Another push I’ve been working on for a few years now is comprehensive monitoring of our systems. When I started at my job, monitoring was being done through a home-grown script, that would run once an hour. While not particularly bad, it had some major shortcomings. Primarily, the hour lag time meant that, if a problem occurred shortly after the script ran, you wouldn’t know about it for nearly an hour. Another problem was that, while the script would make note of system problems, the only notification mechanism was “someone needs to visit the web page it generates”. During a normal workday, that might be OK, but evenings and weekends? So, at least for my benefit, I set up a monitoring system that could not only monitor systems more frequently, but monitor more systems, and send out alerts via email, cell phones, etc.

For reasons I won’t get into here, what I chose to use for configuration management was Puppet, and I’d already chosen Nagios as my monitoring system. So far, my biggest problem with Nagios has been finding the time to add new systems to it, figuring out what services to check, etc. It’s not a particularly difficult thing to do, but in the grand scheme of things, it was just something that always fell by the wayside in the drive to get more systems set up, deal with user problems, and put out the inevitable fires. That is, until recently.

My original Nagios install was done on an aging box that has been serving as a development web server for our group. I did the install shortly after I’d started, so had I been around longer, I might have either waited, put in a request for new hardware, or found a way to get virtualization into our environment sooner. Overall, it worked, but it was in general a pain dealing with the box, a RHEL3 server, since it was so far out of date. Recently, I’ve set up a VM on our XenServer cluster to be our new Nagios box. Since I’ve also been playing with Puppet, I wanted to automate things as much as possible, since every new system created should be managed by Puppet (though reality slightly differs from that).

Fortunately, the groundwork for automating Nagios monitoring with Puppet is already built in to Puppet. It took me a little bit to wrap my head around the concepts, but the example helped and served as a base.

Now, even though I’m still in the process of setting things up, I’ve gotten to the point where my new Nagios server is already monitoring about 30% more information about hosts (422 services vs 308 on the old server), even though the number of hosts is currently about half (48 hosts vs 99 on the old). All of it done automatically, and here’s how.

First, set up stored configurations on your puppetmaster. You’ll need to specify a database in which to store your puppet-collected facts and resources. While the default is SQLite, I ran into problems with concurrent access. Since I’m also currently responsible for the handful of MySQL servers we have, I decided to just use one of those. Create a database and user for puppet to use, then tell the puppetmaster about it. Your [puppetmasterd] section of puppet.conf should look something like this when you’re done:

Your paths may likely be different than mine. If your DB server is running on the same host as the puppetmasterd process, dbserver should be “localhost”, and you’d uncomment and adjust the path of the dbsocket line. The downcasefacts line is set to “true” so that I can make use of the $operatingsystem fact later on without having to muck with changing the case later.

Next, you’ll want to create a nagios module in Puppet. The Exported Resource example linked above served as my template, but I’ve made a few changes to it. My puppet/modules/nagios/manifests/init.pp file currently looks like this:

To use it, I simply do an include nagios in the node definition for my Nagios server in puppet, and in my basenode node definition, I’ve done an include nagios::target. Each of the @@ lines will collect information for each machine managed by puppet that inherits from basenode. The “collect resources and populate /etc/nagios/nagios_*.cfg” portion is the real magic, however. Each of those lines will cause puppet to collect all the matching resources, and output them to files in /etc/nagios. The only real caveat, which I also noticed in the example I built upon, is that I’m having trouble convincing puppet to reload nagios when the files are updated, which I just brute-force solved with a periodic cronjob to run nagios’ init script with “reload”.

I’m also slowly adding nagios entries for each service that puppet manages in some form. Currently, that means things like apache and ssh. For example, in my apache2 module’s init.pp, I have the following in my class:

This both monitors over-the-wire connections to port 80 on webservers, via the check-http command, but also monitors the number of httpd processes running on each host, via remote-nrpe-httpd-procs.

Similarly, for ssh, I have:

to monitor whether sshd is accepting connections on my systems.

And that, basically, is how I’m automatically monitoring all puppet-managed hosts in my environment. Whenever I set up a new host, I activate puppet on the host to ensure configurations I care about are synced to my master templates, and now as a bonus, puppet automatically tells nagios to start monitoring the services it knows about on the host. By expending a little extra effort once now, I’ve managed to be lazy later on multiple times over, truly something a Systems Administrator should be doing!

Fish keeping. With live plants. In a 150 gallon aquarium.

I first got into the hobby several years ago, when Cathy brought home a small aquarium and fish she’d been keeping at work. It soon grew from that first 5 gallons to a 10 gallon tank, then a 29 gallon one, then the 10 *and* 29, then finally 2 29 gallon tanks.

Somewhere along the way, fairly early on, I decided that we needed something other than the plastic plants we were using. So we started replacing all the plastic with live plants. At that point, we started replacing the tiny under powered single-tube lighting with more and more fluorescent lights, until the 29s were maxed out at 4 24″ (well, really 20″, if I remember correctly) tubes.

This provided at least a minimum amount of light to allow plants to grow, and some to even flourish. The addition of more fish, aquatic fertilizers, carbon dioxide (both in liquid additive and yeast fermentation forms), etc just made the addiction worse.

