Sat, 09 Oct 2004
Searching the Contents of Torrents
And I don't mean the .torrent file, I'm more focused on the file
containing the actual content. For a personal project I'd like to be
able to search for information stored in text/DOC format or in
compressed archives but short of scripting a down-loader to get each file
I find, pulling it apart and searching manually I don't see
any options. As far as I can tell the main search engines stop at the
.torrent file.
Anyone know of any that actually download and index the content?
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Posted: 2004/10/09 16:54 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
WS-Management, an SNMP Replacement?
I hate to jump on any bandwagon that starts at Slashdot, although even a
broken clock is right twice a day, but I find myself agreeing with a
number of the
Slashdot comments
made about the new WS-Management spec. Firstly, and most importantly,
SNMP is
still the most widely used management protocol in production. Secondly
it has survived the invention of a number of replacements, WBEM and CIM
spring to mind as standards chosen to replace a lot of the functionality it
provides; oddly enough those specs were also backed by Microsoft and
Sun.
I'd be among the first to agree that SNMP isn't a perfect solution, it has a bad security model, version 3 has never been widely adopted and it can be immensely confusing to set up and run in an enterprise due to the poor documentation and propriety OID layouts. It isn't however going to be easily replaced by an XML/SOAP protocol, even if they get SOAP over UDP working correctly.
SNMP is used in a number of small embedded devices that are limited in memory, CPU and bandwidth. Adding enough of a webservices stack to allow these machines to communicate like this is going to require a pretty serious beefing up of the hardware used in these tasks. As an aside it is quite interesting to note that Cisco, Nortel and Juniper are all absent from that spec, I find it hard to consider any replacement to SNMP that lacks their backing.
I'm all for innovation and progress but lets not try and shoehorn XML and webservices into everything; please.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 14:45 | /specifications | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
DTrace Perl bindings? Yes Please!
While looking through the blogs of both the DTrace engineers at Sun I
stumbled upon this little gem (taken from Adam Leventhal's
Weblog):
"And speaking of perl, a lot of people asked about DTrace's visibility into perl. Right now the only non-natively executed language DTrace lets you observe is Java, but now that we realize how much need there is for visibility into perl, we're going to be working aggressively on making DTrace work well with perl. We've got some neat ideas, but if there are things you'd like to see with DTrace and perl, we'd love to hear about it as we think about what sorts of problems we need to solve."
This is excellent news, being able to interact with DTrace without needing to learn Java will make a lot of System admins happy. It's also a good first step into getting other ports working as any work needed to make this work with dynamic languages (like Perl) rather than statically typed ones (like Java) will have been done by the experts and then OpenSourced with the rest of Solaris 10.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 14:11 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Web2.0 via Jeremy Zawodny -- Nearly as good as being there?
I'd never heard of the
Web 2.0 conference
(an O'Reilly event) until Jeremy Zawodny
started to blog his attendance but now I wish I'd have gone along (let us
ignore the very high attendance cost and the fact I'm in the wrong country
:).) His full
Web2.0
archive is well worth digging through if you have any interest in where the
commercial interest in the web is pointing.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 14:01 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Just Don't (4 of ?) - Install More Than the Customer Wants
Over the last few weeks I've been involved with arranging evaluations
and purchasing of a number of 'enterprise' products. Among the rogues
gallery have been IBM (OK but nothing special considering they had near
a dozen people in the room), Oracle (Actually very good) and my new
favourite, Business Objects (BO), providers of Crystal Reports.
The day started off quite nicely, the BO technical gent came in and did an install of the product we were evaluating on our test server with me watching over his shoulder. The install was hitch free and took maybe an hour. He then took me through some of the administration features (on the OS level) including the logging and auditing support.
He then went to converse with the lady who will be doing the actual report writing, during the course of the afternoon he made a number of subtle hints as to the other powerful Crystal addons we might like to spend money one. One of these caught my attention, logging and auditing, I innocently asked what this got me beyond what I'd already seen; and then I was told what I'd already seen was the optional software. Which we had no intension of buying at the start of the day but that'd been installed for us just in case.
Never install more than people ask for in an evaluation, it leads to mismanaged expectations and distrust of the vendor.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 13:45 | /justdont | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
UKUUG DTrace Talk
After their 2004 AGM UKUUG arranged for
Jon Haslam, a Software Engineer at Sun Microsystems, to give a presentation
on DTrace. While
I missed the first thirty minutes of slides I did get to see the ninety
minutes of practical demonstrations.
The official DTrace spiel, "Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is one of the hot, new technologies in the next revision of Sun's Operating System, Solaris 10. DTrace provides the ability to generate concise answers to almost arbitrary questions about the behaviour of your systems, from the top of the application through to the bottom of the kernel." sounds quite impressive. What surprised me is that it seemed to work perfectly.
