Jobin@CSS Corp

Monitoring Forge [www.monitoringforge.org]

2010-06-25T02:28:00.000-07:00

What is Monitoringforge [www.monitoringforge.org]?
This was a site which was setup by GWOS, to provide a one stop shop for anything and everything related to monitoring software. i.e Tools, Plugins, Projects containing different applications which can be incorporated into the Monitoring systems. According to the community "MonitoringForge is the IT monitoring toolkit epicenter for all open source projects and plugins that anyone can use and contribute to at any time. It's the monitoring knowledge neighborhood".The community has been slowly and steadily gaining new members and users who are contributing back to the community by way of interacting in forums, wiki. More details on the concept of this community is provided in http://monitoringforge.org/displaypage.php?content=footer&act=1

How is the community run?
The monitoring community runs in the concept of transparent governance. The details has been provided in http://monitoringforge.org/plugins/mwiki/index.php/Www/transparent_governance.

What is the Benefit to the community/Sys-Administer?
Excluding the vast amount of projects and plugins which is present in the site. The community has been also running three important projects which can be beneficial to the community

Job Posting Board. The idea behind this project is to connect job opportunities with participants. Community members who are actively participating in the community, would benefit by been noticed companies, who would require the similar special skill set been exhibited by your community involvement.
Advertise in Monitoring forge. Folks who have projects/plugins which would help the community as a whole can advertise in the site. If you are interested in learning more, please contact Tara Spalding at tspalding@gwos.com
Write the Flippin' Monitoring Manual - This project allows all user and developers to learn about the various Open source monitoring system and management platforms which are available currently. They have also included HOWTO on general usage, options/way to extend your monitoring system with a plugin. They also talk about the various platforms API's and developers kits which can be used by Sys-Admin Folks.

So, what are you waiting go register in the site and participate in the community.

Projects in monitoringforge [www.monitoringforge.org]

2010-06-14T02:15:00.000-07:00

Recently, I have going through the Monitoring forge site to understand the types of projects and plug-ins which is present in the site. I did come across some very interesting ones.

First one is the project named pandora [http://monitoringforge.org/projects/pandora]. This project actually uses agents for both local and remote monitoring of site/systems. The best part is this tool works on all other OS i.e Linux, Windows, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and my fav BSD.

According to the owner of the project "Pandora FMS could detect a network interface down, a defacement in your website, a memory leak in one of your server application, or the movement of any value of the NASDAQ new technology market. As it’s name says (FMS stands for Flexible Monitoring System) it’s very flexible and this is one of it’s big strengths, it started as a data-center monitoring software, and this is still it’s main use, but thanks to it’s flexibility it can be used to monitor almost anything.

Pandora FMS can use local agents available for almost any operating system, or remote checks done with different technologies (SNMP, WMI, TCP, UDP, ICMP, HTTP…), there is even hardware modules called Octopod (following the same philosophy of flexibility and ease of use as pandora) that can “speak” with Pandora FMS directly just by attaching the sensors and adding the PandoraFMS server address." The development work for this tool is done by a small Spanish company called ArticaST, located out of Madrid(Spain). Checkout the project for details.

The second project which I wanted to talk about was the Rivermuse project [http://monitoringforge.org/projects/rivermuse]. Now this tool was built as a next generation Event Management platform for agile infrastructures. According to the owner of the project the core principles of this project are " 1. An open source community-driven development model where practitioners and customers contribute ideas, techniques and code for the betterment of event and fault management 2. Fundamental innovation in the architecture and business processes of event and fault management that results in dramatic simplifications and reduction of the cost of ownership 3. A clear focus on building a ‘change ready’ event and fault management platform that can meet the needs of dynamic infrastructures of today and into the future."

I am sure this tool would be really useful for the community and the users as whole.

Have a look at these projects and post your comments to Tara Spalding [tspalding at groundworkopensource dot com]. Who would be able to provide more information on these projects.

