We needed a CouchDB plugin in the office for some of our servers so I wrote one earlier and added it to the Plugin Store over at ServerDensity.
You can download it at http://plugins.serverdensity.com/couchdb/
It’s a straight forward plugin that exposes all your databases statistics to SD for monitoring allowing you to fully customise your graphs/alerts.
The VPS provider this site runs on, and that we use rather extensively in the office, is currently running a neat little promotion which is very simple. Send them a postcard and you’ll get $10 off your next bill plus you’ll be entered into a competition to win an iPad! I’d love to win an iPad so I can flog it for a few hundred 
)
The competition is open to everyone (UK and USA) and there are only a couple of rules:
To enter, send your postcard to:
VPS.NET
164 North Springcreek Parkway
Providence, Utah 84332 USA
Google has recently launched their own version of public DNS servers, much like OpenDNS. After trying them out briefly this morning, the response time does seem to be very quick from an actual user point of view (browser seems to start downloading sooner than it used to do.)
Google even provides a quote to help people who don’t fully get DNS to understand it, kind of:
Most of us aren’t familiar with DNS because it’s often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names – e.g., www.google.com – into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers – e.g., 74.125.45.100 – that computers use to communicate with one another.
I was just Googling trying to find out if anyone had wrote an application that wraps PuTTY enabling it to support stored sessions in its taskbar icon right click menu when I came across this extremely useful program instead: PuTTY Connection Manager. It’s a very simple application for Windows that sits over PuTTY but provides 2 extremely useful features.
The first feature is a list of all saved sessions so you can just double click and it opens a new PuTTY session inside the application.
The second feature (and this one is great if you’re like us at work and manage lots of nodes) is a simultaneous command function – run the same command across as many PuTTY sessions as you want at once. Yes, type it in once and watch as it’s done on all the PuTTY sessions you specify – marvellous!
For anyone who uses PuTTY, I highly recommend trying this out.
Today is officially the launch of Windows 7 to the general public, people are no doubt throwing their Windows 7 parties everywhere, it’s a day of rejoicing and celebrations, a day to remember those that came before it and hastily forget them again, etc. etc.
The Japanese have decided the only way to celebrate the launch of Windows 7 is to, create a burger (this is a line you’d expect to begin with “The Americans”.) Like many a fast food burger before it, this is heart attack in a bun, and yet I can’t help but wonder if it tastes good. In all fairness though, this is Burger King in Japan so it’s pretty American.
It occured to me when I posted about Peerblock that I neglected to post about a very useful site in regards to it’s use; that site is I-BlockList. It’s a really simple site with some of the most popular services IP ranges there so you can be sure you’re blocking (or allowing) specific things through. For example I play games on Steam and there is a Steam list so I can access the services.
So head on over to the site and grab your block lists, whether you use Peerblock or Peerguardian or any other software that supports the lists for that matter!
One of those little things that help make Windows 7 one of the most user oriented OS’s to come out of Redmond yet – the logon screen can be changed without any 3rd party software allowing more customisation straight out of the box. It’s small, but it’s nice to know Microsoft added it in.
1. Click Start, type Regedit.exe and press ENTER:
2. Create a new DWORD value named OEMBackground
3. Double-click OEMBackground and set 1 as its value data.
4. Exit the Registry Editor.
Next step is to place the background wallpaper (JPEG file) in the following folder:
Note that the info folder doesn’t exist by default. You need to create the info and backgrounds folders manually.
Place the background image file (name it as backgroundDefault.jpg) into the above folder.
For more details, read the full specificaition at the withinwindows blog.
PeerBlock was a “spin off” from PeerGuardian, a program that completely blocks access to certain IP addresses at the network level making it completely impossible to connect to them (or from people on those IP addresses to connect to you.) The reason I love this program so much is it blocks access to known spyware and adware computers making your PC that bit more secure.
PeerBlock 1.0 has just been released, marking the first “stable” version, and one big feature is Windows x64 (Vista and 7) now have a signed driver meaning you no longer have to go into “Ignore Driver Signature” mode at boot-up.
Of course it is also a great piece of software for people who use P2P networks with poor intent as it also can block access to/from known monitoring servers and government addresses.
While I never really got into WoW (I have played, I have characters, I rarely touch it) I do love FFXI and have played many many hours on that game – less now, it just feels dated and that can ruin a game for me.
However, FFXIV is coming soon, sometime in 2010, and I can’t wait for it, a new MMORPG based in a Final Fantasy world, I’m a huge fan of the FF series so this is a no brainer for me. Below is the latest trailer for it. You’ll notice (if you haven’t read much about it yet, the characters look oddly similar to FFXI, that is something SquareEnix stated they wanted to do, keep the mithra, galka, hume and tarutaru styles in the new game so “veterans” of FFXI could transition easily and new players would just treat them as they would any new game.)
I’m torn on this, it has some great ideas (updating interface with dynamic search – real time search Ben?) and it has some big failings (updating interface with resizing objects.)For example, the login screen, rarely seen but those little changes with the moving/scaling image is a great idea; the live search with an updating UI (something as simple as “x items” with each click); and several other things.
Hopefully some of this ideas will be seen and developed for Windows 8.
