I have a confession to make: I’ve developed a failed open source project! There I’ve said it, it’s now public knowledge and I can hang my head in shame… lead me to the village stocks so you can all throw rotting vegetables at me. Happily, I don’t feel like that. Failure is, well, no big deal. Of course it does sting a little bit that I wasted an awful lot of time developing the software.

Wireless networks, as we all know, are everywhere today. All the way back in 2004 Denis did a wardriving exercise to check how widespread the use of encryption and other security measures were in wireless networks deployed in and around Leeds. The arrival of the new JDSU ValidatorPRO-NT NT1155, which includes a wireless detection module (including 802.11n networks), gave me the opportunity to repeat the exercise and see how the situation has changed over the intervening period.

I did a comparison of the buzz for the leading open source network management tools in 2008 so I thought it would be interesting to do the same comparison for 2009 and see what’s changed. As I did last year, I’ve compared the number of searches for the project name using Google Trends. As always, this post is not intended to be indicative of the usefulness of a particular tool to your requirements.

The Tech Teapot is three years old today. Well, if you want to be pedantic, it was three years old last Thursday but I forgot all about it! A selection of my favourite posts from the last year: Open source network management buzz comparison 2008 Tivoli vs open source network management buzz 2008 Open source network management activity comparison It has been a thin blogging year, mainly because my time has been squeezed by a combination of my regular work and TimeTag.

The German magazine Network Computing has done a comparison of four well known network monitoring packages: PRTG 7.2, What’s Up Gold 14, Solarwinds Orion Network Performance Manager 9.5 and ManageEngine OpManager 8. From all these points of view we can only advise those who are looking for a good >monitoring product to write PRTG Network Monitor right at the top of the list of products >to look at. For Network Computing this product is, as previously, still the reference

Why is software becoming so political? Sometimes it feels like the tech industry is being infiltrated by a “software taliban” determined to root out all non-believers in the one true path. A great example of the talibanisation of software is the reaction of parts of the open source community towards the Mono project. Why does Mono get the goat of the software taliban? Well, Mono is an open source implementation of a standard originally developed by the great satan Microsoft.

Great news for gadget fans in Europe. Bug Labs have announced the availability of their amazing gadget making kit in Europe with all of the appropriate approvals like RoHS and CE. In addition Bug Labs have announced the availability of a WiFi and Bluetooth base module called BUGbase WiFi. All you need is a Windows, Linux or Mac PC with the DragonFly SDK installed and buy a Bugbase module, which can now have WiFi and Bluetooth on board, and then choose the add-on modules you need like BUGbee, BUGsound, BUGvonHippel, BUGview, BUGlocate and BUGmotion.

One of the things I’ve found very interesting about being involved in open source, and indeed business for that matter, is customer expectations. Just because you give something away does not mean that you or your offering will be judged more kindly as a consequence. It does not mean that there will be a lower expectation of your support either. Take this exchange on the Hyperic support forum. HyperMike plainly has an expectation that Hyperic offer technical support via their forum for free.

As we’ve just delivered a big lump of functionality onto our website using Drupal, in fact everything is now managed through Drupal except this blog, I thought that you might appreciate a heads up on the books we used during the development process. Getting hold of the right books early in your project will make things a lot easier. Whenever I’m taking on a new programming language or some other technology it always seems to take three books to really get a good handle on it.