28 May – 1 June shared nifty ideas for development, ticketing, Windows monitoring and hotkeys, as well as a couple events to look forward to.
Ronny started by looking at the latest from AutoHotkey and Christian recommended his best ticket system for business.
Gunnar then explained test-driven development and how it reduces the need to debug, while Birger discovered a discarded traffic light that could have been handy as an Icinga/Nagios alerter .
Phillip followed with Part 6 of his NSClient ++ blog series, offering a guide to monitoring various file attributes such as size, age and version.
Lastly, Eva counted down 149 days to OSMC 2012 with a video of a presentation by Christopf Siess – “A Performance Comparison of Nagios Monitoring Solutions”.
She also reflected on RootCamp Berlin 2012 and looked ahead to the Puppet Camp coming to Nuremberg in October, in time for the OSMC. We welcome you to combine the two and join us!
NETWAYS Blog
Neues von AutoHotkey, V2 und AutoHotkey_L
Wir hatten AutoHotkey ja schon einmal vorgestellt und die reine Grundversion ist seit 2009 stable und wird nicht mehr weiter gepflegt. Es gibt aber in den Projekten wie AutoHotkey_L, welches von Lexikos verwaltet wird oder mit AutoHotkey V2 Anpassungen, welche aufeinander aufbauen und die Bedienbarkeit, sowie die Funktionalität erweitern und verbessern sollen.
AutoHotkey_L bildet dabei die Grundversion und die neue V2 ist ein Fork dessen. Zu beachten ist aber, dass die V2 zur Verbesserung auf die Abwärtskompatibilität verzichtet und derzeit noch im Alphastatus ist. Man kann also noch gespannt sein, wie es hier weiter geht. Aber die Funktionalität ist auf jeden Fall schon weit über die reine Automatisierung hinweg.
Zus. kann/muss man aber auch die Arbeit in der Community und der Dokumentation loben. Hier wurden die Hilfen und Tutorials sehr überarbeitet und auch in viele Sprachen zur Verfügung gestellt. Das ganze macht die Nutzung und Einarbeitung leichter.
Weekly Snap: Powershell, AutoHotKey & Rockbox
7 – 11 November was a Windows week, with tips on accessing databases via OSDB and managing hotkeys and script macros, topped off with a celebration of Rockbox.
Carsten started off by showing us how to use OSDB to access databases with Powershell. When an ODBC driver is only available for Windows and no extra script languages should be installed, he suggested Microsoft’s object oriented Powershell that comes with current Windows versions such as Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. Carsten shared an example script to demonstrate how to build a connection to a MSSQL database, run a query and show its results. For him it is ideal for use when developing Icinga plugins for Windows, which use an ODBC driver and are queried via NSClient++.
Following suit, Ronny recommended AutoHotKey for the management of hot keys and script macros in Windows. With the open source script language AutoHotKey, not only can frequently used entries such as “btw” be auto-expanded” to “by the way” but a whole range of queries, functions and applications can be set to respond to particular sequences of keystrokes and mouse clicks. Take a look at the tool’s documentation and wiki to understand the entire range of possibilities.
Last but not least, Ansgar wrote an ode to Rockbox, an alterative open source operating system for MP3 players. To overcome the deficiencies he saw in using the firmware that came with his iPod, he installed Rockbox. Now his player is capable of supporting more file formats, altering tone per equalizers and compressors, as well as being individualized with themes and games. With diverse applications, his iPod can display pictures or read text aloud and be transformed into a calculator or torch – pretty impressive for an open source makeover.
