Jul 21st, 2006 | Perl, Programming, Technology | 1 Comment
I have some web development to do for the past month and I came across Catalyst framework for perl which simplifies the job a lot. It is an MVC framework which does all the routing one need, plus it has support for such good modules like Template Toolkit, Class::DBI and others. Another big advantage is that it has a small web developers web server which helps to troubleshoot many aspects during the development process and then the whole thing can be migrated to apache with a couple of moves only.
Apr 6th, 2006 | Linux, Nagios, Networking, OS, Perl, Programming, Software, Technology, Windows | 1 Comment
I am playing around nagios now (again) and it seems that I have found the nice way to monitor most of the stuff I need.
Monitoring Linux servers in not a big deal and a lot of custom plugins can be (and already) written for watching different stuff, but monitoring Windows servers were not so easy for me until this days. Now it seems that I found the way.
It is well known that SNMP under windows really sux (I mean the standard one), the thing that really caught my attention was Performance Counter. This can do the job well.
My idea was to integrate nagios, windows performance counters and rrd graphs. For this I have set up nagios, installed NRPE plugin on windows to be able to check it and added a plugin which is able to watch performance counters. Now I have everything: performance counters are monitored, nagios updates the state of services and does all that fancy stuff it is supposed to do and in addition, the output and performance data of the plugins is written by nagios to the named pipe from where my small perl script takes it and updates a bunch of rrd databases. A simple web GUI shows me all needed graphs.
Feb 13th, 2006 | Perl, Programming, Technology | 3 Comments
I wounder if anyone knowns any perl WYSIWYG editor or better module? I was looking on CPAN but failed to find one and I really do not want to write my own (especially a JavaScript part for the textareas).
Something with a couple of methods, where one to create an HTML + JavaScipt code for textarea and the second one to parse text with tags for display.
Jan 24th, 2006 | Perl, Programming, Technology | No Comments
While looking for some cool stuff for Class::DBI on CPAN I found the Class::DBI::mysql. An amazing thing! Since I use MySQL it matches me and it simplifies the job even more. Now I do not need to specify the columns and I use create_table function to create a table for a particular class if it is not there yet which makes the installation even easier - no set up classes or something like this need.
It also provides with enum_vals function which is really cool as well :)
Jan 18th, 2006 | Hardware, Linux, OS, Perl, Programming, Technology, Windows | No Comments
Recently I borrowed an IBM ThinkPad 390X for doing some small perl-for-web stuff on it. It is quite an old model with 500MHz CPU, 64MB of RAM and 11 GB of HDD. I added some more RAM so now I have 64+128 MB and this was the max I could do to improve the machine.
I have installed the Fedora Core 4 (custom install), booted up and started to look for some X window manager to work with, because I do not really like gnome a lot and KDE was a bit luggy. After looking on enlightenment, afterstep, fluxbox, FVWM and IceWM and stopped on the last one since it was fast, easy to set up, quite customizable, but not complicated. Since I really like some fancy stuff, I needed some nice terminal emulator which can support transparency, unicode and have tabs (although the last one is not so important, I really like when terminals do have such a feature). Looking here and there I tried many existing products including xterm, eterm, aterm, rxvt, mrxvt, konsole and gnome-terminal. All of these were either heavy or did not work as I wanted them to. Finally I found a project called “Terminal” which was an attempt to create something similar to gnome-terminal, but lighter and which would not require you to install the Gnome at all. I would say this is an amazing piece of work. I has all of the features I need, it is fast (a bit slower than xterm, but much faster than my default emulator konsole [from KDE]) and it is quite customizable as well so after 3 minutes of working around I almost didn’t feel the difference between it and konsole I used to.
Next task was to find browser and email reader. For browsing I tried mozilla, firefox, dillo and links (with -g for X). I stopped on using firefox (the 1.5 is pretty fast) and links -g for for viewing my ebooks (which are in HTML). For emails I usually use kmail (or kontact package with all it’s benefits) but it was too heavy to use it here so I decided to use thunderbird. I could also use mutt, but since all my mail is on two IMAP servers and I wanted to have it offline synchronized as well, I went to thunderbird which can do this job out-of-the-box instead of spending lots of time on setting offlineIMAP stuff and then binding mutt to it.
The only small part of the software I am missing now is some light office suite which can work with M$ Office files in the same good way OpenOffice.org can, so I am still using OpenOffice.org which is a bit heavy for my hardware and it takes it almost a minute to start up and then another half of it to load the document I need.
Anyway, I am very glad to see such a good working station for me, especially after noticing the label “designed for M$ Win 98″ and imagining what I would do on the default OS coming with this laptop :)