Joined the Ubuntu community

2010-04-09T23:54:00.001-07:00

I been thinking for some time ways to contribute back to the community. I just made my fist baby steps to the same. Joined the Ubuntu community and have started reviewing the unassigned bugs ..its going to take time for me to understand the process. However it seems to be fun ..and let see how it goes ..

My Skydive - long long time back

2010-04-09T23:14:00.001-07:00

>>snip
See how brave and bold our jobin is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YibFE5njMno

--
Regards,
T.Shrinivasan
>>

I wish could do one more jump some time soon. It was an awesome feeling ....

Saturday - Working in Office

2010-04-09T22:34:00.001-07:00

I am currently in the office working on a Saturday...the fun part is there is no one in the office only me and me....

I had asked my team to come over to the office to complete the devlierables. However most of the folks has decided to either to work from home or not come to office at all.

I am really happy folks are actually from home. I know they would be more productive at home since they do not have too many distractions :). Its 11:00 am now ...lets see how this goes ...

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Nested Labels and Message Sneak Peek

2010-04-09T04:20:00.000-07:00

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Nested Labels and Message Sneak Peek

Yahoo Messg in Ubuntu with Voice and Video

2010-04-01T01:11:00.001-07:00

The other day , was trying to use the webcam and voice feature of Yahoo in ubtunu. What you know there isn't an offical yahoo version with support for these two features. What is more bad is what we can download is a legacy one ...:(. Found an alternative one however did not had a time to experiment and try it out ...

Has any one found a alternative one to chat with folks using the windows version of yahoo with voice and video....

Developers -Interview Process

2010-04-01T01:06:00.001-07:00

My good friend has posted a note in google buzz placing in my blog for a more wider audience. Thanks Raj.
>>snip
Have been interviewing a lot of candidates for the Java opening. Generally I give them a simple scenario and ask them to develop a small solution / application which solves the scenario on a system with MySql as the DB.

They can use which ever tool they want like eclipse / netbeans or plain old notepad and java compilation and all the Jar files related to Struts, Spring, Hibernate, MySql, Swing, Vaadin, ibatis along with Tomcat will be provided to them.

Big deal !!! right... well the catch is there would be no internet connection to that system ( means no google and no cut and paste business).

Guess what almost 20% refused to sit in the system, and rest 70 % suffocated in just 15 mins.

Makes me think on what is the real standard of my current team and how many of them can work without google ( the very idea of no internet scares them a lot :) ). Got to think some way to improve the quality of my team.

GMail and FF featues - which I use daily

2010-03-24T04:43:00.001-07:00

First series of posts which talks about my experience of working in Gmail along with FF.

Small snip of my Gmail Inbox

Few features which is of interest to me in gmail are provided below:

Multiple Inbox - this is a awesome gadget which I use extensively along with the gtd gmail option. I have labeled some and shown in my pic pasted above.
Custom Keyboard short cuts[gadgets] - I use the keyboard short cut extensively in my day to day activities. Enable the keyboard via the setting option and you can view the list by typing in shift+?
Color labeling
Blogger snippet in the left side bar - I use this option to quickly post in stuff into my blog.
Google Calendar
Google Docs snippet
Themes
Undo send option -Gadgets - very useful when you are some one like me who does not have patience to review the typed email.
Attachment Reminder - extremely useful and saves a lot of embarrassment especially when sending customer emails -:).
Signature Tweaks
Mark as Read Button
Got the wrong Bob?

In FF 3 with Gmail:

I use GTD for gmail extensively along with multiple inbox to make my work productive. I would personally recommend anyone to use this feature to make sure all the mails are properly handled/reviewed.
Tree style tab for having a indented form of tabs when viewing multiple pages in the same site.

I will try to add some more information, as and when I do find time. HTH for some folks, who have never heard of these options.