When we moved from our apartment to a house, we got. 150 gallon tank, to consolidate both of the 29 gallon ones we’d been keeping. Unfortunately, the lighting levels weren’t the best, and as time went on, aquarium maintenance started to slip from every week to every few, to once a month, and beyond. Compounding the problem, the 150 gallon was in the basement, which still doesn’t qualify as a “living area”, because we were worried that approximately 1500 pounds in a 4 ft by 2 ft area would cause problems on the main level.

Since we’ve had a dog for over a year now, we’ve been passing through the basement on our way to the back yard for “potty time” (dogs, kids, apparently it’s common to use the same euphemisms for things…), and I’d gotten really good at ignoring the tank sitting against the wall.

After regular prompting for a few months, however, we finally found the time one weekend to perform a much-needed water change and filter cleaning. We’d lost some fish and all the plants, but enough fish survived to guilt us into getting back into the maintenance habit again.

At this point, we’ve mostly fought off a blue-green algae infestation (brought on by an overabundance of nutrients and poor lighting), cleaned up an embarrassingly-thick layer of mulm (a nice term for fish food, fish poop, and…dead fish & plants), and mostly have what’s left of the tank under control. We’re planning to restock in the near future, building up schools of fish around the current survivors. I’d also like to take the time to get a sufficient amount of lighting in place to make the place viable for a range of plants.

Why plants? Because most of the “waste” in an aquarium can be used by plants, keeping the water cleaner, which keeps the fish happy. That, and live plants just *look* better, providing homes and hiding places for various aquarium fauna, as well as some supplemental food. I’d also like to introduce Malaysian Trumpet Snails to the tank, which will act as scavengers while leaving the living plants alone, as well as burrow through the gravel, to keep that healthy.

Going forward, some of the challenges I see are;
1. Maintaining the current weekly water changes and other routine maintenance, which has obviously been a problem
2. Slowly increasing the fish population, to avoid overloading the current biological filter (bacteria that convert poisonous ammonia into poisonous nitrite, and other bacteria that convert the nitrite into much less harmful nitrate)
3. Getting enough lighting into the tank to make plant growth possible, without turning the tank into a bubbleless hot tub
4. Finding and arranging plants to soak up nitrates and all the other by-products of keeping live fish that can tolerate the likely low light levels (1 watt/gallon is “low”, 2 wpg is “medium”ish, 3-4 wpg is “high”…that’s 150W, 300W, and 450W-600W, respectively, with a 4 foot fluorescent tube putting out about 40W)

Something tells me this is going to get expensive, especially when you start to factor in items like a carbon dioxide injector (for the plants), heaters & chillers (to maintain a constant water temperature), additional fish food variety, and liquid fertilizer for the plants. Then again, I’ve managed to do this on a smaller scale already, so hopefully I can use that experience.

Anyway, Cathy and I have been in the process of merging our separate lives, from bills for things like the landline & TV, to bank accounts, to now cellphones. After all, we already tend to the same network for coverage, and we’re each the primary person the other calls, SMSes, and IMs from our phones, and so it makes some degree of sense to stop paying for wholly separate plans, and start taking advantage of “family” plans. You know, since we’re now a family…

For me, part of the process involves looking back at what I’ve liked and disliked about my current and past phones, and what I’d like to see in a new one. In the interest of being more positive, I think I’ll mostly enumerate the things I’ve liked, and what I want in addition. With the SK3, I knew a lot of the restrictions going in, and while some of them I hoped would have been fixed in firmware updates, that never turned out to be the case.

So, what I’m looking for, in no real order, is:

• GSM, most of the rest of the world uses it, I’d like to continue using it as well
• Data connectivity such as GPRS or EDGE, because I really have gotten used to web surfing on a phone to look things up or just fill time while waiting somewhere
• QWERTY keyboard, I’ve gotten used to having one, to the point where typing on a numeric pad is painful, in part because I use SMS a lot, and in part because I also want…
• An SSH client, as there are times I’m not near a computer or Wi-Fi connection, and still need/want to access machines directly. Also, broadband where I live sucks and goes out in the rain
• Wi-Fi, because there are times I am covered by a Wi-Fi signal, but have almost no cell reception, but don’t have a laptop with me (or I only have computers I don’t trust, namely ones I don’t have sole control over)
• Bluetooth, because, well, it’s nice to not be tethered to an earpiece for hands-free calling, and my last 2 phones and current PDA have it
• Decent battery life, I shouldn’t have to charge my phone every day if I’m not actively using it, and shouldn’t have to worry that it will completely drain if it’s sitting idle from a full charge in “airplane mode” (all radio transmitters/receivers turned off) in 2 days. My PDA lasts at least a week, if not more, with light usage on a single charge
• PDA capabilities, as I’m getting tired of carrying around multiple devices to do everything I want/need to do to manage my life
• Decent data sync, especially address books, calendars, reminders, etc, since I manage a lot of that through desktop apps (and use WebCal/iCalendar for calendaring, especially sharing with my wife and/or coworkers)
• Expandable/removable storage, since nothing’s worse than running out of space. Carrying a few flash cards in a pocket takes almost no space
• Somewhat open platform, so I’m not spending a small fortune on adding software. Yes, I knew this wasn’t the case with my SK3, and accepted it at the time, thinking I’d get around to qualifying for a developer’s key, allowing me to directly load apps, but I never seemed to find the time to write something ever-so-slightly more complex than a Java “Hello, world”, despite so many plans. It would also be nice to be able to get not-officially-sanctioned apps like the mobile Google apps or Opera Mini
• IM clients, yes I’m addicted to IM, but it also seems to be the way I keep in touch with the majority of people I know. At least AIM and Y!IM, since that’s where the majority of the people I know reside. MSN Messenger would be nice, and a Jabber/XMPP client would be fantastic
• Email, as I do a lot of reading/responding while killing a few minutes here and there. I’d really prefer IMAP4 (with SSL), but will settle for POP3 (with SSL). Non-SSL is likely a non-starter for me.
• IRC, hell, let’s go for broke! This isn’t really a requirement, as I would likely just SSH into my remote server, and reattach to my screen session that’s always running irssi if I really needed to hop on IRC…
• Media player, ideally something supporting WAV, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, though I can deal with MP3. I’m trying to consolidate devices, after all, and both my current phone and my PDA can both play audio
• User-installable ringtones, since most every ringtone out there seems to suck, and the ones I can currently install on the SK3 really suck, since my tastes seem to be decidely outside the demographics they’re targetting. Why can’t I use something like the Imperial March from Star Wars for work-related calls, or some Billy Joel, the Beatles, Styx, or Nine Inch Nails, when I already have the CDs, have them ripped, and plan to listen to them anyway on the device?

