Archive for February, 2010
Categories: Family News, Photography | February 28th, 2010 | by breandan | no comments
Back from my little trip to the beach, settling back in, and getting pictures off my memory card. It appears, however, that I forgot the fundamental rule of taking pictures – make sure your lens is clean. There are a handful of dust spots on every image I’ve reviewed so far. For some images it’s no big deal, but for a lot, they are very distracting. Once I saw them, I hauled the lens out, and there they were, plain as day. A through cleaning and a spot check later, I’m happy that I got them all. Still a little mad at myself for taking all these pictures without cleaning the lens first.
Categories: Family News | February 22nd, 2010 | by breandan | no comments
A year ago today, at 12:19 in the afternoon, Qais Emerson Dezendorf was born. The last year has been one of learning and growth – for him and for my wife and I. We have learned how much joy the little guy can bring into our lives, even as we learn how to get by with less sleep and less time to do other things. We have loved every minute of it, even the hard parts. We would have it no other way. Qais, you are worth every minute of every day.
I’m also deeply indebted to my wife, who has taken on the full time job of a stay-at-home-mom. There is no greater job in the world – in gravity, in rewards, or in importance. I am humbled at her ability to care for, feed and love our child. My goal as a father is to do half as much for him as she does – and I often don’t come close, though I try as hard as I can, every day. Qais’s birthday – especially this first birthday – is as much a celebration of her as it is him.
Categories: Photography, Site News | February 16th, 2010 | by breandan | no comments
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.)
Categories: Home Network, Technology, Virtual Data Center | February 12th, 2010 | by breandan | no comments
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.)
bwdezend@godzilla:[~/] $ ./check_google_apps.pl -s "Google Mail"
OK - Google Mail is operating normally | warnings=0
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
Categories: Family News | February 11th, 2010 | by breandan | no comments
Just two weeks shy of his first birthday, Qais learned how to use The Force.
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