So the latest book, Pro Linux System Administration
Must admit this was a lot of hard work. Incredibly unmotivated on a few occasions and whilst I think I need a little break from writing I’ve got another project to finish this year.
I’ve worked out I’ve written somewhere in the region of a thousand pages in the last five years. Which is quite a bit really – somewhere in the region of 500,000 words. Just thinking about it makes me tired.
This seems incredibly un-PC at first but when you work out what she’s actually saying you realise it’s really rather clever.
Brilliant lyrics too.
when vacation was over
the word was all over
that i was a crack whore
melissa had told them
and so now were not talking
except we have tickets
to see blur in october
and i think were still going
oh-oh
i’ve seen better days but i don’t care
oh i just got a letter in the mail
oasis sent a photograph
its autographed and everything
melissa’s gonna wet herself
i swear
Went to see my sister’s boyfriend in a dance piece that was part of Dance Massive. It was called Untrained and the premise was that two untrained non-dancers (but who are visual artists) and two trained dancers would be paired for the show. It was interesting – the differences in movement and movement skills were almost mocking on occasion but funny on other occasions.
Ruth looking quizzical
Ross all blurry because I am a shit photographer
Having dinner and discussing whether people are getting ruder or we’re getting older.
In the sticks for rachel and dan’s wedding. These photos somewhere near Olinda.
Small group of South Korean pro-democracy protesters outside the QVB in Sydney
It’s well known that I am not a fan of Cucumber – tends to make me come out in hives. However, I’ve come across a very cool Cucumber of the non-vegetable Ruby (and hence not edible) variety that has some awesome possibilities.
So what is Cucumber? It’s a behaviour driven development and testing tool that uses plain English language to describe testing scenarios (a la RSpec) and do the resulting “story running”.
But the goodness isn’t limited to those rascally developers. It’s an excellent tool for sys-admins to do systems testing. And to prove it along comes cucumber-nagios. Developed by Lindsay Holmwood (who is an open source guy in Australia and a Puppet person) it is designed to allow Cucumber to output using the Nagios plug-in API.
First, Lindsay has some cool stuff in this blog post but here’s another example I cooked up. Hypothetically, we might have a web page created on our site and we need to ensure users can click through to a link on it. We also want to be sure that linked page contains a section with some information we want to share with our customers:
Feature:
It should be up
And I should be able to reach the interest rates page
And it should contain a "Daily Rates" section
Scenario: Reaching the rates page
When I visit "www.interbanking.com.au"
And I click on "Rates"
Then I should visit "www.interbanking.com.au/rates.html"
And then I should see a section called "Daily Rates"
This would then be run:
$ cucumber-nagios features/interbanking.com.au/rates.feature Critical: 0, Warning: 0, 4 okay | value=4.000000;;;;
You can see it would return an appropriate Nagios plug-in output.
And voila! Cheap and easy website script testing which plugs into our enterprise monitoring system.
Multiply this with all of the other things Cucumber can script and story board and you have a powerful engine to monitor complex elements of your environment.
P.S. Related to this that I stumbled across recently is Cucumber and Dash integration. Dash is a mechanism for creating and measuring custom metrics and Bradley (@ RailsMachine) has a couple of posts that show how to integrate Sensor, Cucumber, Dash and cucumber-nagios!
© 2010 Kartar.Net · Proudly powered by WordPress & Green Park 2 by Cordobo.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS 3
