The RageNET Weblog

Well, web 2.0, for me has a lot to do with making data available in an agnostic manner, wether that be via RSS or via a web services API. Data tied to a presentation layer, such as a traditional website, is data that has no future outside that website. The rise of mash-ups is enabled by data being decoupled from it’s presentation. Being combined with other data makes that data more valuable.

Until now you’ve needed to be a reasonably adept programmer to put together different data sources to create mash-ups. But not now. Yahoo has just launched an application that allows anyone with the most rudementary conceptual knowledge of programming to create new mashups.

Yahoo Pipes is the new application, and it allows anyone to easily string together web data sources and funnel them through some rudimentary filters to create new mash-ups. Yahoo has been a bit absent with the whole innovation thing since Google became the industries’ darling but I think this marks their comeback in a big way.

There are a good series of articles on the O’Reilly Radar about why it’s important and how it works. Tech crunch has a good mention about Yahoo! Launching Pipes and There’s a nice bit about it from Yahoo MySQL guru Jeremy Zawodny.

The excitement about this product is very high in the tech community, resulting in someone as big as yahoo having their new service overwhelmed. So be patient when trying it out until they’ve got some new servers spun up!

Technorati Tags: pipes, yahoo

Last year I wrote an article on building a self-healing network with off the shelf software components. If you are responsible for managing a large UNIX/Linux network it’s a must-read…

An excerpt from the article:

Computer immunology is a hot topic in system administration. Wouldn’t it be great to have our servers solve their own problems? System administrators would be free to work proactively, rather than reactively, to improve the quality of the network.

This is a noble goal, but few solutions have made it out of the lab and into the real world. Most real-world environments automate service monitoring, then notify a human to repair any detected fault. Other sites invest a large amount of time creating and maintaining a custom patchwork of scripts for detecting and repairing frequently recurring faults. This article demonstrates how to build a self-healing network infrastructure using mature open source software components that are widely used by system administrators. These components are NAGIOS and Cfengine.

ONLamp.com — Building a Self-Healing Network

Technorati Tags: nagios, cfengine, healing