Blog

Congrats to Hyperic for the purchase by SpringSource. If you’d bet me which of the new wave were going to be bought first I would have bet on Hyperic every time. What is most gratifying about the purchase is that it is an open source company doing the buying. Whilst I think it unlikely, one of the concerns many people have about the new wave is: what happens if they get swallowed up by some proprietary software company with absolutely no clue about open source.

One of the nice side effects of our new content management system is that you can leave comments on our articles. We received one rather intriguing comment this week effectively accusing us of plagiarising an article. That came as a bit of a surprise given that I know Denis wrote the article in question several years ago. Things are complicated slightly because the article is hosted by an article submission site.

Rich Skrenta has done a post about the Blekko cluster health visualisation console. Very neat!

One of the more annoying things about using the new, all singing, all dancing web interface on Apple’s MobileMe email service is the hijacking of my much used Firefox shortcut ^N (create a new browser window.) When using a browser, I expect ^N to create me a new browser window, which it duly does most of the time. When inside the MobileMe email web application, ^N creates a new email message window.

Everybody knows that one of the biggest consumers of electricity in data centre is the air conditioning system. There are two main avenues for reducing the cost of air conditioning, either make the air conditioning system more efficient so that it consumes less electricity, or remove the requirement to use so much air conditioning in the first place by running your data centre hotter. It looks like running the data centre hotter is gaining some ground.

I blogged about choosing a content management system and we’ve finally managed to deploy the resulting system. It would be fair to say that choosing a content management system is a nightmare. And, anybody else’s experience probably won’t help you very much unless you share the same set of requirements. Our requirement was largely shaped by the e-commerce system we run on our main website. It is a big blob of a Java system running under JBoss all front ended by Apache.

My posting activity has been a little light of late… and there is a very good reason for that, I’ve been busy writing some software. Writing software is kinda like the powerful spell in Rincewind’s mind in Terry Pratchett’s book The Colour of Magic, it will prevent everything else from occupying your brain. Anyway, the software in question is PowerTime. It is now nearing completion and should be available as a first beta real soon.

… now all of you OpenNMS fans and people who’d like to know more about how OpenNMS can help you manage your network for less, have the opportunity to meet lots of influential OpenNMS people, without the need to hop onto a plane to the good ol’ U.S. of A. The first ever OpenNMS user conference will be held in Frankfurt, Germany on the 14th March 2009. Cost will be around 200 euros.

… at least the public release anyway. I expect if you work somewhere interesting, then it may be worthwhile contacting them in the meantime. RiverMuse are aiming their offerings solidly at Tivoli, Micromuse and OpenView event correlation users. RiverMuse are going to be using an open cor**e strategy, so far blazed by Zenoss and Hyperic, in the network management space. The open core product is RiverMuse FreeCool and the feature added, for sale product, will be RiverMuse ProCool.

As suggested by Jane Curry in her comment on the Open source network management buzz comparison 2008 post I’ve compared Tivoli related keywords and selected open source projects. Tivoli covers a lot of ground so comparing it on its own doesn’t really tell you very much. Tivoli vs Open Source Network Management Systems Both Tivoli Monitoring and NetView have been pretty consistent throughout 2008 unlike OpenView which fell substantially. It is odd that Tivoli Monitoring fell off a cliff in December.