Ideally, if Palm could release a GSM PalmOS-based Treo that had Wi-Fi (the Palm TX has been out for how many years now with Wi-Fi?), and wasn’t just another tired rehash of the Treo 650 or Treo 680, that would probably be an ideal phone for me, as my PDA is a Palm Tungsten|T3, so I have almost all the software I’d need/want, and could easily transfer over all my existing data. Alas, Wi-Fi at this point seems like a determining factor. I’ve considered the various Microsoft PocketPC/Windows Mobile/whatever it’s called this month phones, and I’m sort of lukewarm on the whole idea there. Sure, they’ve got the largest market segment right now, and even Palm is releasing Windows-based phones, but what little I’ve seen of the interface (and what lot I’ve read from people that have devices with it), makes me hesitant.

Symbian-based could be nice, I really liked my old Nokia 6600. Unfortunately, what I’ve heard of recent “advances” with the Symbian OS make me think that it’s diverging greatly from where I want to be, what with locking down the installation of 3rd-party software. I’m also wishy-washy on BlackCrackberries. I admittedly don’t have much of any exposure to them, so it could be entirely just my unfamiliarity with them. As for the iPhone, well, talk about locked down…updates that brick phones that people have liberated, software only installable through the just-announced App Store, and the requirement to use iTunes to even activate the thing? Maybe if iTunes were available for Linux, which will not be happening any time soon, or more likely ever…

Ideally, when we’re ready to switch, and both of us are off-contract, the OpenMoko will be in mass-production. It’s Linux-based, seems to have almost all the features I want (except maybe a keyboard), has a community already, and looks to be fairly extensible. Whether it will actually pan out or be available at that point, though, is anybody’s guess.

Looking at phonescoop, it appears that I’ve got a choice of a lot of Windows-based phones, some Symbian ones, a handful of Blackberries, as well as a few undetermined phones. Honestly, I don’t know what I’m likely to choose at this point. Maybe a few more months will produce a clear winner…

The entire day seemed like a blur, both the longest and shortest day of my life, and the scariest and happiest day as well. It still feels surreal to say things like “my wife” or “I’m married” or to look at my ring. I know that it will probably start to seem more normal as time goes on, but I’m enjoying the weirdness right now.

About the only things I can add to Cathy’s account of the wedding is the bachelor party, on Saturday, February 16. As far as I know, no one had a camera, so there aren’t any pics, but it was rather tame, if not late.

Sean, my best man, organized a dinner at Claddagh Pub in Baltimore, where we kept things pretty much low-key. There were at least two separate bachelorette parties that were taking place there at the same time, and near as we can figure, that means everyone dresses up in silly outfits and gets drunk. After dinner, we went over to Edgar’s to play pool until something like 2 in the morning. The entire time, I proved yet again that I can’t play pool to save my life. After we closed Edgar’s, we went back to Sean’s hotel, to swap cars, and then drove back to Frederick. I figure we got in sometime around 3:30 in the morning. After a nice 4-5 hour nap, Sean made sure I was awake, then we got into our tuxes and drove back to Baltimore, arriving right when we were supposed to, at 12:30pm.

We spent most of the next hour+ just waiting, with me basically trapped in a room so that I wouldn’t inadvertently see Cathy in her dress. Groomsmen and bridesmaids were going back and forth between our room and Cathy’s, and I got fitted with a lapel mic and had a few pictures snapped by the photographer. The hour seemed to drag on, but eventually we were told to get ready. Sean, Morty (our officiant), and I were led through back hallways at Martin’s to the room where the ceremony and reception were to take place, and we got to wait some more behind the curtains until the rest of the wedding party was ready, then we walked out and took our places.

I couldn’t really tell you what happened during the ceremony, but I remember when I first saw Cathy, radiant in her gown, and thinking how beautiful she looked. After that, everything up until we left the reception is nothing but a blur. I can’t wait to see the video to find out what the ceremony and reception were like.

Incidentally, we and others have put up some pictures. Some of the links will be updated, so be sure to check back, and as we learn of more, I’ll add them to the post. So far we have:

• Debra and Cedric’s pictures that Cathy’s put up in her account
• Leigh’s pictures
• Sabrina’s pictures
• A collection of multiple sets that I’ve put up, where all wedding-related pictures I have will go
• The professional shots, just enter “February” for the month, “2008″ for the year, and either “Catherine” or “Michael” for the name, and it will provide a link to view/order pictures.