Ubuntu Manual Translation in Tamil

2010-03-23T02:05:00.001-07:00

>>excerpts from my friend Srini post

Date : 21 / 03 / 10 Week : 45 People : 13+1

Session : 10 am to 8 pm
Location : Shrini's Home

It is one of the 2010 goals of KanchiLUG, to bring a Tamil book for ubuntu linux. We goto colleges/public events to talk about linux often. We feel that it will be so helpful for Tamil students to learn linux easily with a Tamil guide.

Even, help.ubuntu.com or ubuntuguide.org have tons and tons of information, Tamil students gets tough to read them. It is a breeze to learn the things in mother-tongue. It is true. If there was no magazine called "Tamil Computer", I wont be into this field.

We keep on talking on bringing a book for linux. We scared on where to start? fortunately, Ubuntu-Manual team come up with a great effort to bring a handbook for Ubuntu, written by community. :-)

We got a chance to review it. Wow! This is what we need in tamil.
Discussed about this in #ubuntu-manual at irc.freenode.net.
That team is nice and they encouraged a lot.

ubuntu-tam mailing list members gave their suggestions.

Our team lacks in Tamil typing. Still, we have some 3-4 Tamil typists in our LUG. we planned to make use of them.

Today, morning 12 of us met in my home around 10.00 am.

The real fun started.

We formed 6 teams to translate 1 chapter each. we found it is hard to translate in pure Tamil. Decided to do our best in Tamil and use English words as it is in essential places.

Kidding, shouting, fighting for right word, seeking Tamil dictionary, pain of continuous writing, photo-shoot, poses... made the event joyful.

My mom and dad made us tireless with their snacks, tea, juice and sweet words. They are so proud of the team on this work.

Three typing tigers started to break the keyboards. They typed most of the todays work. 2 guys updated their work in the launchpad too.

We decided to keep this work on in the weekdays too in homes and meet in next Sunday to do more.

Thanks a lot for the following members for making this wonderful day.

1. Dhasthageer
2. Rajkumar
3. Elango
4. Manigandan
5. Loganathan
6. Logesh
7. Selvamani
8. Balakrishnan
9. Praveen
10. Yasir
11. Jagan
12. Shanmugam
13. Arulalan
14. Shrinivasan ( Ya. Its me )

Thanks for Ponmozhi and Thamaraiselvan for giving their laptops for the event.

We discussed about the upcoming "Ubuntu Global Bug Jam" on next sunday, march 28 and Google Summer of Code 2010.

Here are some fun-filled snapshots of the event.
http://picasaweb.google.com/kanchilug/UbuntuManualTranslation#

You can Download the original English ubuntu-manual here.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-manual

You are welcome to see and correct the Tamil translations, here.
https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu-manual/main/+pots/ubuntu-manual/ta/+translate

ஸ்ரீனிவாசன் . த

--
Regards,
T.Shrinivasan

How....?

2010-03-19T03:59:00.001-07:00

'How' is the word. I been asked almost every time other time in these last few weeks. Sometimes or most of the times it feels great to explain items. However there is sometimes I really feel is it really necessary for me to explain each of the items.

I suppose everyone goes through this feeling on of off in every day.

Aree Hills -Trek on Dec 19, 2009

2010-02-12T03:33:00.000-08:00

I have been wanting to place these pictures, for some time. So here it goes.

That is me, Raje and Raghav on right. I know the body language shows some thing else. However that is just about to start the trek :)

The next image is the whole team along with Mohan's cousin getting ready for the trek.

Dry-log this was the first spot point. Finding the first spot point, would take some amount of time. I am not mentioning the route or amount of time it would reach this location due to various reasons.

Yes folks, that is the CTC team in our spot. Obviously our expression in this pic says it all.

MonitoringForge - forge for IT administrators

2010-02-11T23:27:00.001-08:00

Forging the Meta-Forge - Community - ComputerworldUK

MonitoringForge is designed to appeal to IT administrators who want
to compare and understand the differences between various open source
monitoring tools and plugins available today, facilitating the
selection of open source monitoring software over proprietary
offerings.

