the second phase

In my industry, there’s alot of monitoring to be done. We have servers, services, processes, ports, log files, applications, you name it, we have to monitor it.

When I first started at DI, there was a current implementation of Nagios. Unfortunately, it was horribly done. Some agents used SSL, some didn’t. It was all done with separate configuration files, it was slow and if you had too many monitors, they didn’t go off in time.

In any case, we started investigating replacements for Nagios and we came upon Hyperic. Hyperic is an open source ( although they have an enterprise version ) monitoring system.  It is written in java and has individual agents that are installed on each of the systems you wish to monitor.  The agents have a very low overhead, although that is somewhat dependent on if they are running scripts and what those scripts are doing.

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My brother recently started getting some new tattoos and it got me to thinking that I should get mine re-done and maybe get some new ones. ( I know my girlfriend is cringing at this point. ). If you haven’t seen my tattoos yet, I’m sure there are some pictures in my gallery somewhere of them but in order to save you the browsing time - I like tribals. I like the clean, artistic design of them. I like how they stay nice and bold, even as the tattoo gets older. And if you know me at all, I do not simply like dragons, I love them. I collect them. Hell, the Tiger calls me the Dragon.

The problem with tribal designs is that they are everywhere and when they are everywhere, it means you get some really crappy ones and some really good ones. After about 3 weeks of scouring the web, I found Dali Rău. This guy is just amazing. And the best part, he’s into computers and technology. Hell, he has his own wordpress 2.5 blog. I mean, c’mon, how cool is that? Most tattoo artists around here are just into bikes and skulls and crap. Here’s a dude who actually knows what XHTML is and is pissed when his site doesn’t validate. ( FYI, my site doesn’t validate, due to some issues with how Wordpress displays the link categories.. ). The only downfall? He lives in Japan.

So, me and the Tiger are thinking of planning an excursion for sometime later this year to make the trip to Japan, drink lots of sake, eat lots of sushi and get ourselves some tattoos from the venerable Dali.

If you’re into tattoos at all, check his site out.

fifth graders can YOU fight at one time? Go figure it out!

That’s right, boys and girls, it is no longer a myth, a legend, that bullshit story about how you lost your virginity.  The Apple iPhone is finally a reality and OMG.  The thing is loaded with goodies for all geeks, audiophiles and sleek enough for you upstrung exec types.

The down side?  It doesn’t come out until June.  Maybe I can preorder one and then sell it on eBay ( ala Wii and PS3 ). I will, however, be saving up some cash for this monster.

Just kidding.  I’m not a jew.  Not really.  Sometimes I wish I was, but I’m not.  Maybe I’d have more money.

So yeah, what’s NEW WITH ME!?!?

Nothing.

Really, nothing is going on.  I still work at Digital Insight and The Tiger is still a homo kitty cat.  In other worlds, I fly planes, dance with hot women and eat $1,000 sushi.  But unfortunately, I awaken to a large german shepherd moving around on the bed and then deciding the most comfortable position happens to be the one where he places his ass on my head.  Quite a far stretch from beautiful gyrating females, but hey, it’s a step closer.  Sorta.

Anyway, I need to get back to studying Ruby ( I’d link the site but I’m lazy and I don’t know it off the top of my head. ).

Peace out yo.