Work makes staying on top of things difficult. You don’t always have an easy way to catch up with the constantly changing tech world. Enter RSS and feed readers. Have one at home, works great. Wouldn’t it just be lovely if I could remote into that system at home, my Mac, and get all my feeds and files off of my home network? It would! Especially since SAP doesn’t block outbound SSL connections except…enter Hotwire DSL. Arguably the worst internet provider I have ever seen, they make AOL look like shining virgins of the Lord. Yes, the dancing and singing kind.
After much scrambling and intensive thought (ok, all of about two minutes of it) I decided to try out Bloglines as my feed reader. It’s got a decent interface, reasonably fast and most of all: I can use it from any computer. Perfect! Nirvana! Or, atleast, it was through the first hundred or so feeds.
Then I added the OPML feed for the Bloggercon conference and suddenly Bloglines isn’t so fun anymore. The interface that once seemed so simplistic is now smothering. It’s speed is unbearable when it attempts to load the 200 previous posts of some of those sites and no, I don’t know why it insists upon 200 posts! I set it to one week worth of posts.
I really need a good windows based feed reader that can sync my reading habits across multiple computers over seperated networks. Anyone have any suggestions?
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Previously, I had made mention of an interesting idea I had thought up while attempting to fill my overwelming amounts of free time at SAP. I was in the datacenter, replacing a failed drive on a server and I got to thinking - “Why don’t we have software that tells us what failed, when, and where?” It would seem to be relatively simple to do. The hardware monitoring capabilities exist out there currently in even desktop systems, let alone servers.
As far as I know though, the capability could be in commercial datacenter monitoring tools, and most likely is. If you’re paying thousands of dollars a year for something like that it’d damn well better work. However, is there an open source tool that does the job? From what I’ve been able to find, no.
Granted, almost every Linux and Unix system out there can send its log files to a central server for storage but then you still have a problem of displaying those logs in a readable format. If you’ve ever taken the time to search through a log its often rather cryptic, vague, and a PITA to get to specific areas you want without using grep or various other search mechnisms.
Did I mention that there’s no cross-platform tool as well?
Microsoft locks down their server event logs into their “Event Viewer” software which is pretty much a POS. You can extract the information but it takes extra utilities which really shouldn’t be necessary. You also can do remote viewing of another servers event logs but only through a windows console thats running a management software package and so on and so forth.
So, lets get back to the point. Its simple really. Log files to RSS. Yup, thats it really. On a Windows or a Linux server you would just need a small script (whether in perl or whatever language you’re comfortable with) to extract the log files and convert the information into an RSS file. Then, a stripped down webserver (there are some that run in less than 200kb of RAM) would publish that information. A centralized webserver, whether running a Planet software package or even a computer with something like NNW or FeedDemon would grab the RSS feed and show any updates to the log files you wish to monitor. Simple, lightweight, and cross platform.
Now, granted, this doesn’t have remote management features or anything of the sort but you could def. build upon the idea add them in. I’ve been thinking of working on it but I’m not sure if its worth while. It has potential, alot of potential, but it requires a drive and planning and most of all experience that I’m not sure I have. Anyone want to give me a kick in the ass to get started?
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I’ve been rather quiet lately but I don’t think many people have been around to notice. This month (and Sept) have been two of our slowest months so far in TA’s history concerning traffic. Much of that has to do with Sam and I’s breakdown in writing. We’re both busy and though I’m sure we each have much to write about, finding the time to write has become much more difficult.
I really do promise thats going to change, atleast for me. I have a couple post ideas that I’m working on now and just some general ones to fill in the time while those are being worked on. I’ve really become interested in corporate blogging (or lack thereof) and expect that to be addresses in the coming days. I also have an idea for an open-source system monitoring tool that I’m pretty sure hasn’t been explored yet.
I’ve been hesitant to post my idea because I don’t want someone to steal it. Yes, call me vain if you will but its something that for the first time I’ve felt that I could make a mark in the computer world, if I executed it properly. However, since I’m the only one who knows about I haven’t had any desire to work on it; go figure. So, that’ll change as well hopefully once I get the idea aired out.
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