Additionally, MonitoringForge provides a unified, professional
project and plugin listing for all open source solutions involving
monitoring. This web platform is designed to give the project developer
control of how their material is presented and managed.

Considering that I was one of the person responsible for this project. It feels great to hear such good review.

Monitoring Forge -www.monitoringforge.org

2010-02-05T02:17:00.001-08:00

This was a project which was handed exclusively by the Project Management team, i.e me and Vijayan. The first phase, required the site to be hosted with our core functionality and features from ESP. This phase was done some time back. The feedback from the client, has been positive so far.

The Second phase was done recently. In the second phase the PM team comprising of Padma, Ranijini, Rajesh were able to make sure the requirements was gathered and documented in a clear manner. This ensured that there was clear cut objectives to be achieved, with the features which was requested by the client.

It has been a rewarding to be working for this project until now. Since we worked with a small team, we have been able to make sure we are on-time with our project deliverables and also making sure the quality is on place.

Trekking in Nagalla Falls on Dec 12, 2009

2009-12-18T01:39:00.001-08:00

Us the venture-pals group made a second trip to Nagalla falls. Though the actual plan was to visit Aree Hills. We had to make a last minute change, due to our democracy process. Thanks Mohan :).

For some this was a first trip to Nagalla. For me and few other folks this was the second trip. The first trip wasn't a very enjoyable one since we did the trekking in a very hot and humid conditions. We got completely dehydrated due to the heat. However this time around it was a very pleasant climate. It actually started drizzling just half hour after we started the trek.

This time around we had to make a round about trip to reach the "prescribed route" provided by CTC. That was primarily because due to the flash floods in AP which happened some time back, due to which the other side of the DAM was completely filled with water.

Which was good in one way, we had to trek through rocky terrain for some amount of time before we reach the first stopover [Small pond with a lot of tiny fishes:)]. During the trek we had asked Shobi to tell us her version of their [Mohan and Shobi] love story.

The information was provided in a continuous manner, keeping our otherwise idle mind occupied. It also made folks to speed up their trek so that they can pick up on the juicy bits of information :). Thanks Shobi.

Sadly our first stop-over, actually became our final stop-over, since some of the folks did not want to continue the trek upwards. They loved the cool fresh water so much that we spent ~ 2 hours in the same location.

Personally I wanted to continue with the trek, however democracy won again and we had continue our trek back to the starting point.

During our return trek Shobi continued with her love story. We actually stopped near the dam, sat down in the nearby rocks to facilitate Shobi with completing her story. It was a joy hearing all the little tits bits of information it made us understand the amount of planning/tasks they had done during their pre-marriage days :).

After Shobi and Mohan completed their story we got back to our parked cars and continue back to Chennai.

The end ....

Essentia community for students -part 2

2009-11-21T08:45:00.001-08:00

As per my previous post, I had talked about the following points or action items.

Come up with projects which would be useful for students.
Projects should be something which can be provided back to community
Need to flesh definite milestones, requirements

However even after continuous followup and numerous meeting this project did not succeed as expected. One of the foremost issue was with our students college schedule and other commitments. Second we completely miscalculated the amount of hand holding which we needed to provide the students on moving the project forward. Lastly the community communication and working in the full view of the public was on overkill for folks since this is first time they were getting experienced to the open source way of working.

Note: All my post's are my personal views. These views do not represent the opinion of my employer or any other organization.

Wake up Sid

2009-11-21T05:13:00.001-08:00

Today(21-11-09) watched the movie Wake up Sid and I was blown away by the concept. Sometimes or most of the time I was able to identify myself with the main character since my character did resemble the same kind of carefree guy who does not have any hazzle in life. Use to take like life as it is, did not have any goal or did not have any clear idea on what I should do with my life. I am sure most of my friends would agree wholly with this characterization. I suppose us kind of guys do need a guiding star in the form of girl/woman to open the lid or dark shades from our eyes and usher us to reality.

