The team at Boundary were kind enough to demo their new network and flow monitoring and visualisation solution to me. It’s pretty cool albeit it has a fairly limited feature set so far. Their future directions show some interesting promise though especially around the potential ability to visualise networks and services. If you’re lucky enough to be involved in the beta (or if you make use of the product after launch) then I’ve developed a Puppet module to deploy Boundary probes.

I spend a lot of time in IRC but I also spend a lot of time away from it too. I usually leave a Weechat session inside a screen session signed onto IRC 24x7. I have XMPP notifications set up from Weechat to have Jabber notify me when people say my name or private message me. That works fine for notifications to my laptop. It doesn’t, however, suit for sending notifications to my phone as I am often mobile and don’t have my laptop with me.

If this was a vlog instead of a blog post then it’d start with the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the apes shuffling around the Monolith until finally touching it and sparking their development into tool makers and users. Obviously, broadly speaking, most of my tool making doesn’t involve turning bones into weapons although I did a solid line in improvised explosives in my early teens. I think I was the only kid in junior high who had his own mortar.

One of the things that I use a lot of lately is Sinatra. However I find the native application layout a tad annoying and I find myself wanting the same basics from every Sinatra application I create: A simple binary Laid out so I can create a gem from it including a Gem specification Versioning A config.ru file so I can rackup if I need to A README file, license and the miscellaneous trappings Created as a Git repository I was going to create a tool to generate my own Sinatra application templates but then I saw a Tweet from RubyGems about a Sinatra application generator called Mafia.

I like scoreboards and tallies. I have an amazing penchant for becoming competitive about electronic totals: number of things done, changed, updated. I am really quite surprised I never got addicted to gold farming in WoW although I had an unhealthy interest in Zeal.com for a long time (when it was a LookSmart property - long story). So when we started talking about running some public triages of tickets at Puppet Labs I decided we must have a tally board to score who changes the most tickets (or at least who games the system fastest to achieve the highest score).