One might think, “But the last guy had DSL, so what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that Verizon really doesn’t care about the Frederick area at all. There’s one CO in the area. It happens to be at full DSL capacity. So as soon as the previous owner terminated his service, his DSL circuit was snapped up by someone else. So it wasn’t available to us. I really didn’t want to go with cable, because I’ve had it before and haven’t been overly impressed. For a while, I seriously considered SDSL, but at well over $100 a month, I convinced myself that wasn’t an option.

Then I found a local ISP that claimed to have ISDN. Now, this would be just as slow as SDSL, but for roughly $30-$40 a month, it’s much more reasonable. I was psyched to get the service, and just had a few questions. So I call the ISP to speak to their tech people. They couldn’t really answer any of my technical questions, such as whether I’d need another line, and despite being right down the street they couldn’t say whether Verizon would charge per-minute fees or anything above and beyond what I was paying them. I could have handled that, but the answer to my next question floored me. Their website specifically stated that they would provide the CPE, fully configured. The person I spoke to, when asked “Do you guys provide the CPE?” told me that no, they didn’t, and recommeded a specific model of ISDN CPE and suggested I find it on eBay. Um, yeah… So scratch ISDN.

By this point, you might be wondering what I finally went with, not having DSL, cable, SDSL, or ISDN. I’ll tell you… Satellite. Yes, slow, slightly faster than dialup if it’s a clear day, expensive satellite. We went with Dish Network, which resells WildBlue’s service. If I’d done some homework, I might have gone elsewhere, as the overall opinion seems to be rather negative. But, I didn’t. So we have it. Now. Because we ordered on June 26th, were told an install of August 4th. On the 3rd, we got rescheduled to the 5th for what I consider a valid reason. On the 5th we got rescheduled to the 12th, due to lack of the right length of ladder. On the 12th, we got rescheduled and the feces started to hit the rotating blades.

We were both sick and tired of being rescheduled, and this time we were told the 24th. You know, 2 months after we ordered the service. After several phone calls and being told there was nothing sooner, we called Dish Network to cancel all our service. We lucked out with someone who seemed to actually care, that looked into the ticket and then got pissed on our behalf. And then she got her supervisor, who also got pissed on our behalf. After collecting all our details for her supervisor, to be forwarded to the district managers, we had a promise of “this week, with at least 24 hours’ notice” or they’d completely release us from all their services without penalty.

Monday morning, we get a call, and set up a Tuesday morning install. Tuesday’s install completes with very little trouble, and we’re online by 1pm. Since then, I’ve learned about the Fair Access Policy, and have installed FapZilla to monitor usage. After 2 days and change, we’re at about 23% of our monthly download limit before we get cut to painfully slow speeds. Most of this is due to having 5 computers needing a 45 days’ updates, 4 of them Debian Unstable (2 i386, 2 amd64). We’ll need to see over the next month just how bad things get, but I’m getting the impression that this service is, at best, aimed at just websurfers. Urk.

So, where’s the blog now? I ordered a Linode, since I needed a solution for web, mail, dns, etc. They’re really awesomely responsive, dealing with requests usually within minutes. For root-level access and my choice of distro, with static IPs and an insane amount of bandwidth, the prices are incredibly reasonable as well. I highly recommend them if you need your own host somewhere.

And so, now we’re finally back on the air. Maybe not with the best access speeds for ourselves, but hopefully we’ll have more options once our contract with the satellite is up…

Add in several hours of intensive measurements (no room attempts to be a box, so some rooms have about 16 measurements), some window measuresments, and playing with the garage door opener, and we’re done for the day. We also managed to activate the major utilities.

Up next? Probably moving all the accumulated junk from our apartment…

I got a call from my mother a little while ago, in part asking about a friend of mine who teaches at Virginia Tech¹. After assuring her that my friend was OK, she went on to tell me that she got home from work this morning, and the house was flooded. Apparently the tank on the toilet in the powder room cracked sometime between when she left for work last night and when she got home this morning. So there was about an inch and a half of water on the main level, and the basement was a lot worse off. Ruined floors, carpet, tile, etc. Frantic, she couldn’t find her homeowners policy, so called the number on her car insurance². After they managed to calm her down, they got the insurance info squared away, and told her that within an hour and a half or so, someone would call to arrange for a crew to come out and deal with the issues within four hours.

Well, I didn’t get a time that she got home (though I suspect it was in the 8-8:30 or so range), but when she called me just after noon, there was already a crew there cleaning up. Now, I don’t know what the normal turn-around time for the average company is on an issue like that, but that’s still a pretty impressive reaction time.

She’s had Nationwide for probably close to 25 years, and they’ve always been there, especially when my sister and I were pretty stupid teenagers with cars, with all that implies. I’ve had them myself for over 10 years, since I got my first apartment and my car. My fiancée has had them since she got her car. And we’re (my fiancée and I) are using them for our homeowners insurance on our upcoming house.

Now, this blog doesn’t have the production values of of a national television or radio spot, and I certainly receive nothing other than the normal long-term & multiple policy discounts that any other customer gets from them, but Nationwide has been there time and again, and have never given me or mine any hassles in dealing with them. And that, as a completely independent customer who’s genuinely happy with the service, speaks more highly of them than any paid-for advertising. At least, it does to me.

