Category: work

Wed 25 May 2005

BBLISA Presentation Online

here

Posted by Christian Pearce at 9:50PM EDT [ /work | # ]

Wed 04 May 2005

Presenting at BBLISA

I am going present at BBLISA. It is a forum for meeetings and presentations for network and system administrators in the boston metro area. It takes its name from the sister Bay LISA group.

I will be presenting about SysNav and the role it plays in configuration management.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 2:12PM EDT [ /work | # ]

Fri 19 Nov 2004

CfengineDoc WIP

Just finished the CfengineDoc WIP at LISA'04. It went pretty good. I wasn't nervous. I suspect the guy who did a WIP on CANUBI is going to win. I will put up the code shortly.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 3:38PM EST [ /work | # ]

Wed 17 Nov 2004

LISA'04

Back at Lisa. Time is flying. We got the booth setup and it is looking good. The Configuration Management workshop was a success. There are a lot of challenges in this area.

I am going to attempt to get a WIP together for CfengineDoc. I need to spend about two hours to prepare. I think I will just send an email and signup. Hopefully I will get a chance to do that today.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 1:30PM EST [ /work | # ]

Thu 09 Sep 2004

Okay Mister Smarty Pants

I just did a quick review of the Smarty code. Mostly for the sake of getting it out of my system. But really to take a hard look to see if this is what we need for the Middle Layer in SysNav.

Based on what I read and dabbling with Smarty Template Engine, I found it to be just that. Your standard templating engine. It is highly optimized for the html, web and people who have sites that would benefit from such templating systems. I don't think it is going to help improve what we currently have with the ML. And while the prospect of leveraging open source is always enticing, I would have to say it would be a mistake.

The Middle Layer needs to scale better, something not even remotely addressed by Smarty. At best they have some form of caching which could be of interest. But this hardly solves creating thousands of configs every five minutes. Our solution would be to schedule the Middle Layer to run when a configuration update has been made. And if someone modifies the templates on the file system they are going to have to know enough to run the Middle Layer. Just like programmers who have to compile code. And just for sanity sake we can run it once an hour.

The Middle Layer could use better error handling and debugging. This is something Smarty could help with, but I think we just need to write a better Middle Layer to handle this issues. From what I can tell Smarty has a similar approach to handling templates. They would then suffer from the same issues we do when it comes to error handling. As it is we have made great improvements in logging errors.

Finally Smarty doesn't handle object manipulation very well. Knowing that we would end up putting a lot of out code in {PHP} blocks. This just adds another level of syntax to learn and deal with. Plus the locations of where the templates are stored doesn't help or make sense. It searches for the template files in a templates directory for all the include_path directories. Where the Middle Layer has a highly organized and structure directory layout.

The only thing Smarty would be good at doing for us is creating a ton of functions (I am going to guess similar to tags in JSP), for our customers. We could write custom functions for manipulating our APIs. Not something that is going to happen this release. So for now we should lay to rest the notion that Smarty is going to save the Middle Layer day.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 8:56PM EDT [ /work | # ]

Fri 10 Oct 2003

CommNav Gives Back to Open Source Community

Yesterday it was announced at Linux Journel the release of its next generation Web interface development toolkit into the Open Source community. CommNav is giving back to the community by providing PHP Widget Toolkit.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 2:40PM EDT [ /work | # ]

Sun 21 Sep 2003

Photos, Sun Network, DMB, OU and Back to PA

This is going to be a rather large update. I added pictures from my DMB concert at Hershey with Lael and the Sun Network Conference at San Francisco. I still have some pictures that I need to develop. I left my camera when I went to the Fisherman's Wharf. So I picked up a disposable.

The concert's were a absolute blast. I got to hear all my favorite songs and then some. The Sun Network was also very cool. It was good to see Sun is still committed to their vision. They are doing very exciting things. I got to ride a cable car. The only place in the world with they type of public transit.

As I mentioned earlier, my time in OU has been cut short due to logistics. I will be coming to work with OU from a far with planning. I will be traveling back to PA at the end of the month. I look forward to being back and will see everyone soon.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 3:31PM EDT [ /work | # ]

Sun 14 Sep 2003

I am leaving PA for OU

My trip back to PA is just about over. I really enjoyed the time back. I am going to be in San Francisco next week for the SunNetwork Conference sponsored by Sun Microsystems. I will be leaving to come back to PA at the end of the month. This is very exciting news. I am very happy to be coming back.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 10:04AM EDT [ /work | # ]

Sun 15 Jun 2003

Back from USENIX and a Broken Box

I rode back from San Antonio yesterday. It took about eight hours. I then proceeded to fix a server at the University of Oklahoma till 3:30AM. I planned on going to bed early and getting my ride on to come home. But now I am going to take three days to get home instead of two. The machine had a bad patch, then the disk failed. Fortunately it was mirrored. We got a new disk about 11:00PM then rode down to Norman. We installed it, synced the mirrors, tested both sides and set up monitoring of Solaris Disksuite. I am going to leave in the next hour or two. I think the weather will hold out for me like it did on my ride up from San Antonio.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 1:14PM EDT [ /work | # ]

Tue 10 Jun 2003

Bonus Ride: San Antonio, Texas for USENIX

At the request of a great friend I am updating my website. I am on the bonus ride of the trip. It is about 450 miles from Moore, OK to San Antonio, TX. Not exactly a drop in the bucket. USENIX is a conference for Unix Administrators. People present papers and give talks. I never went to USENIX, but I went to LISA several times. I should have pictures from the conference so stay tuned.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 5:22PM EDT [ /work | # ]

Sat 18 Jan 2003

First Spam Conference at MIT

I just got back from the first Spam Conference up at MIT. I posted an article about it.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 12:00AM EST [ /work | # ]

Sun 03 Nov 2002

LISA 02 WIP

I am giving a WIP at LISA 02 this year about the SysNav project and taking it open source. For more information please see sysnav.commnav.com. Please note it is still a Work in Progress itself.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 12:00AM EST [ /work | # ]

Mon 03 Dec 2001

LISA 01 Cfengine Workshop

I am giving a presentation at the cfengine workshop at LISA 2001 in San Diego. The topic is Dynamic Cfengine. This topic involves tying LDAP and PHP into a frontend for generating cfengine code on the fly, based on the policy stored in LDAP. The slides for my presentation are here. Once the workshop is complete a paper will follow.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 12:00AM EST [ /work | # ]

Mon 12 Mar 2001

Starting Work at CommNav

I accepted an offer with CommNav, Inc. I want to take the time to personally thank everyone who took the time to review my resume and portfolio. Please feel free to return and see my accomplishments as I will be updating my portfolio on a regular basis.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 12:00AM EST [ /work | # ]

Sun 18 Feb 2001

Welcome prospective employer,

I am currently seeking a new position. I put together this website to further promote myself and my career. Please feel free to take a look around. Most of the information on this site has been reproduced on monster.com as well as on my paper resume. Please take a look at my portfolio section as it outlines three of the major projects I have worked in the past two year.

I am looking to do interviews the week of Feburary 18th, 2001 and will review offers the week of Feburary 25th, 2001. I will accept a job the week of March 4th, 2001 and am available to start work March 12th, 2001.

If you have any questions, concerns or comments. Please feel free to contact me. See my contact link to the left.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 12:00AM EST [ /work | # ]