Archive for October, 2007

Voice alerts with Intellipool or pretty well anything


October 30th, 2007

Thanks to Robert @ Intellipool for alerting me to this one.
Intellipool, as many of you may already know, is an excellent web based network monitor. One of the problems it has had, and its competitors for that matter, is the difficulty of informing off site duty IT personnel when things *really* go wrong.
Many people rely [...]

Popularity: 26% [?]

Popularity Contest Widget


October 29th, 2007

Popularity Contest is a great Wordpress plugin for displaying your most popular blog posts. It powers the Teapot Highlights over on the right hand side of this post.
One thing missing from Popularity Contest is a widget. We created one for this blog, so we thought we may as well share it for everybody [...]

Popularity: 35% [?]

How not to comment your code


October 29th, 2007

I was talking to an old time programmer a while ago and he reminisced about a colleague who used to comment his code using Ancient Greek.
So next time you’re tempted to criticise one of your colleagues for their poor quality code commenting, just pause and think that it could be a lot worse. Instead of [...]

Popularity: 18% [?]

OpenNMS coming soon to Windows


October 26th, 2007

OpenNMS is one of the original enterprise grade open source network management tools. For the Windows based admin, it has had one huge problem: it only runs on Unix based systems.
Not any more!
After a week of prototyping, the development team now has a prototype running on Windows. Expect to see a full release on Windows [...]

Popularity: 41% [?]

Battery charge by the sea


October 25th, 2007

Apologies for the lack of posts since last Friday. I managed to get a few days away in Robin Hood’s Bay just north of Scarborough. The weather was perfect, the hotel cosy as usual and the company good too! Well, I’ve got to say that as the party consisted of both of my parents, two [...]

Popularity: 21% [?]

Real time log visualization using glTail.rb


October 19th, 2007

Hat tip to Dougal Campbell over at Geek Ramblings for finding this.
Just occasionally you come across a tool that really blows you away…that tool is glTail.rb!
Getting an instant idea for how your web server is performing can be a difficult task. One way to do that is to use a command like:
tail -f <log file>
The [...]

Popularity: 26% [?]

Social Media in Plain English


October 17th, 2007

Hat tip to the Elastic Path folks for finding this one.
If you want a simple introduction to all of the new social media buzz flying around at the moment, I strongly recommend you check out these short tutorial videos by Lee Lefever at Common Craft.
Social Bookmarking in Plain English
RSS in Plain English
Wikis in Plain English
Social [...]

Popularity: 16% [?]

Blog Action Day: The server power double whammy


October 15th, 2007

Servers are getting faster and faster, consuming more and more power, producing more and more heat. Removing heat from the data centre uses even more power.
According to a November 2006 Gartner report, over 60% of total data centre power consumption is spent cooling the data centre environment.
Making the cooling system less power hungry would be [...]

Popularity: 36% [?]

ANN: Intellipool Network Monitor 3.3 released


October 12th, 2007

We are pleased to announce the availability of Intellipool 3.3.
The headline feature for us is the support for the Sensatronics Senturion, the new rack-mounted environment monitor. There is plenty more for everybody though.
Popularity: 28% [?]

Popularity: 28% [?]

Paper prototyping: IT’s best kept secret?


October 11th, 2007

One of the biggest problems when developing a system, be it software or a website, is getting the customer to visualise how your proposed solution is going to work.
Quite often, you will get a long way down the path towards producing your solution before you get any meaningful feedback.
The big early career lesson for most [...]

Popularity: 29% [?]