Jon Haslam stood in front of the audience and wrote small four to ten line scripts, while keeping everyone amused with anecdotes, that drilled down on information such as what thread (or process) was writing to which disk blocks (which you can't do in Linux at all), what was actually causing the most interrupts (which top doesn't actually catch as it's granularity is too large) and other similar feats. For a full example of how simple the tool is to use have a look at TCP by process
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Posted: 2004/10/09 13:33 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Larry Lessig on Creative Commons
I was lucky enough to take a long lunch and amble down to see Larry
Lessig's presentation at UCL on the Creative Commons Licenses last week,
firstly it's worth noting that Mr Lessig is a very slick speaker, he
obviously invests a lot of time in his presentations and it shows. The
slides were very shiny and incorporated a lot of multimedia, video clips
ranged from a mash-up of a Charley Brown cartoon with an Outkast sound-track
(the song was Hey Ya) to Blair and Bush singing love-songs; the latter was
interesting as the whole video was created from public footage.
The multimedia fascination of the slides was something i wasn't expecting from a lawyer, I've never seen Lessig speak before except at a FOSDEM, but they served two excellent purposes. Firstly they helped break the talk up into small digestible chunks, most people don't really have the ability or desire to memorise details of licenses and copyright directives. These clips suited the audiences attention span and stopped people getting bogged down in the details.
The second more insidious tactic (IMHO) is mind-share, software isn't that interesting to most people but music and video are. The more people that are aware of alternatives to the established monopoly players the better and while the FSF are well known in the tech world they have pretty much no real influence on the unwashed masses who buy most of the DVDs and CDs. Hopefully the Creative Commons will make more progress here.
The second part of the talk, which wasn't performed by Larry Lessig, was an introduction to the UK version of the Creative Commons license. The short version is that we will soon have one, the long version can be found at the following links which I stole^Wborrowed from the newsletter that came out afterwards.
Thanks to Mark Simpkins, audio of the presentation is at:
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/I.Brown/cc/lessig-ucl.wav (80MB)
To discuss the UK licences, you can join the cc-uk mailing list:
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-uk
The UK project pages are at:
http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/uk/
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Posted: 2004/10/09 13:08 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Attending Events and Blogging from the back row
It's been pointed out to me that while I'm willing to endlessly type
about such thrilling subjects as "Incomplete Ideas -- Knoppix, UML and
CDs in books" and Apache Logging directives I'm very lax about covering
events, talks and workshops; or as it's known, things people actually care
about :)
Two good examples over the last few months have been EuroFoo and the UKUUG Linux Techcon in Leeds. I started out intending to blog at least some of the sessions at each conference but two things stopped me, the talks were too interesting and I felt rude.
Both UKUUG and EuroFoo (which I am immensely thankful to have been invited to) were full of interesting people and sessions, I don't think I spent more than five minutes on my own at either event, there was always someone interesting to chat to about what they are working on or the contents of the last session. This constant activity stopped me taking any real notes or actually typing up the little I did write down while there and once I got back I decided to catch up on that pesky sleep.
The second reason is something I've mentioned on mailing lists before, if you are going to a session to listen to someone talk then shut up until the question session and TURN THE BLOODY LAPTOP OFF. I don't want to hear you picking away at the keyboard and I really don't want to hear you getting beeps from bash tab completion. If you NEED to use the laptop, and lets be honest you don't, then either sit at the back not the front row, and turn off the speaker or sit in the main areas of the room. Politeness costs nothing.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 12:45 | /meta | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Never confuse an Asset and a Liability
I've recently re-read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I was
actually looking for a different finance book and this one fell on me so I
considered it an omen :) The book is pretty straight forward read which
gives you a peek at the perspective of a business man who is trying to
educate his son and sons friend in how to treat money.
While the book isn't exactly life changing it is a worthwhile read and contains a number of well explained nuggets, the best example and the one that stayed with me from my first reading about four years ago is the comparison between a "rich" and "poor" mans balance sheet.
While a poor man gets his money and spends it on bills, car costs, home costs etc, which the author considers to be liabilities, a rich man will try and purchase assets, things that will bring in some return these assets can then be added to a list of incomes and the extra money allows you to then purchase more assets; creating a virtuous circle.
While this may sound simple you'd be surprised to know how few people actually think about this. The other interesting part of this example is how the author defies conventional wisdom and lists a house as a liability rather than an asset. For the full story of why pick a copy of the book up, it's worth the investment of a couple of evenings reading.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 12:20 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Welcome to the Marie Celeste
I've been to every Linux World Expo at Olympia in London and each year
it gets a little bit more depressing. Earlier events have had such
marvels as a giant ice penguin (provided by SGI) that had vodka flowing
though its veins and Jon Maddog Hall pointing out how insane it is to refuse
entrance to students to a Linux focused event (watching the management
squirm was great fun) this year we had... well nothing of any real
note.
A slow stroll through the conference hall took about twenty minutes and was more than enough to take in all the sights, from Novells horde of booth girls and desperate looking sales people to the marauding Java people wearing monitors on their backs and looking very confused the day was pretty much a washout. The only highlight of the day was the .Org section which was actually quite busy considering the low visitor turnout on the 6th of October; the day I attended.
It's worth noting that this year we've had two Linux World Expos in the same place, from what I heard on the day it seems like the new owners of the show didn't want to wait until next year and pushed this one through, was it a mistake? In my mind yes but then again I've never organised a show like this so what do I know :)
After spending an hour speaking to some of the .Org stall workers who work their arses off for a couple of days as volunteers it was time to honour the second tradition of the expo and head down the pub. Here's to a better show next year.
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Posted: 2004/10/09 12:06 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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