Essentia Community for Students in code.essentiaforge.com

2009-09-11T11:19:00.001-07:00

This is an initiative from the Essentia end to provide college students an opportunity to participate and understand the intricacies of working in an Open Source project. Give them a taste of Open source, provide them a real world experience of working in cutting edge technologies and best practices which are followed when working on project.

Hence in collaboration with IEEE and CDAC we have started a program were in students can use our platform in community communication and develop project/tools using our platform. We have hosted this platform in code.essentiaforge.com.

Our aim was to be a solution provider for the community development of open source projects/ tools. Essentia ESP provides a whole lot of collaboration utilities and we wanted to measure the students on the following items

Activity in the project
Usage of the tools present in the site

We have about eight colleges and forty eight students split in six groups spreading across college.

Some of the challenges faced by Students:

Communication gap
Discomfort in using tools that we have built in the forge site
Don’t have clear picture on the technologies and the project, we neither have a clear way to educate them

Some of the challenges we faced:

The project given at first were too complex, needs to broken down.
All the projects members should have the knowledge of using LAMP technologies (this need not be the case in real life).
Most of the students have knowledge in core Java and doesn’t have experience in Web based programming.
About 10% of students and faculty have actually registered and have logged in only once into the site
Mentoring.

Hence to resolve the following items we came up with these actions items:

Come up with projects which would be useful for students.
Projects should be something which can be provided back to community
Need to flesh definite milestones, requirements

In the next post will talk more about the results of these actions items...

Whats new in Essentia

2009-08-20T01:33:00.001-07:00

A new client has signed up with us and I have been completely involved in the Project Management aspect. This has been really different experience for us. Though this project is small in its scale of changes to our product it still been a challenge for us. In this project, time-lines and change order requests both internal and external needed to be extremely controlled and we are still refining the process every day.

I have tried to incorporate some of the Scrum Methodologies in this project. IMO it has brought in a more transparent environment for the cross functional teams. However there is a lot more streamlining of this process needs to be done.

Our PM team has spent considerable amount of their time and energy to make sure the requirement/use cases and features elaboration reaches the Dev on time. Our Dev guys have also spent most of their weekends at the office trying to make sure we reach the time-lines.

Overall it has been sometimes exciting and tiring ~ 2 months of work which involved a lot of meetings, discussion with client and internally. We are almost there just few more lose ends to be tied up.

User Experience - Reworking Search

2009-06-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

User experience is an ocean. The depth which is present can never be measured. I am very happy that we now have a In-House User Experience Architect who would navigate our ESP ship in this vast ocean called User Experience. He joining the team has brought tremendous amount of value for Essentia.

We just had first round of review with our clients on the re-worked Search UI and I must say all our clients have been very impressed with the work so far. This work would really help our clients and ESP product in providing a rich and rewarding experience to users.

As product owners there are times when we just completely overlook the User Experience front of the feature and we now have a guy who with his vast experience can provide us with really valuable feedback and tweaks to improve the presentation of our environment.

Blog Post from Brian Gentile CEO of Jaspersoft

2009-05-15T02:06:00.000-07:00

The CEO of Jaspersoft Brian Gentile has blogged discussing about the Paris Release and has provided us a very good feedback.

I am happy that Jasper has officially declared that they are now in full production mode and have moved away from the Beta mode.

Agile Development at Essentia

2009-05-14T02:41:00.000-07:00

We have been contemplating for some time in moving to a more robust and faster way of providing new features, tools to our clients and market. Finally have started to take small baby steps to an Agile kind of model in Software Development however we still have a long way to go...

One of the first of things which needs refinement is amount of time we spend in meetings discussing about features and other important client objectives. I am hoping that by incorporating the Agile Methodology we make the meeting shorter and precise to the point. I have heard that the Stand-Up is one such concept present in Agile which takes care of this process.

The next thing which I am very interested is the concept of Sprints, abstract methodology of Agile called Scrum and the ever famous Scrum Master. I have seen this Sprints/Scrum Concept been used effectively by one of our Clients like Openbravo. I am excited with this concept and am really interested in how things would shape up for us in the Product Management world.

