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I’m a sucker for engineering in the trenches stories … some good ones I found today: here, here and here. There aren’t enough of them documented. If you’ve got any I’m all ears. Engineers and engineering should be celebrated not just be the whipping boys for the sales and marketing folks.

I read Bryce Harrington’s The paradox of FOSS projects supporting Windows with some interest. If you’re a Linux enthusiast it should scare you. Bryce makes the very good point that the ratio between contributors and users on Linux is substantially higher than for Windows users. The contributor ratio is crucial to the success of an open source project. If the ratio is too low, then users will have difficulty getting support and fixes.

The folks over at TweetVOLUME have produced a tool for counting the mentions of words or phrases on the Twitter micro-blogging platform. I thought that it would be an interesting, though not especially significant, metric for comparing open source projects. The graph above shows the number of twits in which Zenoss, Nagios, Hyperic, OpenNMS or MRTG were mentioned according to the TweetVolume algorithm. The graph once again shows that Nagios is ahead of everybody.

Many moons ago, around about 1989 or so, my brother-in-law asked me to solve a problem for him. He was the secretary responsible for assigning referees to football matches in a local football league. He was having considerable trouble with it. It was taking him ages to do the task manually because, whilst it sounds easy, it is rather complicated because there are a number of subtle constraints that must be taken into account.

If you just can’t get enough of The Tech Teapot and feel that your day isn’t complete without some more of my ravings you’ll be pleased to know that I also nano blog over at Twitter. You can follow me here: http://twitter.com/techteapot. Enjoy! If you would like to join the fun, please subscribe.

How can a network & systems management Value Added Reseller (VAR) benefit from offering open source solutions and what are the potential problems? Any VAR not offering genuine added value is going to be left out in the cold. A “SKU” VAR, a company that expects to take orders with the minimum of fuss, are going to have a problem. But then, that’s the way commercial software like What’s Up Gold and Solar Winds Orion is going anyway.

Every time I look back on my first job I realise just how odd it was. First off my job interview was in a pub. I was met by a couple of engineers and one of their wives. It did seem a bit strange having a job interview in the middle of a pub but hey, it was my first so I just figured out that that was normal. The pub interview wasn’t an aberration.

Sometimes you fall over a product and it blows you away. Network taps have until now been exotic hardware affordable only by large IT departments with the budget to match. Not any more! nmon have brought out a range of low cost network taps and network traffic analysers with NetFlow support. Looks like network taps just got affordable to the masses. Why should you be interested? They’re just enterprise doodahs aren’t they?

Many moons ago in the late 1980s, right at the start of my interest in computers, I bought a book about computer languages. The book titled Computer Languages: A Guide for the Perplexed by Naomi S Baron inspired me to get into programming and eventually led me to program professionally (in the sense that somebody paid me 😄 .) What is interesting, 22 years on, is what has changed and perhaps just as interesting, what hasn’t changed.

Recently I’ve been musing about the computer languages that will take us into the twenty first century. One candidate I’ve been watching for a few years is Mozart/Oz. Mozart/Oz is a dynamic object oriented language… stop yawning at the back there… and what separates it from the rest of the pack is the built in constraint based and logic programming. It is built from the ground up to support massive concurrency inside a computer as well as between computers.