May 22

Hyperic 3.2.2 review

Interesting Links, Reviews, Technology, Unix, Work 1 Comment »

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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Apr 26

Recipe software cookoff!

Cooking, Food, Mac, Reviews, Software, Website No Comments »

I’ve always loved to cook. Unfortunately, I’m one of those people who only likes to cook with really fresh ingredients and I only end up cooking about once a month. That results in me buying alot of ingredients over and over and over, which costs me money, which makes me cook less. A vicious downward spiral.

However, I still like to collect recipes in hopes that one day I’ll have my gourmet kitchen and all the utensils and equipment for cooking that I’ll ever need. In the meantime, I have the need to really start categorizing and storing these recipes that I’ve been collecting. I went searching today for OSX software that was developed to do just that and I was surprised when I found out how many packages there are out there for recipe organization.

They all have different features and all are quite cheap, weighing in at about 25$ or so. As a ‘woot!’ bonus, they all have free downloads to try ‘em out, so I figured I’d do just that. After they run out, I’ll see which one I like the most and buy it.

So here’s the competitors for Haji’s Recipe Software Cookoff!

I’ll be reviewing them based on these features:

  1. Interface
  2. iPod/iPhone export
  3. Website recipe import
  4. Shopping lists
  5. Search capabilities
  6. Printing Options
  7. Website Export
  8. Fullscreen view for cooking
  9. Nutritional values
  10. Meal planning
  11. Price

As an added bonus to my quest for recipe goodness, I came upon three other little gems: BarGenieMac, Netflix Freak and BeerAlchemy.

I’ll post my reviews up in a few weeks.