Giant Geek Blog

Regardless if you host your own websites, or pay to have them hosted elsewhere, up-time, availability and network performance metrics are important to your visiting guests.

Here are two free services that I’ve found useful for monitoring, notification and reporting.

BTW, you can even use these to watch competitors or sites that you frequent.

In my past enterprise experience, I’ve worked a lot with IBM WebSphere MQ, as I’ve evolved to open source, I’ve found RabbitMQ to fill my messaging needs as an implementation of AMPQ. While I’ve added Ubuntu installation instructions here, server and API implementations are available for most programming languages and operating systems.


sudo wget http://www.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-signing-key-public.asc

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rabbit.list

NOTE: this file will probably be empty, just add the following line (for Ubuntu 11.04 and earlier)


deb http://www.rabbitmq.com/debian/ testing main



sudo apt-get update
sudo aptitude install rabbitmq-server


REFERENCES:

About a year ago I wrote a post regarding JSLint usage for code quality of JavaScript. There is now,for a while actually, an open-source fork of that code that allows for greater configuration.

Oddly, there are two separate sites, but I believe that they have the same content:

With the recent rapid release cycle (currently every 6 weeks) for Firefox, it’s a good idea for developers and testers to use the upcoming release versions before they are released to the general public.

For Windows users, you can download and install an appropriate version from:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/

On Ubuntu, it’s a little more difficult, but rather straight-forward:

1. Open a new Terminal window
2. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-next
3. sudo apt-get update
4. sudo apt-get install firefox

REFERENCES:

That’s all…. Happy Testing!

I’ve used a variety of means to connect to remote machines. Long ago, PCAnywhere was common place, later replaced by VNC and Windows Remote Desktop (RDP). As I’ve migrated nearly all of my work to Ubuntu, I’ve found that VNC is generally too slow, and SSH alone only gives access to my command line environment. NX over SSH allows for efficiently visual access to my entire desktop and all accessories remotely, regardless of my client system.

Setup on the server/host system only takes a few minutes, but is only available on Linux and Solaris. Installation of SSH on the host is required first.

Setup of the client is even easier, and is available for Linux, OS/X and Windows.

NOTE: A “NX Free Edition” is available for use.

REFERENCES:

Now that HTML5 support has grown, and Apple continues to resist Flash on their IOS devices, it may be advantageous to make use of the newer markup standard in your web applications.

There are currently three separate methods to convert your Flash applications:

• Google Swiffy
• Abobe Wallaby
• Smokescreen (Open Source)

Here’s another great reason to use Linux over Windows.    Ksplice Uptrack provides for runtime patching of the Linux kernel without rebooting of the machine.  This has great advantages where you need to maintain the security of a server but have limited opportunites to reboot due to SLA’s (Service Level Agreements).   Ubuntu Linux was the first supported operating system, other variants are now available too, though often for a fee.

I’ve been using an old Linksys WRT-54G (version 2.0) for years, while Linksys released a few firmware updates over the years, none of them really added any new functionality. Thankfully, they had released the source code to the open-source community and several excellent releases have been made available.

Additions such as real-time monitoring/graphing, boosting wireless transmitter power, QoS (Quality of Service) and WOL (Wake-on-LAN) have been added making the router and network much more useful and valuable.

The most prominent versions are:

• Tomato
• DD-WRT

NOTE: There are several branches on both of these, you can read more at their respective websites.

I was easily able to update from the Linksys firmware (4.21.1) to Tomato 1.25 in only a few minutes, it was even capable of saving my existing configuration making the transition that much easier!

Happy Networking

Through the years, I’ve had to develop, maintain and support software on a variety of systems. Unfortunately, it’s often impossible to maintain specific software versions or configurations installed on physical machines. In the realm of web development, this becomes increasingly complex because of the rapid release of multiple browser versions.

To aid in testing, I’ve found that it’s often best to run these configurations in Virtual Machines, I’ve used VirtualPC and VMWare in the past, but have recently become a fan of Sun’s OpenSource release of VirtualBox as it runs on a wide variety of host systems and supports most x86 based operating systems as clients.

Cheers

While it was not technically a personal computer, the Atari 2600 was one of the first pieces of technology that I had experience with in my youth. I’ll likely outline the progression of machines/operating systems in a future post.

I’ve heard about Stella for quite a while, but never had any time to fiddle with it. Recently I found that Ubuntu includes an installer for it and took a chance look. Other versions are available for MacOS and Windows.

I also found a few websites that contain ROM images for the emulator and was playing some of my old games in a matter of minutes.

For those legal types out there… I actually do own the games that I played, in fact, they are currently boxed up in my basement.

References:

• http://stella.sourceforge.net/
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/stella/
• http://www.atariage.com/

Happy Retro Gaming!!!