My sister, Liesl, and I recorded this song for our family and friends. Merry Christmas to all of you, may you have a wonderful holiday season, and best wishes for a prosperous new year.
Zenoss Plugins now support OpenBSD
Zenoss is a great open source system monitoring tool. I usually configure it to get data using SNMP. However, I have a few remote OpenBSD boxes that I want to keep an eye on, and I am not going to expose SNMP to the universe. Zenoss has a cool thing called Zenoss Plugins which let your collector SSH into a machine and get basic statistics. The current version of Zenoss Plugins (2.0.4) does not have support for OpenBSD.
Here’s how you add it:
Installing Bespin on Kubuntu 8.10
I have I have had Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) on one of my machines for a month or so. I really miss baghira, which makes linux look at much like OSX as linux can look. Alas, there will be no baghira for QT4. I thought I’d try out cloudcity (or bespin, I can’t figure out what the real name is), written by the same guy who wrote baghira. It’s not an OSX clone (boo), it’s still early code, and you’ll have to compile your own, but it’s not hard. Here’s what I did:
The Best Keyboard Ever
Some people are perfectly happy with the $2 keyboard that came with their Gateway. Personally, I would rather write with a pencil than use one of those mushy plastic heaps. I have always tried to find nice keyboards, but they always have been second best to the metal clicky keyboard on the IBM 286 that was my computer at my first job. Ever since then I have never really loved my keyboard, until now.
jactiveresource launched
ActiveResource is one of the cooler parts of Ruby on Rails. It uses the dynamic goodness of ruby to consume RESTful resources without having to hardly write any code. How about this for a stupid-easy class:
class Person < ActiveResource::Base site = http://api.example.com end
Three lines of code makes a proxy class for a remote service, ActiveResource dynamically figures everything else out.
I needed some Java code that could consume RESTful resources in a Rails application. I looked around to see if I could find any code that would do this for me. I found Restlet, which looks like a pretty good server side framework for writing and publishing restful services, but I need the client side of that. So I decided to start a new project called jactiveresource, which is a port of ActiveResource to java. Because java is statically typed it won't be quite as easy as it is in ruby, but I think we can get close. This weekend I stood up a site to host it, and got the first bits of code working. Stay tuned....