Somewhere out there!

In the OSS document management (DMS) space there are two primary choices: Alfresco and KnowledgeTree (KT). Other systems that do content management, like Plone or Drupal, are often suggested as DMSs, but in my opinion while they maybe great for managing websites they aren’t really designed for a business DMS.

I noticed some issues while writing a blog entry:

[emptysands@smithers:~] w
 20:48:51 up 26 days, 19:59,  6 users,  load average: 24.71, 20.75, 13.89
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT

… 30 minutes later …

[emptysands@smithers:~] w
 21:26:52 up 26 days, 20:37, 10 users,  load average: <strong>558.90</strong>, 537.18, 406.38
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT

before they finally get the reboot actioned. They use filers and the diskio was low:

[emptysands@smithers:~] vmstat
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa
 3 217 766800 280684   4668 176616    0    1     8     2    9     9 54  8 35  2

so it was maybe a rouge process. Not sure exact what the details are yet, I’m sure Dreamhost will post them in due course.

Another useful PDF tool is pdfsam. This will rip apart and glue back together your PDFs in a simple basic interface.

I’ve used Guaranteed PDF Decrypter a few times to remove passwords restrictions from PDFs. It is a clean, simple and easy to use product. I can even crack some PDFs, but only passwords with 40 bit, which basically isn’t much.

Thanks to this post I’ve discovered ssh-copy-id. I’ve thought about putting a quick script like this myself in the past, but given this is included in the standard openssh distribution is makes life much easier.

I was playing around a little with ThinkFree Online over the weekend. It handle quite well the matrix math methods I use to generate many of my business analysis spreadsheets. Methods that I’ve tried in Google Docs but haven’t been able to get work. Equations like {sum((A1:A10<=10)*(A1:A10>0)*B1:B10)} and LOOKUPs. I don’t use pivot tables so I didn’t try those.

Worth a look if you need something online, they even have a self-hosted server version that runs on tomcat.

A great line.

My Views on OSS ESM (Part 1) | John M Willis – ESM BLOG:

I had to present to Jeff Schulman at Gartner, at the time, the infamous ops automation guru at Gartner. Jeff is another guy I used to argue with a lot back in the early days of ESM automation. Although I can find no record of this on the Internet, I am pretty sure Jeff Schulman coined the phrase marketecture. During my presentation Jeff didn’t listen to a word I had to say. All he kept asking was when he was going to get to meet Aubery Chernick, the founder of Candle. It was then I learned my first lesson about analyst groups. It had nothing to do with the technology and all about the smooze.

Most of my mobile devices have management tools for difference auto-config at locations. Devicescape seems to be a more generic free option, that would make it easier setup new device and manage the config information generically over several devices. I’m not sure I understand their business model yet though.

From jkontherun.

Quite a useful list of Office 2.0 applications that are being used at the Office 2.0 Conference.

AskoziaPBX is Monowall derived embedded version of Asterisk. It weighs in at about 10Mb. It could also be useful for larger systems where something like AsteriskNow is overkill and only the extra hardware power is need to drive more phones.