I am still learning about this Agile concept and its going to be a fun ride for sure ....

Press Release from Jasper for Paris Release

2009-05-12T03:52:00.000-07:00

My previous post explained about the new features which has been provided in the Paris release. Now we have got some very good press coverage via the press release done by Jasper for Paris Release.

IMO getting recognition from our customer's for the all hard work done in incorporating the new features and providing a strong framework for customer is the Big Win. We hope that by providing the best of the breed tools and features our customer would be able to build a strong community which lives, breathes and thrives in our environment.

Way to go Essentia.... Lets keep up the good work and win more customers and people who would love to explore in the Essentia ESP environment

Openbravo Forge

2009-04-30T22:57:00.000-07:00

On March 18, 2009 we were able set up a new forge site for the Openbravo Community. We had been working for considerable amount of time with Jordi Mas and his team from Openbravo in coming up with Openbravo Forge site.

This site was built with the objective of coming up with a collaboration platform for the partners/third parties to develop applications which would synergize with the Openbravo applications thereby increasing the value and portability for various clients of Openbravo

We have been very pleased with our efforts so far in building this new forge with Openbravo as one of partners. There are two things which stands apart from Jasperforge which is also running the Paris instance of ESP platform

Incoporating Single Sign On(CAS) for Openbravo Forge
Adding web service in the core product which allowed us in hosting the central repository and modularity repository of Openbravo

It has been very pleasant experience working Jordi and his team we hope to continue this partnership in coming up with new and exciting features with would be extremelly benefical to the Openbravo Community.

Jasperforge upgraded to Essentia 2.5 release

2009-04-22T03:35:00.000-07:00

On April 20, 2009 we upgraded the Jasperforge (www.jasperforge.org) site to Essentia 2.5 version. This release was codenamed "Paris". We brought in a lot of cool features in this in release like

Google Gadgets

Increases the visibility of Forge site or your project using Google Gadgets. Gadgets displaying latest information about Forge and All projects are now available for embedding into any application that supports gadgets for example, your iGoogle page or Google desktop. Be constantly in touch with Forge activity using Gadgets. These gadgets are searchable in Google Gadget library. You can embed them to any application of your choice.

To view and use your Forge Google gadgets, click on ‘Gadgets’ link in the top navigation menu.

Mantis Integration

Mantis is easily the most popular and accepted bug tracking tool. It not only includes a wide set of features to make bug tracking complete, it is also user friendly and quick to adapt.

In EssentiaESP, with every project that gets created, a Mantis instance for usage within project is invoked. To access Mantis for a project, click on ‘Tracker’ tab in the project.

MediaWiki Integration

Like Mantis, MediaWiki is the most popular Wiki tool. Along with its own rich set of functionalities, it has several plugins that can be integrated to extend the features. In Paris release of EssentiaESP, MediaWiki along with its plugins for Printable Versions, Recent Changes and Search have been integrated.

In EssentiaESP, with every project that gets created, a Wiki instance for usage within project is invoked. To access Wiki for a project, click on ‘Wiki’ tab in the project.

RSS feeds

RSS feeds for most tools are available in Paris release of EssentiaESP. Feeds are available for site activity (most active projects, most active users etc), activity across all public projects on forge (number of messages, number of bugs etc.) and for individual project activities.

Access Site RSS by clicking on Site RSS link in the top navigation menu.

News

Share project announcements with the team using the News features. New Paris feature includes ability to comment on News items.

Integrated Google Search

You can now perform exhaustive search of your EssentiaESP instance along with other related sites using Google indexer.

Native Search

Coupled with the Google Search indexer is an improved Native Search. You can now perform extensive cross project and cross tool searches.

Blogs: Wordpress Blog Integration

Wordpress has been integrated for the Blogging needs of the community. It supports all functionalities for Wordpress. Blogs page can be reached by clicking ‘Blogs’ link in the top navigation menu.