1. If you haven’t been following the news today, there have been shootings on-campus in Blacksburg, VA, with the casualty count mounting [back]
2. There are advantages to getting home/renter’s insurance and car insurance from the same company! [back]

Let’s see… where to begin? Well, I guess I can list things in no particular order, and let it go from there.

1. The “biggie” is that there’s now an official name for the project. I thought that I’d be clever, and had been using SpeedReader internally, but then I decided to search for the name, and it turns out that not only is there already a SpeedReader, but it’s also an aggregator. Damn. So, I thought long and hard about it (a few minutes), and decided that, based on my initials and a dearth of hits from Google, that the name maggregate would be good. Well, if not good, at least unique¹. So, that’s what I’m calling it from now on. Maggregate.
2. A lot of extraneous crashes have been dealt with. I had been adding exception handling in the few places where it’s most likely to occur (network and parsing) on a case-by-case basis, but I kept coming up with new ones. When I took the wireless interface down on the laptop I use to develop code on, and got yet another unhandled exception, I finally decided that adding a “catchall” rescue block to each place that needed it, as those errors were all technically recoverable. Since then, no crashes. Yay. And logging differentiates enough (error for catchall vs warning for explicitly handled) that I can quickly see what I’ve been too lazy to explicitly deal with.
3. Maggregate now accepts gzip-encoded content! I knew I always wanted to do this, but my prior experiences with trying to deal with raw Zlib (in C) kept me from relishing having to do it. Lucky for me, the ruby library is nice enough that it was almost trivial. In fact, the hardest part was realizing that I needed to wrap the body from the HTTP request in a StringIO object instead of leaving it as a string. Once that was done, it was dead simple.
4. Partial cookie support is in place. Well, that should really be “preliminary”, as in there’s just a bit of code to recognize cookies, and there’s now a table in the maggregate database to eventually store the cookies. So, the logs let you know that you were sent a cookie (or several), but that’s currently it.

   As an aside, having looked at RFC 2109 and RFC 2965, it appears no one is using them… Instead, it appears every single server out there sending cookies that I’ve come across just uses the Netscape cookie specification. Keep in mind, RFC 2109 dates from February 1997, and RFC 2965 dates from October 2000. Not much of an issues, but I think my jaw will drop the first time I spy a max-age insead of an expires in a cookie header.

5. Potential support for RFC 3229 with “feed”. This was more of a “I wonder how easy it would be…” deal than anything else. I was reading something, followed a URL in a comment, and one or two clicks later, ended up at that page. For those folks who haven’t memorized the RFC index, RFC 3229 is “Delta encoding in HTTP”, which is basically a way to request a resource over HTTP and get just what has changed on the page instead of having to transfer the entire thing again. The “with feed” is an extension that purports to handle feed deltas in a manner that doesn’t break encapsulation, it just gives you a “feed” with only new/changed articles in it.

   My biggest concern was having to support a new HTTP status code, 226 IM Used, as the Ruby Net::HTTP library doesn’t have support for it. I should have known that it wouldn’t be an issue, thanks to Ruby’s allowing one to extend existing classes fairly easily. How easily? This easily:

   require ‘net/http’

   module Net
     class HTTPIMUsed < HTTPSuccess        # 226
       HAS_BODY = true
     end

     class HTTPResponse
       CODE_TO_OBJ[226] = HTTPIMUsed
     end
   end

   That’s in the maggregate file that does all the network and HTTP connections. That’s it. Now, in maggregate at least, Net::HTTP understands the proper status code for a successful response for RFC 3229. Nice, no?

   Now, I say it’s potential support, because so far not one single feed in over 300 has ever responded with either a 226 response OR the associated additional HTTP headers. But due to the way that I handle adding entries now, I don’t expect any issues, if and when a server decides to respond correctly.

The UI is still completely unusable, as I’ve been verifying things are working through both logging and using the sqlite3 exectuable to examine the database by hand. Despite the number of crashes, I’ve yet to corrupt any data, either. I suppose that the UI is the next real step, so I should finally learn more about ncurses and how to interact with it.

1. I had jokingly originally referred to the project as maggle, a take on raggle, but it seemed a bit too derivative of a name. Sorry Tim, I know you liked this one [back]

I knew roughly the price range we wanted to look in based on what I was comfortable paying each month. After running the numbers, it turns out that even bumping up the price of a house a bit above what I originally thought was a “good” price, we’re still in the zone that I consider reasonable, even including taxes, insurance, etc. This should expand the number of places we can look at without having to “settle” for something in our price range.

I really never expected to be thrilled that I could go into debt so much, but, well, it’s really time to get out of renting a place, and become an “adult”. Something tells me that this weekend is going to be busy looking at properties within our newly-expanded range, even though we still really like one of the properties we saw our first weekend out

Some of the fun fun things I’ve encountered thus far are:

• The confused server that seems to think that, instead of giving a proper 304 Not Modified response (with no body) when the content I’m requesting hasn’t changed, it should instead give a 200 OK response, with no body. This kept throwing me as I was trying to debug, as I kept believing my logs that there should be new content there…
• The confused server that gives a 406 Not Acceptable response to requests that don’t supply a User-Agent: header with the request. Admittedly, were I less lazy, I’d be specifying one anyway, just to identify the new kid on the block. But as I haven’t even officially settled on a name yet, I was leaving things at their default (and made the assumption that Ruby’s Net::HTTP library had some sort of default value). What really threw me was that wget would work, but telnet wouldn’t, even when I was listing a huge laundry list of formats I was interested in in the Accept: header (including the type that wget said was coming back). After a little while, I decided to just pass a User-Agent: moo, and lo and behold, content!
• The really confused server that would reply to all requests with a Last-Modified: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT, but would then completely bomb out with an application error if it got that value back in a If-Modified-Since: request header.
• The feed that seems to randomly return something that isn’t RSS or Atom at all, but from the exception the content generates, looks like it could be normal HTML. I say randomly, because after the last time it happened (and I finally got around to catching that exception to log it, deal with it, and carry on), it’s happened a grand total of once. And in that time, it’s checked the feed a few more times, though the content hasn’t updated (from before the time stored…), with no issues. I’m hoping something happens during the night, just so I know that I’m not the one going crazy.

