Blog

This is the story of Helmer. A linux cluster in a IKEA Helmer cabinet.

I’ve written about my woes finding some good test data sets for PowerTime before…some good news. There is a place you can get hold of climate data for free over at European Climate Assessment & Dataset project. Whilst the temperature data is averaged, the precipitation data is not…so that’s what I’m going to use for my tests. The Berlin data set goes all the way back to 1876 with only quite minor disruption during World War 2.

Brian Boyko over at Network Performance Daily mentioned in passing that Network Instruments now have a blog. Well worth a read… oh, and Network Performance Daily is well worth a read too!

Almost as a doodle I thought I’d create a graph depicting the dependencies between a selection of open source network management projects. Once I’d done it, it occurred to me how much just about everything depends on just a couple of projects or project variants of, RRDTool & Net-SNMP. The main conclusion I draw from the above graph is that if you wish to create a thriving platform for open source network management, you’d better have something like those two hub projects.

A couple of months ago or so I lamented the fact that the raw temperature data from the UK met office is not publicly available. I’ve just received some further feedback from the Met Office. I was partially wrong, there is a lot more information available than I thought. Here’s a quote with a list of resources: There is a wide variety of historical information that is available on our website and information can also be obtained from our National Meteorological Library and Archive see http://www.

Whilst developing PowerTime, I’ve kept in mind the requirement that I need to ensure that the software can be built using only freely available tools. Of course we will eventually provide an installer, but I like the idea that people can build the software on their own machine if they want to. One way to make self building easier is to minimise the number of external dependencies required. To that end, everything is written in C# and only standard .

…it’s not AI. Funny. 😄 Just ran across a great paper written by Eve Phillips documenting a history of artificial intelligence. Well worth a read. The title made me smile because my first job in IT, all the way back to 1989, was writing an expert system and it most certainly did not work. The above paper reference came from Dan Weinreb’s post Why Did Symbolics Fail? If you ever want to start a company, you can learn a lot from reading war stories like the ones herein.

I complained in my recent Microsoft mypopia post that Microsoft had failed to support the main unit testing framework inside Visual Studio. Happily, I’ve found a solution in the form of a Visual Studio add-in called TestDriven.NET. Now I can execute and debug my NUnit tests all from inside Visual Studio. 😄 Just need a bit of wallet surgery first. 😉

John Willis over at IT Management and Cloud Blog posted an interesting post I’d like to reply to. The key question is will Enterprise customers make an investment in companies like OpenNMS and Nagios with out the warm and fuzzy that Software Companies provide. That’s certainly an interesting perspective John… It isn’t that Nagios/OpenNMS aren’t hitting enterprise customers. It is the nature of the sale that is different. Nagios/OpenNMS is more of a bottom up kinda sell.

I passed the marker buoy on the journey to middle age last week. At least according to the Collins Dictionary anyway. Of course, according to the Oxford English Dictionary definition, I’ve got a further five years to go. 😄 To celebrate I treat my family (all twelve of them) to a play at the Theatre Royal in York to see Twinkle, Little Star. The protagonist plays a pantomime dame, for whom life hasn’t been altogether kind, playing his last ever season.