Whoa! I was just thinking that I need something like this for a smart RSS aggregation agent I am designing. An open source search engine that I can completely interface with via XML-RPC is what I need to build indexes and tables to make my agent very smart, very quickly based on key words and phrases the agent's owner enters. What would be even better is if Nutch has a special flag to search only RSS feeds. This post brought my attention to Nutch. Thanks, Dave.

posted: 11:41:34 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

I find out today that the entire past two weeks of data collection, conference calls, and wrangling could have been avoided with better communication. EMC has a tool that runs on a host and collects all of the data they need to perform their planning and design. The only thing is that they utility grabs a lot more information than they need to do planning and design. So, they make their customers collect all the data they need rather than scaling down or modifying the utility for planning and design purposes. I just found this out today. I have created similar utilities for very specific environments using Windows scripts or Unix shell scripts. So, why doesn't EMC lead with the utility and simply ask their customers to send them the output files? I posed this question to a number of EMC folks today and didn't get one acceptable answer. They should have at least given us a choice to use the utility or execute a manual data collection process rather than forcing a manual process on us. This is the type of stuff that gets me fired up to look for an alternative to EMC.

posted: 11:00:23 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

We have got buy in and approval on the data center cost allocation model that we have been developing. Now comes the interesting part: designing and building the application. Iâve already begun to identify the data sources and sketch out the interfaces. The primary data transfer method will be XML-RPC. I also want to build RSS feeds for each of the entities that will be relying on this system to get updates about their costs in the data center. These RSS feeds will alert the business owners to cost changes as their environment changes. There will also be a reporting interface with a set of canned reports as well as a data-mining interface. A permalink will exist for each entityâs current month charges. This application will be built using as many Open Source components as possible.

posted: 10:52:06 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()