Michael Medin

Random thoughts on development, SOA and monitoring…

Is poetry like programming: language Agnostic?

DSC05632It was my birthday earlier this week (Monday the 27:th to be exact) and since my daughter Sofia had her first birthday the 21:th we had a joint celebration over the weekend. Mainly the gifts were targeted at my daughter since I am a bit to old really to get birthday gifts.

But I did get some things and among them one thing really stood out it was a poem written by what is loosely I guess a cousin to our children.

I have included it here translated to English (by me). Now the poem is I think hauntingly beautiful (even translated) but the interesting thing is that it was written by a teenager who moved to Sweden little over a year ago. This means his command of the Swedish language is less then perfect.

The poem was written in Swedish (I simply translated it to English since I tend to blog in English) which makes me wonder: How can one who write such beautiful poetry in Swedish without first excelling at the Swedish language?

This got me thinking a bit: Is poetry language agnostic?

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2.5 points by Sheraton in Bolzano

DSC04936Now Four Points by Sheraton is what it was actually called and the aim of the hotel chain is to be a bit more stylish than regular four star hotels. Another way to call it is I guess a budget version of Sheraton. This means I know I cannot expect a Sheraton class hotel but I still think I can expect more than what I got from Four Points by Sheraton in Bolzano. Something I would have expect staying at a cheep three star hotel in terms of overall quality and customer service.

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Scripting on the Windows side

image.pngThe biggest reason for Nagios success is the ability to extend it with custom scripts which makes it one of the most powerful monitoring systems. Now Nagios is not the only place where you can extend your monitoring! NSClient++ provides many ways to extend it with scripts and since I have gotten many questions about how to use scripts with NSClient++ lately I have decided to write this tutorial to help sort out the concepts.

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Book review: Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development—Made Simple

1889EN Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development-Made SimpleThe best PACKT book ever?

Now don’t get excited!

This is not saying much; most PACKT books are so bad I want to gauge my eyes out with a fork!

And indeed this book is no exception it has many flaws and I honestly think is a bad book which suffers from lack of editing and peer review.

But is is a very very smart book and the author has managed to pull something rather difficult off in very nice way. I think with some editing this would have made a truly amazing book.

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Putting some client into NSClient

imageNSClient++ despite its name is most often used in server mode responding to remote calls via either NRPE or check_nt. The closest thing to a client we get in normal mode of operation is NSCA where we submit data back. But NSClient++ can act as a client as well which is not just something I use for unit testing but something which can actually be useful in your monitoring environment.

A good example of a really useful feature is creating a proxy or use NSClient++ as proxies to add intelligence (see my post earlier on writing stateful scripts Enhance your monitoring with stateful scripts).

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