our field we can suggest life-saving, life-changing or just handy tools we use from day to day that others may not be aware of. Each person got up, said some small amount about the tool in question and wrote it on the board. In the end we…

I've been doing most of my work with Ruby this last year, as a lot of it was Puppet-related. I went through the pain and pleasure of learning Ruby and the intricacies of unit testing with test::unit and RSpec, and mocking objects with the excellent Mocha library. Now I have slightly returned to my roots by doing a bit of Python programming on another part of our codebase. We use Python for some of…

I've had a cheap, crappy bike for a while now and so far it has served me fairly well. It is not in great condition and has its problems but generally works despite my recent fitness kick which has seen me taking my son out for morning rides before work in the trailer which hangs off the rear axle. The additional weight of course puts a strain on the axle and gears (not to mention ME) and the…

I took a week off work this week for an "Urlaub auf dem Balkon" - in other words a holiday at home. With a demanding one year old child, a bit of relaxation and time to ourselves is about as much as we can ask for at the moment since actually going away on holiday can turn into a bit of a stressful nightmare. Since I have the week to relax, naturally I've used the opportunity to get my geek on and…

I've been playing around with OpenCV over the last few weeks while reading/coding along with the Learning OpenCV book. Overall I'm pretty impressed with how easy it is to do quite complex things, thanks to the rich library of visual computing functions. The library is natively in C, but there are also python bindings using SWIG. It is actually an interesting exercise taking the examples in the…

Tom Limoncelli just released his own version of The Joel Test - except his one is for sysadmins. I was only vaguely aware of Joel Spolsky's test and only just read through it and rated my current team, and I'm glad to say we are just about at twelve for twelve. It hasn't really been on my radar until now as this is the first time I can actually say I've been on a development team. Given all the…

I imagine that there are two groups of people who might read this post: When you need to find a process by name, you run ps -ef or similar and pipe into grep processname. When you need to find a process by name, you run ps -C processname If you fall into the first category, you fail my interview tests. Perhaps you smugly fall into the second category, but surely you have seen this occur: I don't…