warren @ shodor

we’re not Opsware anymore

wmyers — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 16:39:56 +0000

Opsware, the company I work(ed) for, has been acquired by HP.

a working vacation

wmyers — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 09:50:50 +0000

The company I work for now, Opsware Inc, is headquartered in Sunnyvale CA. We have offices in Redmond WA, Cary NC, and overseas in London and Brisbane.

One of the handy things about my current role in the company, ie one of providing phone and email technical support to our customers, is that as long as I can be on the phone, I can work from almost anywhere. Typically I can’t work from home, which would be very handy, but I can work from Sunnyvale, rather than my normal Cary digs.

The past two weeks, I’ve been in San Francisco on vacation. However, I didn’t want to take any time off from work, so I arranged to work from the Sunnyvale office while I was out here.

So, it’s not quite WFH, but it’s a close-ish substitute.

post-Shodor

wmyers — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:12:06 +0000

I’ve now been at Opsware for 6 weeks. It’s been a blast, often like drinking from a fire hose, but it’s been fun.

I’ll be back at Shodor on 17 Mar (hopefully) with a class on cryptography.

And I’m working on materials for an introduction to Boolean logic, too.

Good times, fun stuff.

wrapping-up

wmyers — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 18:18:59 +0000

This is my last week at Shodor. I am transitioning to a new job on Monday 22 Jan 2007 with Opsware in Cary as a support engineer.

end of school

wmyers — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 18:24:11 +0000

I officially finished my degree from Elon on 12 Dec 2006. All final grades were submitted that week, and I am done with my BA in CIS (minor CS). Now I’m off to the ‘real’ world of job hunting.

the joy of the typo

wmyers — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 15:08:10 +0000

I’ve been working on a programming project for a couple days, and updated my string library (strfuncs.h) to include some spiffy string cleaning functions. I now have a utility to strip all instances of a single character, or all instances of a string of characters from another string.

However, in writing the library yesterday, I failed to notice that I had typed a ‘c’ instead of ‘k’. Yep, that’s right - I broke the entire function by one character.

Gotta love the typo.

updated lcgp class header

wmyers — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 15:44:52 +0000

If you’re in the market for a pseudo-random number generator (prng) for your C++ development activities, I have just updated my linear congruential generator with perturbations (lcgp) class header. There is now a flag to account for adjusting the range of returned random numbers from 0..(modulus-1) to 1..modulus. The header is available here: lcgp.h.

And yes, I think this is fun.

network monitoring

wmyers — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 22:33:50 +0000

I’ve been somewhat unsuccessful in getting the new network monitoring up and running. I’ve been trying to get OpenNMS to run, and while getting tomcat5 installed and running under FC6 was straight-forward enough, getting OpenNMS to install keeps returning errors on install.

I’ve also been playing with the most recent edition of Nagios to get a side-by-side comparison. That one’s easier to install, but configuring it is harder.

Oh well, I guess I was expecting too much to just download the packages, run rpm, and have everything magically work.

shodonix 1.04 redux

wmyers — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 19:31:16 +0000

In generating Shodonix images, I did a lot of package alterations, and it turns out that Ghemical 2.01 had been updated to 2.10 - but in updating the package, a couple libraries updated that broke Intel i810 graphics chip support - which might not be too horrible, but many many educational institutions go for the educational specials when buying workstations, and they tend to have integrated graphics chips, and those are often the Intel i810 line. So, I had to back up to 1.03, then reupdate the CD, which this time included yanking Ghemical. It’s not a vital package, and frees-up space for other applications in the future.

So, in case you ever decide to customize a Knoppix CD, and you have a ‘normal’ PC with integrated Intel graphics, be sure you don’t break the support for the chip.

a (semi) work project

wmyers — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 20:04:22 +0000

I’ve begun work on a new OSS project. I know projects like PEAR DB and DBI exist as application development tools to hide the underlying database from the application developer - but it seems like not many people use them, and I don’t like their overhead. So, I started working on a PHP Database Abstraction Layer which is viewable in its current incarnation here: datente.com/dal.phps.

Any database-driven PHP projects I do in the future I plan to build on top of this DAL.