Laen Aggregated

The JEP is nearing completion.

JEP-0072

The cheapest camera I’ve seen that can pull location information from a GPS runs $7000+. For the rest of us, there’s now GPSPhotoLinker

You give it a GPS track file, and a bunch of images, and it pulls the dates from both to determine where you were when a specific picture was taken, then encodes that in the image. Hott.

So… What GPS should I buy?

Okay, I’ve got four main projects going on right now.

1. UMLazi – It’s almost time for another release. Wahoo!
2. UMLFaq – This is going nowhere fast. I want this to be a compendium of UML knowledge, but thus far I’ve only posted a single entry. It takes a lot of energy to write FAQs.
3. UMLForge – I don’t know what to do with this. I pictured it as a place where people could just request a UML. The problem with that is that they could be used for evil, and that I would rapidly run out of processor and memory for new UMLs. The answer to this might be to set up a timesharing system. Request a UML, and it’ll create one and stick your Public Key on it. You get it for an hour. After that, it suspends to disk, and you have to request more time. That could be fun. I don’t know how useful it would be. Hey, what if this was a UMLForge system, where anyone could set up one of their machines as a UMLForge Node, and contribute UMLs to the common good? Hmm.. Again with the usefulness test: What good is a temporary UML? What problem does this solve?
   
4. The Jabber Monitoring and Management System – Sysadmins write tons of custom scripts and processes in order to automate their jobs, but the monitoring around those scripts and processes is almost always either nonexistent or sub-par. We need a better way to discover problems, notify the appropriate personnel, and automatically fix when possible.
   

November 1st, I start working for Nike in Beaverton, OR. I have very little idea of what I’ll be doing (outside of normal sysadmin stuff), but I do know that every time I’m paged out of bed, I’ll be getting paid for it. Yay contracting.

This marks the beginning of my return to Portland, which means, in no particular order:
* Selling the house in Tampa.
* Figuring out the bus system between home and work
* Making a good impression on my coworkers
* Distilling my possessions down to the absolute minimum, and shipping those to Portland.
* Finding a place to live in Portland.
* Re-examining my investment goals to take into account my new income.

I had a wisdom tooth removed Tuesday, and dang did that suck. Not so much the procedure, but the recovery. It wasn’t as bad as it might’ve been (pain was tolerable without Vicodin in just 8 hours), but I still have this oozing open wound in my mouth that I don’t know what to do with. I don’t dare chew with that side of my mouth. I don’t know how long I’m supposed to go easy on it. They say the stitches will dissolve in 9-14 days, and I’ll be fully recovered in 6-9 weeks. I guess I just have to be careful for a while!

Oh, the procedure for a tooth extraction (when the tooth is already all the way in) goes something like this:
* X-Ray
* Lidocaine
* Novocaine
* More novocaine
* Blindfold
* A rubber block in your mouth, to keep you from biting the dentist.
* A bunch of yanking
* Stitches
* About an hour of numbness, after which you damn well better have some vicodin in your system.

This was taken from a seaplane from Vancouver Airport to Sechelt, BC. The water is as blue as I’ve ever seen it in the Pacific Northwest, mostly because it’s reflecting the sky, I think.

Birefreingence

Refraction

Polarization

Gallery
This week I switched my gallery from Menalto Gallery to Coppermine. I still have a bit to learn about it, and some more rearranging to do (now that I have more options in rearranging), but wow. It looks great, the theming is awesome, and so many features! Check it out!

Portland
A couple of weeks ago, I took a covert trip to Portland, OR, my home town, where I met up with a bunch of old friends (who I keep in daily contact with through a chat server). Only 195 pictures to show for two weeks up there, and most of them were taken by a friend (heck the BEST ones were taken by my friend. :) Of all the pictures taken with my camera while I was up there, the ones by David are the best, since they have, well, actual people in them. I’m pretty shy when it comes to photographing people.

While bussing around, we encountered this nutria.

Rats
Also, over the weekend, I scored two new pet rats from Bella, in Orlando. She breeds the best rodents. Always well mannered, extremely friendly, and amazingly long-lived (for rats). Below is “Sumi-e”, a dumbo-eared black self rat, being kissed by Bella’s granddaughter Isabella. We also got a berkshire fawn we’ve named Ponzu. Pictures of him later.

Two new programs worth watching:

Arrested Development – Filmed like a documentary, it follows an upper class family’s descent into chaos as their patriarch and family company CEO is arrested for cooking the books.

Venture Brothers – An Adult Swim ‘toon from the creator of The Tick. It satirizes Johnny Quest.

I’ve set up a Coppermine photo album at Photo Zefyr and seeded it with the stuff from my old Menalto Gallery. So far, I like Coppermine a lot better. The multiple user thing is especially cool, though I won’t be using it here.