Feeds in general have also been interesting. I’ve discovered that there’s such a huge variation in the quality of the actual data that I’ve had to special-case a few things, and delve into the XML (or XML-like) content itself in order to pull out data that I’d hoped would percolate into the normal accessor methods of the classes I’m using. It’s not a big deal, but it’s one of those things that becomes a minor annoyance after a while. Fortunately, of the information I care about, it’s only dates and links to individual entries (or in at least one case, the complete and total lack thereof), and I think I have that in the bag.

Speaking of dates, one thing I’ve been noticing over the months of adding various and sundry feeds to the readers I’ve used in the past is that there are some pretty horrid implementations of Atom out there. I’ve noticed several feeds that various apps/frameworks provide that seem to think that publication, update, etc dates should always reflect the current time when you make the request, and not the time that each item was actually published or underwent a major update. This makes trying to figure out anything temporally useful about feed items a non-starter. Such is life…

Now, lest folks think that all I’m doing is complaining, let me just say that I’m glad that I’ve been running into these problems. I never would have discovered some rather fragile assumptions that I made without real-world data. In order to do that, I whipped up a pretty brain-dead (but functional) OPML import feature, and an add-a-feed feature, so that I could import the OPML file that I’d managed to export from my other reader a short time ago. Importing that, and adding some feeds that I’ve been pasting into a file for a week or two, I’m able to see how everything fares trying to parse 294 highly varied feeds instead of a few minor test cases. So when I’m ready to release the first alpha version to the guinea pigs, it should at least do better than it might otherwise.

So, yeah, I’ve made some decent progress on a lot of the back-end code and infrastructure. There’s just enough of a UI in place so that I can at least verify that things are working. It’s butt-ugly, and almost completely useless, but meets my current needs. Eventually I’ll get around to making it functional for me, maybe even functional for you. There’s logging in place so that I can at least figure out where something goes wrong. Hell, it even saves data (without corruption despite multiple crashes). You just can’t, well, read or navigate or do anything else at the moment.

However, now I’m dealing with one of the readers I mentioned deciding to die partway through startup, and having marked all my feeds invalid or unread. I noticed it Saturday morning, when I went to check some news before heading out to look at houses, when the window that I keep the reader in was sitting at a prompt with an error on the screen. So I re-ran the command, and within a minute, it had crashed again. As near as I can guess, either some bad data came through on a feed, or its constantly-growing cache got corrupted. Either way, even with logging set to DEBUG and the “diagnostic” flag specified, there’s no indication at all what is causing the problem.

So, instead of fighting with it, I’m writing my own feed reader. I’ve dusted off the really simplistic “playing around” code, and have been working on turning it into a full-featured (or at least itch-scratching) RSS and ATOM feed reader. It’s nowhere near usable yet, but I’m currently able to pull down, parse, and save feeds, as well as check intelligently for updates (thanks, in part, to “Towards polite HTTP retrieval in Scala“, which gave me the idea to let the remote webservers tell me whether a feed’s changed, in order to reduce load on everyone).

Instead of raw on-disk storage, or fairly opaque language-specific storage formats, I’ve been playing with using SQLite for storage. It seems fairly lightweight (especially in comparison to MySQL or Postgres) while still providing a nice familiar SQL engine, gives me a decent command-line tool to inspect and modify data, is fairly portable, and I was able to get up and running with sqlite-ruby in practically no time at all.

I’m currently working on a functional (read: ugly, but it works for my purposes) interface in ncurses, threads to deal with fetching & updating in the background, category and configuration management, etc. As I work on it off-and-on as I grab a few spare minutes, I’m not sure on the ETA right now, but hopefully something that I’m willing to let others see will be available “soon”.

I think in part it has to do with consumers not demanding more information. While within minutes of a failed delivery the online trackers are updated, there’s this huge black hole from the time a package is loaded onto a truck and when delivery is attempted. Last year I read an article on how UPS uses computerized routing to help increase efficiency. Everything from the truck loading order to the exact route to take to deliver packages is pre-determined. If a package is missed, the driver is notified.

So why can’t this information be provided to people tracking packages? A spokesperson in the article says a residential delivery should take 30 seconds, steering wheel to steering wheel. Combine that (or even a fudge factor) with the number of packages loaded on the truck on scheduled before the specific one being tracked, and you have the “non-driving delay”. Factor in an approximate travel time between stops, which it would surprise me if they didn’t already know down to at least a 5 minute window. Update periodically throughout the day, especially since successful and failed deliveries are already being reported back with a time of (non)delivery. Now, instead of just knowing that your package is “Out for Delivery” as of 6:35 AM, and having it be delivered randomly between 11:30 AM and 8:00 PM, you can now see that your package has an “expected delivery window” of 4:00-6:00 PM.

