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bug labs has come out of stealth mode at last. If you’ve got a gadget in you screaming to get out then I’ve got good news. 😄 What is the BUG? The basic concept behind Bug is that you have a basic gadget chassis called BUGbase which you program. You can then plug into the chassis a number of add on modules called BUGmodules like GPS, touch sensitive LCD, accelerometer motion detector & digital camera.

One of the great things about sourceforge, apart from the cool services they provide free to open source projects, is that they provide statistics about the projects they host. One of the stats that sourceforge provides is a history of project downloads. You can’t compare the stats though. So I thought it would be interesting to compare the downloads for the major open source network management projects. The volume of downloads is indicative, like search trends, of the relative mind share for each project.

Googlebot has swallowed 47,846 pages in eight hours. Eek! The server’s getting a good thrashing this morning. Maybe it’s time to get that dual processor 4 core server our ISP offered us a month or two ago. 😄

Thanks to Robert @ Intellipool for alerting me to this one. Intellipool, as many of you may already know, is an excellent web based network monitor. One of the problems it has had, and its competitors for that matter, is the difficulty of informing off site duty IT personnel when things really go wrong. Many people rely on email for alerting purposes. And that works fine whilst people are on site because email server or network failure will be noticed pretty fast or your SMS alerting will work okay.

Update 2nd December 2008: The Popularity Contest Widget has now moved to the wordpress.org site. All updates will now appear on the new site. Popularity Contest is a great Wordpress plugin for displaying your most popular blog posts. It powers the Teapot Highlights over on the right hand side of this post. 😄 One thing missing from Popularity Contest is a widget. We created one for this blog, so we thought we may as well share it for everybody else to use too.

I was talking to an old time programmer a while ago and he reminisced about a colleague who used to comment his code using Ancient Greek. So next time you’re tempted to criticise one of your colleagues for their poor quality code commenting, just pause and think that it could be a lot worse. Instead of scratching your head trying to figure out what the English means you could be reaching for your Ancient Greek dictionary instead.

OpenNMS is one of the original enterprise grade open source network management tools. For the Windows based admin, it has had one huge problem: it only runs on Unix based systems. Not any more! After a week of prototyping, the development team now has a prototype running on Windows. Expect to see a full release on Windows in the near future. Just goes to show, if you choose your development tools carefully you get a whole load of stuff (nearly) for free.

Apologies for the lack of posts since last Friday. I managed to get a few days away in Robin Hood’s Bay just north of Scarborough. The weather was perfect, the hotel cosy as usual and the company good too! Well, I’ve got to say that as the party consisted of both of my parents, two sisters, 3 nephews and a niece. Normal service will now be resumed. 😄 Whilst I’ve been away Dean has made over the blog…again.

Hat tip to Dougal Campbell over at Geek Ramblings for finding this. Just occasionally you come across a tool that really blows you away… that tool is glTail.rb! Getting an instant idea for how your web server is performing can be a difficult task. One way to do that is to use a command like: tail -f <log file> The main problem with this is that the output is darn hard to make any sense out of.

Hat tip to the Elastic Path folks for finding this one. If you want a simple introduction to all of the new social media buzz flying around at the moment, I strongly recommend you check out these short tutorial videos by Lee Lefever at Common Craft. A lot of you may already be familiar with social media. If you’re not, then I recommend you check out the videos. Social bookmarking & RSS are great time savers, especially when you work on more than one computer.