Xaprb

I spent a little time yesterday doing some things with the “summary” tool from Aspersa. I added support for summarizing status and configuration of Adaptec and LSI MegaRAID controllers. I also figured out how to write a test suite for Bash scripts, so most major parts of the tool are fully tested now. I learned a lot more sed and awk this weekend.

There is really only one way to get status of Adaptec controllers (/usr/StorMan/arcconf), but the LSI controllers can be queried through multiple tools. I added support for MegaCli64, as long as it’s located in the usual place at /opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64. I am looking for feedback and/or help on supporting other methods of getting status from the LSI controllers, such as megarc and omreport. If you can contribute sample output from these tools, please attach them as a file to a new issue report on the project’s issue tracker. (Don’t paste them as text, please — formatting and whitespace will get mangled. Tabs and spaces need to be preserved.)

I am slowly gaining insight into how best to write a similar summary tool for MySQL servers. The goals of this tool are very specific — including things like diff’able output. I’m figuring out what went wrong with Maatkit’s mk-audit tool and how to go about it differently.

I have an ingrained (possibly even genetic) aversion to stock images. Actually, not all stock: just the vacuous kind. You know what I mean: like the politically-correct, gender-balanced, racially-balanced, age-diverse ones where people are all smiling and pointing at a computer screen you can’t see. Ugh!

(Photo credit: istockphoto.com)

There are many reasons not to use images like this. I guess it’s okay in some situations — for example when you just want a smiling, attractive woman with a customer-service headset to reinforce that you’ve come to the right place for support. However, even these really don’t have to be stock images. One of my former employers used their own employees for such photos, almost exclusively, and it made the site much more real. And there are plenty of examples of companies that use photos of their own employees and get “realness” as a result. If I’m not mistaken, Title Nine does so except for certain things, such as underwear models (for obvious reasons).

However, one great reason to eschew stock: other people will re-use the same image. A famous example from a few years ago: the cover image of Head First Design Patterns was a stock photo that also appeared in a commercial for a feminine hygiene product.

This incident was actually pretty widely linked on the Internet at that time. So no one will ever make that mistake again!

Or will they? Witness: the cover of the MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA Certification Guide, the xTuple Home Page, and the cover of the MegaRAID Management Suite documentation.

Interestingly, I ran across all three over-usages of this image in one day, completely by accident. Are there other places this image is used? I’d bet there are.

Who cares? Well, the images that go on the cover of your book, your brochure, or your website become part of your image. If someone else then uses the same image, they can (accidentally or otherwise) exert some control over what people think of your product or company.

If this matters — and it almost certainly does — you should just get some of your own employees, hire a good photographer, and go into your own server room (or beg a friend to let you into theirs) for a photo.

On the subject of image, I’ve just gone to a photographer for some new portraits of myself, and I’m also hiring someone to design a logo for Maatkit (for a new website, and for t-shirts to give away at the upcoming conference). I’ll post more about that later.