Fourteen miles of hiking, and two-thirds of a vertical mile of climbing in two days to get to the top of the tallest Mountain in Massachusetts. It was completely worth the effort.

Check out this “poke your eye out” blue 2003 Nissan Altima. Commence bragging.. now.

Usage: ./genpasswd.pl [OPTION]...
Generate a set of random passwords that match certain criteria.

  -c, --charset=SET    Use the specified charset
  -l, --length=N       Passwords must be exactly N characters long
      --length=N-M     Passwords must be N to M characters long, inclusive
  -n, --number=NUM     Generate NUM passwords (default is 20)
  -r, --require=TYPES  Require at least one of certain characters in password
  -h, --help           Display this help and exit

SET may be one of the following: typeable, alphanumeric, numeric.

TYPES is a comma-separated list of one or more of the following: upper, lower, number, symbol. Any TYPES specified that are not valid with the charset are ignored. Default is all TYPES.

A few months ago, I was asked to make an inventory application for Priceline. I thought it would be simple. But you try making an inventory system for three different IT groups. Make it so that the networking devices and servers are logically “connected” properly, so you can search - for example - for all machines connected to a given core switch. What about tracking depreciation, and controlling who can edit what? Then write scripts that make sure that the information you can get from the Cisco switches matches with what’s in the database.

Freshwater Software has a great site monitoring suite called SiteScope. It allows you to watch dozens of different events and resources on any number of servers. Priceline has more than 4000 monitors set up with this software watching things 24 hours a day. Unfortunately, we have these monitors across 6 servers and 3 data centers in 2 continents. We needed a way to bring all of the SiteScope data together in a single place.

1. Simplified visualization of current warnings and errors, and
2. Baselining and historical trend analysis.

SSM allows us to do both of these. It is able to handle the more than 10 readings per second. The current database has almost 2 months worth of data, is 5.5 GB, and still is reasonably responsive. It’s written in a combination of Perl, C, SQL, JavaScript (using DOM), and HTML.

Using some free GIS data I found online, I made a Manhattan mapping application. Now that Chris has moved to Harlem, I’ve started dusting this code off, trying to get it more functional. I’m hoping to be able to get subway stop data, pre-programmed points of interest, and be able to give point-to-point directions based on some miserliness and willingness-to-walk variables provided by the user.

Go Metric is a web frontend for the GNU application ‘units’. It allows you to convert values between (literally) thousands of different units, both mundane and scientific. It was a quick little ditty to write and I hope to get lots of use out of it.