Some would call me a late adopter, but I’ve become a great fan of Aunty’s Media Watch (Aunty is the ABC, or the Australian Broadcasting Commission, for those not from Oz).  The program provides a reality check for the print media as well as news and current affairs programs on television and radio.  Compulsory viewing in my opinion — you can never take anything you see on TV or read in the paper at face value.

After seeing a few Media Watch episodes now, at least two things amaze me:

* The lengths that the media will go to to sensationalise stories, often creating complete fabrications and reporting them as fact in order to win ratings or increase circulation, seem to be boundless.

* In spite of the existence of programs like Media Watch, such practices continue without pause.

One of the best recent examples of how ludicrous the situation has become is this: recently, the Seven Network’s Today Tonight program ran a story about airline security.  The producer of the report was filmed placing a kitchen knife into a handbag, and then carrying that handbag onto a commercial flight from a New South Wales regional airport to Sydney.  The report went to air claiming that it showed proof that Australia’s airline security was lacking.  Then, based on the evidence of the video footage and Seven’s willingness to air the story and “prove the point”, the segment’s producer was charged with carrying a weapon onto a commercial flight.  The kicker is this: in spite of Seven standing by the accuracy of the story, the producer’s defence argued that the video evidence did not prove that the knife was actually taken onto the flight — it merely showed a knife being placed into a handbag, and a bag which *may* have been the same bag being taken onto the aircraft.  The producer was cleared.

To me, this demonstrates complete duplicity.  A willingness to produce a version of the truth that suits a purpose.  Not my cup of tea.

We are really biased toward Open Source Software at Crossed Wires, especially when it looks as good and performs as well as Cacti.  Cacti is a performance graphing tool that is really polished and sophisticated, and looks set to displace MRTG here.

You might be aware that I’ve been using MRTG for graphing network traffic and system utilisation.  Some time ago I switched to using RRDtool for the backend, and something called mrtg-rrd for presentation.  That was fine, but the underlying limitations of MRTG were always evident: only two data values on a graph at a time; no host presence-checking prior to polling; a monolithic flat file for configuration; and others.

I read an article in SysAdmin recently about graphing LDAP performance.  As I’m keen to know how much action my LDAP server sees, I figured that now would be as good a time as any to look at an alternative to MRTG (since trying to fit LDAP graphing into MRTG looked like tricky work).

The LDAP graphing article was based on Orca, but Cacti came well recommended.  Cacti has a Gentoo ebuild while Orca does not…  :)

Once set up, all of the configuration of Cacti happens via the web interface.  And of course, that’s how you view the graphs!  :)  There are a bunch of canned “profiles” that you can use to assemble graph sets for the hosts in your network — selecting “ucd/net snmp host” for example creates a set of graphs for common data sets presented by the most popular SNMP daemon on UNIX/Linux boxes.

I’m really happy with Cacti so far.  Give it a run!

Newly added to Crossed Wires is the Cool Sites navigation section.  You’ll see it at the left of the screen.  Here I’ll place links to some of the cooler stuff I surf through.  Don’t forget about the Other Blogs section at the right hand side, also!

If you’ve ever looked at our photo gallery (http://veejoe.com.au/gallery) you would probably notice that it’s a little bit “update-challenged”.  Like the blog, you might say.  Ha.  This update problem should soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a little bit more free software.

Our photo gallery operates using the wonderful Gallery software (http://gallery.menalto.com).  It has its own methods of uploading photos into the gallery, mostly using its web interface.  While I was simply copying the digital files off the cameras’ media it was fine, but after getting the Mac and starting to use iPhoto to manage images it was a little difficult.

The other day I came across a wonderful little item — an export plug-in for iPhoto that provides quick and easy access to upload photos into Gallery.  Now, adding photos to the gallery from iPhoto is nice and simple (so no more excuses!).

Having said that Gallery is wonderful software, there’s one thing I’d really like for it to be able to do — create an “offline” version of the gallery that doesn’t require a web server.  I know that other album software does things differently (JAlbum is one that springs to mind) and allows creating of offline albums, but I guess I’m still looking for my photo album/gallery nirvana.  Drop me a comment if you have suggestions!

If you’re like me, you’ll be fed up with the trash that commercial TV serves up, and too cheap to pay for Pay-TV (it’s still just TV, right?)  An alternative, albeit audio-only, is available through your personal music device.  Thanks to iTunes 4.9, I’ve discovered the marvel of “podcasting”.  For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, think of a cross between Internet radio and your VCR (or PVR).  Podcasts are audio programs (like radio shows) that you download over the ‘net.  For programs that are podcast at regular intervals you can subscribe, and your podcast client will automatically pick up the new edition when it’s available.  Then you just sync-up your iPod, and listen to the program when you want.  Very cool!

I’m a bit embarassed that it took until iTunes supported podacsts for me to discover them.  Turns out that podcasts have been around for months, thanks in part to great podcasting clients like iPodderx.

Despite the name, podcasts don’t just work with iPods!  The iTunes podcast support basiclaly just adds the podcast files as music tracks to your library, so if iTunes supports your music player you are set to go.  I don’t know about other podcast clients, so check out the support on your music device.

Australian podasts don’t seem to be too plentiful at this stage.  The ABC seems to have a pretty good selection of programs (including The Science Show), and the Triple M radio network is podcasting some programs.  At the moment I’m working my way through the back-catalogue of This Week in Tech (TWiT), a weekly US tech-talk program, before moving on to Skepticality.

Finally, a way to use more than about 10% of the capacity of my iPod!  :)

As the “downtime” story implied, I was in Canberra again last week — not a month after having posted that I was done in Canberra!  (I did say “for now”, at least…)

I was asked to cover for a friend of mine who was unable to do a piece of work because he was going to be overseas.  I presented a training course on “TCP/IP for z/OS”.  It was an interesting time; hopefully the students thought so too!

We experienced some downtime here at Crossed Wires on Thursday and Friday, due to “backhoe attenuation”.  Grrr!

We moved house (as I’m sure I blogged previously, despite my apalling reputation for keeping up-to-date blog entries), and there is (was) a vacant block next door.  Construction started recently, with the digging of trenches for installation of drainage and electrical.  Well, cutting a long story short, their trench work went a bit too close to our phone lead-in — I guess “straight through” would be one alternative definition for “a bit too close”.

So, Susan was without a phone while I was out of town.  It took me ringing up the builders’ from Canberra to make sure somethng was being done about it.

I’ll leave the obvious rant about carelessness alone, because the fact that our lead-in was not properly installed in the first place was probably a contributing factor to it being cut (it had to be repaired when we moved in, because the fencing installation crushed the conduit).

Kudos to Telstra on this occasion: well, not kudos so much, but an interesting insight into their problem management process.  When Susan rang them, they said “minimum two working days to fix a fault”.  In our case, that would have meant we would have been without service over a weekend — so I was angry about that.  Since it turned out not to be a Telstra problem though, by not responding immediately they’ve managed to avoid what would have been an unneccesary callout — likely saving their fault folks for a real Telstra problem.  I wonder if that’s the real reason for the two-day wait — “give the punter more time to find and fix their own fault so the don’t bother us”…