Colin Walker
There are 158 entries for the tag Colin Walker
We're putting the band back together. And by band, I mean team. And by "putting back together" I mean we're all going to be in the same place, physically. This is a rarity for our remotely distributed team, but next week it is happening, and that is a great thing. It means planning, policies, preparation, prognostication and many other things that don't begin with the same letter. It also means that there will be some new, cool things to look forward to in what will likely be the near future, from a DevCentral perspective. Rarely do we get the whole...
Competitive advantage for network technologies will be determined by a vendor’s ability to allow its customers to create custom features through a programmable front end and then share these ideas with a broader community. The community will become a self feeding ecosystem that will create a higher level of stickiness with network technologies. - Zeus Kerravala A blog post by Zues over at Network World describes just how important community is to innovation these days. He focuses specifically on the networking world, as that's his focus, but the concept is...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (sometimes?) every week for the DevCentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week the forums provide us with more examples of iRules wizardry (or at least apprentice awesomeness) in a scant 20 lines or less each. The credit goes to the awesome community for providing such frequent and awesome examples. This week's installation of iRules...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (sometimes?) every week for the DevCentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week we've got three awesome examples of iRules that are designed to increase your application's security in less than 21 lines of code. Dealing with header size, cache control, and a Microsoft advisory, we get to see a couple of different ways in which iRules...
The holidays have passed, the new year is upon us and there is much geeky goodness to be thankful for. I am thankful for the forums and the wikis, the tech tips and blogs. I am thankful for the outstanding community that drives it all, and the supporting cast of hundreds within F5 that helps support this DevCentral thing we get to do. I am so thankful, in fact, that I am here to share five of my favorite recent DevCentral additions with you. Hurried over the holidays? Nagged after the new year? Fall behind on your feeds? Never fear,...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (sometimes?) every week for the DevCentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week nitass and hoolio deliver the 1-2-3 punch with 3 cool iRules to perform various tasks that I deem useful, or interesting, or...both. We get a look at dealing with destination servers with a dynamic IP, handling SSL and non SSL connections on the same...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (sometimes?) every week for the DevCentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week I'm digging through my list of cool threads from the past month or so and picking out a few that I think are interesting. More to follow, but we're starting with a cool little geolocation redirection rule that will allow you to direct people from different...
10,000 is a relatively momentous number for many reasons. It's a nice, round number like 10, 100, 500, and so on. It's a stepping stone into the five digit numeric space, and it's quite an accomplishment depending on what it is you're counting. A few fun facts about 10,000: It is the square root of 100,000,000 Each neuron in the human brain is estimated to connect to 10,000 others There are approximately 10,000 species of birds. 10,000 days can be expressed in these alternative...
As rare as the Hippocampus and as fleeting as the Pegasus, this special Monday edition of the Top5 is brought to you by "too much to get done on Friday"(tm). Think of it as a bonus edition though, not delayed, as this Top5 comes bearing wondrous gifts from around DevCentral. From iRules Challenges to MVP contributed Tech Tips to a special 20LoL and more, the community has borne deliciously geeky fruit of all manner the past weeks. So much so in fact that the bounty could not possibly be contained within this abbreviated format. Even still, I feel that the...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. By a show of hands, who else here is surprised and/or excited that we finally made it to the 50th 20 Lines or Less? I'm a little of both, though more excited than anything. Years ago when I started the series I wasn't sure if anyone would...
In a shocking turn of events, the gracious sales readiness team invited me back to yet again present an iRules Challenge to the inbound FSEs during their multi-week grooming process here at F5 Seattle, lovingly known as "boot camp". It's a joy for me to be a part of these boot camps not only because I get to geek out about iRules and dream up challenges to get people more involved with DevCentral and iRules, two of my main squeezes in the tech world. But also because it's killer to see the talent rolling through, chat with some of them...
The 20 Lines or Less, the DC weekly podcast, 99% of the hundreds of blogs Don and Lori seem to put out each week...these are but a few of the things you won't see this week in the DC Top 5. With as good as the content is that's getting left out, you can only imagine how good the stuff that made the cut is. It's been a jam packed few weeks since the last installment. I've survived, somehow, and I'm here to tell the story of what DevCentral's been up to, at least this last week. So check it...
It would seem that, at least in this contest, everyone can indeed be a winner. I got the distinct pleasure to, once again, help contribute to the iRules delinquency education of our inbound FSE crew while they were here in Seattle for their boot camp. These folks are all technical, but very few have any iRules experience. Heck, most don't even have much scripting experience, so to lay down the gauntlet and say "Here, act like I'm a customer giving you these requirements, and go write me an iRule that'll make me happy." is a tall order. I'm very pleased...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
This week I do the unthinkable ... I write my own code! Well, some of it, anyway. While I've been happily using the community's examples for this series this week I ended up writing a couple of neat 20LoL worthy entries as responses to forum posts, so I figured I'd...
