I’ve been setting up a Puppet system at work so we can easily set up virtual servers, and also so that all the configuration is in one place. Yesterday, someone suggested to me how I can have our existing Nagios system monitor the state of the puppet configuration. This allows me to be notified if… Read More »
The opportunity has come up for me to escape Dunedin, and go a long way away for an indefinite time. So, I’m jumping on the idea, and planning on moving to the Netherlands, Deventer specifically, to work for Topicus. I’ll have a 6-month contract with them to start with, that is evaluated after 3 months… Read More »
Here’s something a bit more computer-sciencey than usual. For something at work, I have had to implement a function parser, so you can type ‘1+2*b‘ and it’ll work it all out, with correct operator precedence and so forth. To do this, I use a three-step process: Tokenise the input, and at the same time convert… Read More »
I currently am doing some spare-time work for Naxos (the music label), customising my Java-based, open-source eMusic.com downloader, eMusic/J, to work with their Classicsonline download service. This means taking what was a Linux-only application and making it work on Windows and Mac OS X also. Getting the Linux version was obviously easy, I’d already done… Read More »
I recently saw mention that Google had released Guice, their internal dependency injection framework. As an experiment, I ported a few parts of the web application I’m working on for work to use it. I’ve never used dependency injection before, and so it was a chance to learn about it too. The executive summary is… Read More »
For work stuff, I’ve been needing to set up a script to convert videos from whatever form they come in as to SWF (or, really, FLV embedded in SWF). The best thing for this that I found was FFmpeg. It does just about anything. One thing it doesn’t seem to do however is produce SWF… Read More »
Recently I’ve been using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for writing a web-based application (nothing I can talk about just yet 🙂 ). It’s a very nice way of building an AJAX-type web app in pure Java. You write the client-side code in much the same way as you would a typical Java GUI application,… Read More »
I heard back a few days after the phone interview that I didn’t get the Google job. Pity, but not too surprising really. I suspect that it was because I lacked the knowledge/experience related with the systems reliability side of things. So for now, things are just going on the way they have. Soon, I’ll… Read More »
At Linux.conf.au, which I’ve efficiently failed to finish writing about, Google had a beer bash. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I went because – well, free drink! However, at one point I was sitting talking to some people, and one of the recruiters came by with a list for me… Read More »