Am I picking on UPS? No, they just happen to be the one that I remember reading about having the type of infrastructure that could handle this with probably just changes to their web interface. FedEx, DHL, and maybe even the USPS (though it’s more likely they show up at a specific time every single day) could implement the same thing. In fact, I’d be surprised if FedEx and DHL didn’t have similar automated routing and planning systems¹ already in place. As all three major carriers seem to be able to update quickly in the event of a delivery or failure to deliver, it’s not even an issue of adding more equipment to the delivery vehicles.

Online package tracking used to be a differentiator between services, but now everyone does it. Is a finer-grained view of when the packages are expected to be delivered the next step?

1. Though FedEx seems to have completely separate facilities for Ground, Express, Home, etc. Having basically bought other delivery services to get into the various markets, this makes some degree of sense, unless you’re a customer trying to pick up a package, and discover “the” FedEx facility you’ve been to several times isn’t the one that your package has been sitting at for several days… And that the facility it is sitting at is inexplicably not listed at all on the FedEx site. No, I’m not still slightly annoyed about that in the slightest. [back]

Our original planned date had been March 23, 2008. It sounded good at the time, until we asked the place we ultimately decided upon (Martin’s West) if it was available. They pointed out that, while it was free, it was also Easter Sunday. Errrr… So, after some brainstorming, we finally came up with a new date. The advantage is, the following Monday should be a day off for a lot of people. The date? February 17, 2008.

Like I said, it’s a little earlier than we originally wanted, but now that we’ve thought about it, it works for us. It’s close to Valentine’s Day, which we don’t tend to celebrate much, meaning we won’t get overwhelmed. And it should be close to a holiday, meaning we can probably get away for a long weekend near our anniversary every year. Not to mention we’ll probably want to get away from the cold…

So this weekend I activated the Sandbox theme, using the Spartan skin. Maybe it’s just me, but I really like the cleanliness of the thing. I’m typically a big fan of using minimal decoration for web pages, and Sandbox w/ Spartan really adheres well to that. Plus, literally all the styling and layout are done through CSS, so if I get the urge, I can always start hacking the CSS to change things up a bit.

Another motivator was that I wanted to start using Sidebar Widgets, as I prefer to customize without having to edit theme files directly. Call me crazy, but it seems so much easier to keep as much as possible out of files that WordPress in no way versions¹, and most of what I want to do, I can find widgets for anyway.

So, yeah, new theme. Spartan. Sandbox. CSS. Yeah, that. So enjoy. Or not.

1. And this happens to be why I don’t consider most blog software or most of the Open Source CMS to really be anything approaching a CMS. I want versioning, damn it. Maybe it comes from having worked for a CMS WCM company that does version everything [back]

I was hoping to avoid getting mired in the details myself with the planning of our wedding. At least, that was the plan when we initially discussed not planning until after the holidays. I had these visions of sitting back, being blissfully unaware of all the legwork, details, dealing with weeding out selections for food, venue, etc. I had thought that I could stay detached and just give my final consent on whatever decisions had been made, as while I can deal with most kinds of stress, this personal stuff really gets me in my gut.

However, it’s already becoming apparent, just a few days after “the holidays” are over, that I’m going to have to be more involved. Partly it’s because Cathy’s already stressing out and feeling overwhelmed. Partly it’s because as she’s starting to initially look into these things, I realize that it’s better to give my input sooner rather than later. And partly it’s because it’d be a real bastard move on my part to just let her deal with everything on her own. But mostly, I think it’s because, despite how I thought I’d feel about it, I really want to be involved¹.

What complicates matters somewhat is that we’re planning to pay for everything ourselves. This will actually help force us to keep things small (read: affordable) and things in-check. I know I’m definitely not the type for those big elaborate weddings with hundreds of guests, big to-dos, and all sorts of extravagances. I’ve been to those types of weddings, and they’re…not my thing at all. Something smaller and more intimate, probably under 100 people, is more my style. I’m lucky that Cathy feels the same way.

As far as dates go, we’re still shooting for sometime in March of 2008, though that might change based on venue availability. Neither of us are seriously considering a church wedding at this point, since we’re both oh-so-incredibly religious. Honest. We don’t know where that whiff of brimstone comes from when we walk into a place of worship. It’s purely coincidence, as is the rising temperature in the room. I think the current plan is to find a hotel or some other place that can accomodate both the wedding itself and the reception, though that might change as we explore our options.

The same issues with having the ceremony in a church is going to probably affect our choice of an officiant. Fortunately we have several friends who are qualified to perform, and have performed, weddings. That could be an interesting solution, as having a friend do the honors would mean we at least avoid a lot of the rigmarole that would go along with a traditional approach. Also, if I remember correctly, in Maryland as long as the couple recognizes and acknowledges the authority of the person performing the ceremony, they’re qualified. We definitely need to look into that…

As much as I don’t even want to think about the food² right now, it basically comes bundled with the location. Joy. We’ll have to get a better estimate of how many people we want first. Then there’s music, a photographer, flowers³, etc. Those, at least, should be things we can put off for a while. Maybe I should look at the insane book of lists that Cathy picked up, broken down by time until the wedding, just so we don’t get ahead of ourselves.

