Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Diaspora

I have been avoiding social networks for a bit lately. Facebook didn't provide any meaningful content, and Google+ didn't have my friends or family actively posting. A friend of mine invited me to Diaspora. I have invited a few friends and family members as I did with G+. Facebook has an established presence and as such it is hard to contend with.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

New Relic

Guess who will be getting a Nerd Life T-Shirt? After visiting the http://thedailywtf.com/ and seeing the http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Announcing-the-Olympiad-of-Misguided-Geeks-at-The-Daily-WTF--Part-2.aspx  anti-programming contest I had to sign up with New Relic. Not just for the opportunity to possibly win the contest, but also for the awesome looking t-shirt.

Wait you want one too? Well it probably isn't too late (unless it is). Head on down to New Relic and sign up. The account was free. After installing a VM through VirtualBox I fired up instance of Fedora. Support for Node.js is comming soon, but until then you can monitor mobile iOS and Android apps. You can monitor Ruby, .NET, Java, PHP, and Python apps. They also have support for monitoring servers. I slammed together a quick Python app so I could see what kind of reports I would get. I followed the simple install instructions and soon I was view all kinds of valuable information from my app. Error rates, server response times, throughput, and many more metrics that could provide key insights into application use. They also have server monitoring tools. A big win for anyone needing to monitor an application from the ground up.

Here is a link to their pricing page:
http://newrelic.com/pricing