It’s coming up on 5 years that I’ve been posting a picture to gurucollege (almost) every day. 5 years. Today, I’m announcing that I’ve copied everything over from the main blog to the photoblog, barring posts with multiple pictures in them. Once everything is moved, I will delete the content from this blog. This will remove a huge chunk of my archives here, but it puts everything into one interface, which is so much easier from a long term management standpoint. (And yes, I will keep backups, in case I miss something.)

UPDATE: I’ve fixed the plugin download link

UPDATE #2: Updated the plugin to work correctly for “Admin control panel / API”

I’ve written a Nagios check plugin for the Google App Status Dashboard. It’s written in perl, and has two dependancies: the JSON perl module (I’m calling JSON::PP, the pure-perl version), as well as a copy of the open source application curl to pull the JSON data file from Google’s servers. Curl needs to be in your default path – which it is on OSX, RedHat, Ubuntu and OpenSolaris – which are the distributions I care about these days.

If you run the check command with no arguments, it returns an UNKNOWN state. Using the -s "App Name" argument, you can specify what you want to check. If you don’t supply data with the -s flag, or misspell the name of the App, you instead get a list of available applications back – queried live from the JSON feed. This way, as more Apps are added, it’s easy to get the status of them. (Note that all of the app names have spaces in them, so you will need to use quotes around the name.)

``UPDATE: I’ve fixed the plugin download link

UPDATE #2: Updated the plugin to work correctly for “Admin control panel / API”

I’ve written a Nagios check plugin for the Google App Status Dashboard. It’s written in perl, and has two dependancies: the JSON perl module (I’m calling JSON::PP, the pure-perl version), as well as a copy of the open source application curl to pull the JSON data file from Google’s servers. Curl needs to be in your default path – which it is on OSX, RedHat, Ubuntu and OpenSolaris – which are the distributions I care about these days.

If you run the check command with no arguments, it returns an UNKNOWN state. Using the -s "App Name" argument, you can specify what you want to check. If you don’t supply data with the -s flag, or misspell the name of the App, you instead get a list of available applications back – queried live from the JSON feed. This way, as more Apps are added, it’s easy to get the status of them. (Note that all of the app names have spaces in them, so you will need to use quotes around the name.)

``

The perfdata returned is the number of messages for a service that aren’t resolved. This means that each follow up message about a service issue increases the count. Once the serivce issue is cleared, the count drops back to 0, and the service returns “OK” again. The check only ever returns UNKNOWN, OK, and WARNING states. A later version will distinguish between a service disruption and a service outage, but this was all I needed at the moment.

Download check_google_apps.pl

Just two weeks shy of his first birthday, Qais learned how to use The Force.

It’s probably apparent that I’m posting to this blog a lot less frequently, and I wanted to address this with some meta-blogging. I’ve been writing a lot more for Shufflegazine, and most of my free/creative writing energy goes there. Additionally, most of my technology opinion pieces are also being directed there. So, I’ll be posting here, but not as much, and on a narrower set of topics. Most of it will be home networking and photography related, but there will be an occasional personal post (family, politics, etc) that doesn’t fit into any of the above categories.

I’m also working on moving the photoblog archives from this blog to the Gurucollege Photo blog, and slowly cleaning up the categories here.

Great news – Apple didn’t kill Aperture. Looking over the feature list, this is a must-have upgrade. Flickr and Facebook integration, face-detection (a-la iPhoto 09), and a bevy of new image editing tools, including brushes and better curves adjustments. What’s not to like?

And it’s a $99 upgrade. I’m sold.

I need a softbox and a proper light stand that can support it. I actually need two light stands – using my regular tripod for my umbrella works, but it’s a little unwieldy and hard to adjust quickly. A softbox would also provide much better light than this:

Although off camera flash is far superior to built in flash…

I was downloading the newest release of Ubuntu Server for a personal project I’m working on. After 15 minutes, I had the first 35 MB of the file. I guess the Ubuntu distribution servers were under load or they operate under a 35k/s cap – either way, it was slow going. I fired up a BitTorrent client, and within 60 seconds, 40 MB had downloaded. 10 minutes later, %65 of the file was downloaded. There is something undeniable about how magical BitTorrent is for pulling large, popular files down quickly.

Which is why the inevitable ban on the BitTorrent protocol isn’t going to be fun. Obama and the Democrats can say they are all for network neutrality, but they get large campaign contributions from Hollywood, and have staffed the FCC with Hollywood lawyers and lobbyists. These are men who think Technology is teh debil, and have tried to block things like the VCR for fear of their business model. They have already filed court briefs supporting massive fines for people caught sharing music. Even worse, an apparent loophole in the network neutrality framework has been found, which would allow Comcast (or any ISP) to perform “reasonable network management” intended to “prevent the unlawful transfer of content.” That combined with the recent finding that %99 of torrented files are not shared with the rightsholder’s permission, and that BitTorrent opens a lot of network connections to do it’s magic, means that the FCC will likely turn a blind eye when BitTorrent is made to disappear from US networks.