Monthly Archives: September 2010

Splunk helps make logs transparent, but pricing murky

I’ve been trying out the demo version of Splunk to aggregate and analyze all the log files messages generated on the servers we used to host the debut of Intersect.com. It seems pretty sweet.

I’m not sure how it works, but it correctly breaks up multi-line log messages from Ruby on Rails. It also makes it pretty easy to pluck specific fields out of arbitrary log files. You pick a type of log, it shows you a couple dozen example entries. You pick some example values from the field you want to isolate and splunk creates a regular expression to match it. If the match is imperfect, you can add other example values, otherwise, you can save the field.

There are still things I’m trying to figure out, but I’m a little reluctant to invest too much in it. The published pricing of $2000/year or $6000 for a perpetual license with 1y of support might be doable, but the lack of visibility into where pricing goes from there gives me serious pause.

iPod Touch FaceTime: Teen Sexting is so Last Year

The new iPod Touch with FaceTime video conferencing support isn’t even available yet, and yet teens are already using them for immoral acts.

Ok, not really, but I’m sure it is only a matter of days before there are news stories and blog posts about the latest threat to “the children,” (won’t someone please think of the children?).

Further, I anticipate the following variations:
* teens revealing their privates to other teens in real time
* teens revealing their privates to other teens who then show them to other teens, in real time
* teens having sex in person and sharing the moment with other teens in real time
* teens being exposed to the privates of random non-teens in real time
* teens exposing themselves to random non-teens in real time
* teens doing any of the above for gifts and/or money.

With this blog post I am putting the rest of the world on notice, if you do a story or blog post that resembles any of the above variations on this theme, you are a cheap, sensationalistic and unoriginal hack.

That is all.