At least the cake is mostly taken care of, as we’ve already talked with the best cake artist we know, Cathy’s sister’s mother-in-law, who has done all the cakes for Cathy’s nephews’ birthdays, Cathy’s graduation, and so forth, all of them excellent. One detail’s taken care of! Whee!

Now, how about that drink?

1. Cathy now tells me, several hours after she found out I started this, that she’s glad I came to this conclusion on my own [back]
2. And what kind of alcohol to have. I’ve always, as a guest, preferred the open bar approach, though a cash bar is…acceptable too [back]
3. But two people have recommended just getting them from the grocery store. Maybe if costs are getting out of control [back]

I mean, just look:

Who can possibly resist that?!

Ok, if you’ve stayed on this long, I have a confessioin to make: this was just a thinly-veilled excuse to test an email posting plugin, sending from my Sidekick3 to the blog. I hope it worked!

Table of contents for feed_reader

1. Desperately seeking a (console) feed reader

Ok, I’ll admit, I’m a little addicted to RSS/Atom feeds. At current count, I have close to 400 feeds (though a lot of them are Flickr pools). My problem is, I’ve yet to find a feed reader that has everything I want. First off, let me just limit things to console-based feed readers. I do a lot of work in screen, and don’t even have X configured on my main system currently, so something that works in text mode is an absolute must, as it’s the only system that’s mostly guaranteed to be on at any given time, and have network access…

Now, I started with Firefox‘s live pages, or whatever it’s called. When I finally got fed up with the stability issues and loss of open tabs even with extensions, I switched to Opera, with its feed reader. It was OK for a while, but it would regularly, but inconsistently, corrupt its storage, mis-filing feeds in other random feed folders. It would also slow dow a lot if there were a lot of unread articles in the feeds (or even just a couple slow sites). It also ran on my laptop, which wasn’t connected all the time, not to mention that there are some feeds that aren’t exactly work-appropriate.

So I started looking at raggle, and it seemed to be good. Except within minutes, i managed to crash it. And raggle has this…nasty…habit of wiping out your entire feed list when it crashes. I figured it was a fluke, until I did it again. And again. And again. By this time, I was making manual backups of my feeds.yaml file, to the point when I have a cronjob set up to back it up hourly.

I decided to just live with it for a while, as I could anticipate when I would cause a crash, and modify my behavior to avoid it. That was until the day that raggle decided to refuse to start back up. After a couple hours futzing around, I determined that it had something to do with its cache of articles (mostly unread by me, of course). Nuke that, and it starts…and crashes as soon as some undetermined feed updated and sent down whatever data it didn’t like. Time to move on, I thought.

Next I tried snownews, which seems rock solid. Except…it doesn’t handle Atom feeds (just strictly RSS), even though there’s a “plugin” of sorts that uses xsltproc to convert Atom to RSS. It…worked sometimes. Unfortunately, a lot of the feeds I do read regularly don’t provide anything other than Atom feeds that don’t seem to parse.

There’s also the problem with updating. snownews doesn’t. At least, not automatically. You either need to restart, or issue a command to explicitly update one or all feeds. Not a problem, right? Right, unless you happen to go away for a few days, and happen to not be around to update so those high-volume feeds get updated.

That brings up another problem I’ve had with snownews: it has no memory. it remembers just the last N articles in a feed, the same number the feed provides. This, of course, ends up being useless for me, when it can be days or weeks before I get around to reading specific categories/feeds. Categories…good luck if you have more than 26 or so. They’re listed, but you can’t actually select them (I have 44 currently).

After several months with snownews, working around its warts, I finally got fed up, and switched back to raggle. I know that at this point, it’s just a matter of time before some random feed comes along with data that causes raggle to crash and stay crashed. And the other crashing, I can still trigger at least once a day, even trying to be careful.

If anyone has any suggestions, for a console-based feed reader, that can handle both RSS and Atom feeds, update the feeds regularly, save old articles at least until I’ve marked them “read” (better is “deleted”), supports categorization, and is stable or least stores all data in a mostly-transparent way (snownews stores raw feeds, but raggle uses a much more opaque ruby PStore), I’m all ears.

My throat’s messed up from trying to sing along with the South Park Mr. Hankey Christmas album on the drive up to my future sister-in-law’s¹ place. Now we’re sitting around, drinking egg nog, talking about the wedding, holiday stuff, etc.

Even though I’m not really big into the holidays, and haven’t been for longer than I can clearly remember, all in all this is turning out so far to be an enjoyable Christmas. I hope everyone else is having an enjoyable Christmas, Hannukah, Solstice, or just Winter Excuse To Gather and Drink.

1. I’m told that the strangeness of saying something like that will eventually go away [back]

I can’t say that it was a real surprise, seeing as how we’ve been together for over 6 years, and have lived together most of that time, but it’s still a bit of a shock. Cathy’s already written about it, so I’ll just let it stand at that, as it’s pretty much the way I remember it happening too. About the only thing I’d add is that I’ve been trying to think for weeks how to get out to the store to look at the rings without arousing any suspicions. Not bothering to do that seems to have worked out easier. If anyone’s interested and hasn’t seen them yet, there are pics of the ring on Flickr.

Of course, now it seems like even though we haven’t set a date, there’s a ton of work to be done, from deciding where and when, to who to invite, how many, etc. It’s truly scary that Cathy managed to pick up an inch-thick book of lists of things to think of and ask for planning a wedding. As of right now, though, I think we’re just waiting until after the holidays to really think about it. At least, I am…