Year: 2008

Second monitor

Being so much at work during the last few month, I’ve noticed that many IT guys enjoy working with a two monitor setup.  I never paid much attention to that fact and thought that those really need a second monitor are a few and that its mostly the show off for the rest.

Last week, in a very spontaneous move, I decided to try it out.  We had a few of those 19-inch AOC monitors around, so I wasn’t exactly robbing anyone or anything like that.  Within minutes I had unwrapped, connected, and configured in my Gnome, and I have to say that that is one of the best technology experiences I had in the last few years!  It’s totally awesome!

Now, having two monitors configured as one huge desktop, I can either keep my browser separated from my consoles, or more code than every before in front of my eyes without switching virtual desktops, or have all my instant messaging at hand without polluting my main workspace.  That’s brilliant, I tell you.

Downsides?  Yes, sure.  I haven’t yet learned to handle the setup properly, so I have to logout of my graphical interface and log back in every time I take my laptop home.  It would have been so much easier if just plugging the monitor in would work.  I hear that a docking station might improve the situation, but that remains to be seen.

And what I want now?  More monitors.  I’d love to have another monitor at work, and I’d really want to have at least one more at home.  But there is no place to put it at home (I’m working on a dining table), and I’m not sure there is a way to connect two additional monitors to a laptop at work.  But overall, multi-monitor setups is definitely an area I need to investigate more.

Back from work

I have been really silent on this blog for the past three month or so.  That’s because I was totally consumed by my work.  The team in the office is growing, and we are having more stuff to do than ever.  But to add to the usually routine, we were doing some really huge restructuring.  When I started at the office back in April, the IT stuff was one huge mess – everything was chaotically interconnected and it was practically impossible to change something without affecting something else.  We’ve been working hard to separate things ever since, and last week we deployed the last changes to the structure.

Now we have our internal CRM system separated from the web site and from the customers’ tool.  All three parts are on their own now and we can make changes to each of them separately.  There are, of course, a few minor things still left here and there, but overall I am quite happy with how it turned out to be.

Two things that we deployed last week were our new web site and customers’ trading room.  We didn’t have much control over the web design part of it, user interfaces, or the deadlines for that matter, so the results aren’t as glamorous as we’d wanted them to be.  Check them out for yourself – https://www.fxpro.com and https://www.myfx.pro .  Both of these projects are in a very raw state right now – poorly localized, styles are off the limites, user experience is close to horrible, and both of these weight quite a lot.  We will be working on addressing all these issues in the coming month, together with some new and interesting developments.

In the mean time, I think I’ll have more time for blogging too.  There has been quite a bit going on that I want to share, and I’ll try to utilize the slow Christmas time to unleash all of that and clean up the backlog.

Awaiting….

Open source software activity usually bumps up quite a lot before and during Christmas.  This time around I am waiting for:

What are your waiting for this year?

On remote logging with syslog

We’ve been doing some interesting things at work, as always, with yet more people and Linux boxes.  And of the side effects of mixing people, Linux boxes, and several locations is this need for some sort of centralized logging.  Luckily we have either syslog-ng or rsyslog daemons installed on each machine, so the only two issues seemed to be reconfiguration of syslog services for remote logging and setup of some log reading/searching tool for everyone to enjoy.

As for log reading and searching, there seems to be no end of tools.  We picked php-syslog-ng, which has web interface, MySQL back-end, access control, and more.  There were a few minor issues during setup and configuration, but overall it seemed to be OK.  I also patched the source code a bit in a few places, just to make it work nicer with our setup and our needs  (both numerical and symbolic priorities, preference for include masks over excludes, and full functionality with disabled caching).  In case you are interested, here is a patch against php-syslog-ng 2.9.8f tarball.

Once everything was up and running and we started looking through logs from all our hosts in the same place, there was one thing that surprised me a lot.  Either I don’t understand the syslog facilities and priorites fully (and I don’t claim that I do), or there is just too many software authors who don’t care much.  Most of our logs are coming in at priority critical.  Even if there isn’t much critical about them.  Emergency is also used way too much.  And there is hardly anything at debug or info or notice levels.  (RT, SpamAssassin, and many other applications seem to be using critical as their default log level).  Luckily, that  almost always is trivial to fix using either the configuration files or applications’ source code directly.

Pafos airport reborn

Famagusta Gazzette reported on November 16th:

The new Paphos International Airport will be fully operational from midnight tonight, marking the end of flights to the old terminal.

Hermes, which manages the airports in Cyprus, announced that the new building covers 18,500 square metres and has the capacity to serve about 2.7 million passengers per year.

It has 28 check in counters, three luggage conveyor belts, four security arches, a VIP lounge and specially equipped lounges for businesspeople, information systems for passengers and parking places with a capacity of 800 vehicles. It is estimated that around 1,800 people will be employed.

I’ve been to the upgraded airport a couple of month before it was officially launched and I have to say that I was really impressed.  It’s bigger, cleaner, better organized and equipped, and feels like a real airport.  The one that was there before was more like a village utility building for accidental landings.

It’ll be interesting to see how the flight schedules and distribution will change, especially with Larnaca airport undergoing upgrade as well.