As many may have noticed I now have a brand new layout and I’m really digging it. It didn’t come with it’s share of problems though and I’ll point them out here.
I started with the base layout, it’s called Aeros it was put together by Joe at thebuckmaster.com.
I didn’t change too much but I did make some changes that I think make this layout a cut above the original.
I have been working as the Senior Systems Engineer in the operations group at a company called Airbiquity for the past year or so.
As part of my daily job I come into contact with many new and interesting products and things that help me do my job better.
Firstly, how often do you find that you need to constantly debug several machines at one? Tailing syslogs on each box can become a nightmare when you have more than one machine to look at. Consider these options…
After messing with the SolarWinds products for a while I decided to move against it towards open source and free/cheaper options.
At Airbiquity I configured all of our servers and network equipment to send their syslog requests to a centralized syslog server. This was great for work debugging but I had trouble letting my boss have an easy utility that they could search with.
This is when I setup Splunk, it’s easy to install and while it can be load intensive it was a lot more intuitive and easy to use than the SolarWinds offering. So far it’s been great and we’re going to start looking into AD integration and clustering to support our multiple data centers.
So as some of you may know, I’ve been looking for a new job. If anyone knows of any job openings just let me know.
So far I’ve applied to a few but due to the holiday season only a couple have gotten back to me in a timely manner. I hope to get some word back come the new year, otherwise I’ll be posting from a much more homeless place.
So I received my blackjack yesterday, so far I’d have to say it’s pretty neat. I’m enjoying it a lot. My only issues is the battery life, also moving my contacts over was a little more time consuming than I’d have hoped.
I still haven’t tried to write any applications for it but after I’m all moved I’ll give that a try.
NetRiver is officially using Joomla as a CMS solution. Because of this I’m working on a way to automate installation and templating from our development team. Currently it takes me about 3 hours of modification to successfully template a Joomla install.
I’m working on a way to automate most of the process and basically get those 3 hours of my time back to put towards other things.
So far I’ve made a base SVN trunk for our Joomla installs. The trunk has a default basic template and a set of our “supported” modules. We currently have a similar setup for our Chambergate product and I’m going to be maintaining our joomla base install. Hopefully the way I’m doing it will make it easier to roll out mass updates for people and also allow us to document a set of static features.
You can check out my default install here
I was recently contracted to do work for a fellow goon over at the something awful forums, so far it’s going pretty great.
The project is called “I Heart Chinese“, it’s a really neat idea. Teaching Chinese with online flash animations, it’s online learning but in a fun and easy way. So far I’ve been working on the base system, the base system is built around my own database abstraction layer working with ADODB. It’s also using the smarty template engine, no particular reason other than it helps keep the code managable.
I’ll be updating as I write more, but so far it’s hard to show any recognizable progress.
Recently I’ve started a new marketing idea for NetRiver, we moved into our new facility and I’m tired of it being mostly empty so I’ve taken it upon myself to help fill it up. I have connections all over so it shouldn’t be too hard to bring clients the only hassle is going to be the countless hours it is taking me to fill the content and design the website.
If you want to track my progress (anybody actually read this?) check out http://netriver.nr-dev.com.
So I’ve decided to actually make my actual site finally. I haven’t really fleshed it out but I plan to put up details regarding all my current projects and basically just talking about my life and my work as a web developer.
Nobody will be reading this for sure but I’ll make sure to keep whoever wants to know up to date with all the happenings in my travels and the problems I run into while coding my language of choice, PHP.