Sensing a theme? [Quicktime]

Jabber Documents:
* Email is too hard. Let’s junk it.
* Let’s get rid of electronic mail, once and for all
* P2P smuggled in under cover of darkness
* Publish-Subscribe Framework for Jabber
* RPC over Jabber

Jabber Server Bits:
* Jabber::mod_perl – Mess with jabberd internals using perl
* ejabberd – A clusterable Jabber server written in erlang
* Jabber::RPC::HTTPgate – An HTTP/Jabber Gateway
* Jabber Notification Plugin for Nagios

Symbian OS Jabber Clients:
* IM+
* TipicME
* AgileMessenger

My next generation system:
* Debian/Sarge
* Packages pulled from a private debian repository
* Configuration managed with cfengine and templates
* Local Monitoring over Jabber
* Self-Healing
* Convergent

You can add <x> elements to presence stanzas!
Ths means you can have the <show> and <status> tags human readable, and pass machine parsable information around via additional <x> stanzas. We could definitely use Presence for system montitoring.

POE XMPP code:
http://www.jabberstudio.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/pcj/POE-Component-Jabber/examples/XMPPTester.pl?view=markup

POE::Lego, put a small POE::Lego stub at the edge, with enough logic to pull down the modules from a server bot. edit all modules centrally. pubsub would be hott.

1. Agent connects
2. Agents disco’s a “lego-server”
3. Agent pubsubs to lego-server.. (something to catch future published updates).. Disconnected operation though…
4. Cache it locally
5. and then pubsub for updates
6. which redo an eval

Jabber Does Crypto
An article at FinancialCryptography.com discusses Jabber/OpenPGP integration, with a pointer to JEP-0027: Current Jabber OpenPGP Usage. Totally hot.

Here are the four challenges I see to writing this Jabber Monitoring System…

First: disconnected operation. What happens to messages if my clients aren’t able to contact the server?
Second: message formatting. How do I format these messages so they’ll be machine readable on the other side?

Third: guaranteed order. I want messages to be processed in a certain order.

Fourth: Receiving and processing the messages. How do we route the messages to the correct place? How do we write programs to deal with the incoming messages?

For monitoring, what do you think of Machines publishing a list of current statuses, and the monitoring server subscribing to those publications?

One TCP connection per agent. Interface to allow shell scripts to use it.

It would be nice to make this an extendable perl package that can reload itself dynamically (ala geektalk). We could then add system checks dynamically. ..Which we could push over Jabber!

Machines advertise their state via “Presence”. A PHP Jabber page can query all that presence and tell us how they are.

now, regarding XML-RPC messages… I think they should age out
Use Disco
Design Goal: Must be able to do 10K on off the shelf hardware.
Design Goal: Must not be heavy on the host agent.

Netmon: Have the MonitorBot write to the status database directly.

AdminBot: Converts natural language commands into JabberBot::RPC calls, also converts Agent responses into human readable text.

the would then subscribe to pubsub published sources, each agent would be the owner of it’s own pubsub published source.

• The Agent would disco announce itself as an “alertpublisher”.
• Alertbots would then disco search for all alertpublishers.
• they would then subscribe to pubsub published sources, each agent would be the owner of it’s own pubsub published source.
• in this way, the central alertbot would be aggressively discovering and subscribing, the agent would merely be announcing it’s disco and registering its published source with pubsub
• ..And when it actually had something to say, it would be publishing a single message, and the server would be responsible for disseminating it..
• ,..And the multiple alertbots could each subscribe to All or a Subset of agents.
• so a collection of pubsub and disco with the agent as the publisher

Intermezzo – Can this really give me an intermediary between local filesystems and NFS?
CXFS - SGI’s clustering filesystem. SAN only?
Clustered Filesystems in General – What’s available? What’s free, what’s commercial? What are the limitations?
GFS - With shared fibrechannel storage
DRBD - Network mirroring
Dnotify – Kernel feature that allows FAM (File alteration Monitor) to work.

http://www.lambda-computing.com/projects/dnotify/
fake: provides IP-address takeover

Okay, so the idea is that Jabber could be used as a platform for all sorts of distributed system management functions, first and foremost, local machine monitoring, and statistics delivery.

Use Presence to determine if a system is up?
Notification of config changes.

When monitoring systems, create a spamassassin like scoring system to classify badness.

http://punjab.jabberstudio.org/ – Jabber over HTTP gateway

Send logs over Jabber. Watch logs and send interesting events over Jabber?

Have a jabberbot attach use DNotify to warn a central source of changes.

Backups:
Success/Failure report
Size of backup report