Most interesting links of July ’12

A brief one due to (thanks to?) holiday and an accompanying surprising lack of enthusiasm for the technical stuff. Recommended Readings Microdesign and red flags – why using an “else” or returning a boolean as a success indicator should rise a red flag and make you think what you’re trying to achieve and whether there

Book Review: Implementation Patterns

Implementation Patterns, Kent Beck, 2007, ISBN 0321413091. Summary: Should you read the book? Yes, the chapter on principles and values is trully enlightening. The book in general contains pearls of wisdom hidden in the mud of “I know that already, man.” I would thus recommend skimming through the book and reading only the pieces matching your

Notify on Errors in a Log File with Zabbix 1.8

Situation: You want to get notified when a log entry marked ERROR appears in a log file. You want the corresponding trigger to reset back to the OK state if there are no more errors for 10 minutes. (This post assumes certain familiarity with Zabbix UI.)

Testing Zabbix Trigger Expressions

When defining a Zabbix (1.8.2) trigger e.g. to inform you that there are errors in a log file, how do you verify that it is correct? As somebody recommended in a forum, you can use a Calculated Item with a similar expression (the syntax is little different from triggers). Contrary to triggers, the value of