The Sales Readiness team is back at it, training another awesome crop of FSE type peoples here at F5 headquarters. And for the third time in a row, I get the esteemed honor/fun of building an iRules challenge to push them into learning iRules, the tools it takes to build them, how to research them, how to use DevCentral, etc. It's a super fun exercise for me, and I've gotten good feedback from the previous classes of FSEs as well, so hopefully it's a trend that'll continue. Continuing the tradition of my last two posts announcing iRules challenges, let...
When talking about IT performance and rating "must haves", data center reliability is often right near the top of the list, and for good reason. Performance and scalability, features and functionality don't matter much unless the application is up and available. We here at F5 tend to hold availability in pretty high regard, and recent info from Netcraft seems to show that this effort has not gone in vain. Netcraft likes to study and analyze many things, among which is the reliability of different hosting companies. The way they do this is by polling around forty different hosting providers'...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week we take a look at a couple of simple commands that can make your life a lot easier. iRules don't have to be complex to be useful, as such it's a good notion to make yourself familiar with some of the basic commands and the many...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. Digging through the forums this week has been rewarding. There are a ton of people out there writing cool iRules, some big, some small, but all cool and good to see. The few chosen for the 20lol this week are all interesting takes on problems we’ve seen before....
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. Continuing the long standing tradition, this week’s 20LoL brings to you DNS lookups with variable resolvers, avoiding RPC issues with ASM, and some advanced pool selection logic by way of class searching. Thanks go out to user Kent Perrier, mbamusa and ichalis for the examples or inspiration. Now...
It’s FSE iRules Challenge time again, folks, so strap on your geek-hats and follow along. First, before I get too deep into what the challenge actually was this time around, I want to steal a word or two from the last challenge’s announcement to describe what an FSE is. FSEs are the engineering lifeblood of the sales force here at F5. They’re the ones out in the trenches dealing with customer requirements and issues, building real world solutions, and generally doing all the cool sh stuff that I get to talk about theoretically, but in the real world. ...
While the groundhog may have promised an early spring, we’re still feeling the chill here in Seattle. Naturally though that hasn’t impeded the content marching its way across DevCentral in the past weeks. We’ve had everything from awesome blogs and Tech Tips to user contributed content to the triumphant (hopefully) return of a long lost series now born anew. This is your place to find out about all of that and more, as always, as I offer you this week’s DC Top5: Post of the Week - Regular Expressions http://bit.ly/e1m4Ri The aforementioned series being reborn...
Last week I wrote about the iRules challenge issued to the FSEs again, and showed my intended solution. Go take a look at that post for a point of reference if you like, or just dive in.
Today I want to give props where props are due, and show off the winner and two runners up of the FSE iRules Challenge. Big congrats to Harry Kleinbourg, Sudarshan Sivaperumal, and the winner, Karl Vogel. Excellent work, guys! There were many solid entries so the judging was surprisingly close, but these three engineers came the closest to the complete solution while keeping an...
If your week has been anything like mine, then you’ve had plenty to keep you busy. While I’d like to think that your “busy” equates to as much time on DevCentral checking out the cool happenings while people get their geek on as mine does, I understand that’s less than likely. Fortunately, though, there is a mechanism by which I can distribute said geeky goodness for your avid assimilation. I give to you, the DC Top 5: iRuling the New FSE Crop http://bit.ly/f1JIiM Easily my favorite thing that happened this week was something I was...
I’m not gonna lie Jim, I’m pretty excited. Clint, one of the awesome people that helps get all of our FSEs (Field Sales Engineers) up to speed was kind enough to ask me to put together a challenge for the new crop of FSEs coming through training this week. I got my geek on and did just that, but before we delve into the challenge let’s talk a little about FSEs and why this was wicked cool for me.
FSEs are the engineering lifeblood of the sales force here at F5. They’re the ones out in the trenches dealing with customer...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. I’m back again this week with examples #135, 136 and 137 in the 20 Lines or Less series. Chiming in this week are Chris Miller, Hoolio and Bhattman himself. Three of our power users bringing you three cool chunks of iRule that get the job done. This week...
This week brought new meaning to the old, familiar phrase “so overstuffed with goodness it’s unknowable”. Well okay, maybe it’s a silly new phrase I just made up, but that doesn’t change the fact that this was yet another killer week for content on DevCentral. There were forum posts by the hundreds, blog posts by the dozen and tech tips a plenty. There was even some twitter inspired swan diving silliness. Through all of that I’ve picked what I thought were some of the most interesting things out of the bunch to highlight. To be fair, though, I could have...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
This week I’ve got some cool forum examples including Chris Miller’s awesome example of doing a redirect, but in an interesting way that includes an iRule generated HTML page with an in-line meta refresh, some cool SSL re-encryption logic, and a look at how you can use TCP and node...
Settling into the new year there is goodness a plenty on DevCentral this week. Between group revamps, site improvements and maintenance, including trimming the page size down to a more svelte, downloadable size, and the general content screaming across the front page there has been a lot to keep up on. Here are my Top 5 picks for the week to help you out: Revisiting Hash Load Balancing and Persistence on BIG-IP LTM http://bit.ly/h7etBK As I may have hinted at last week, Jason had more tricks up his sleeve in regards to hash load balancing on the...
Happy Friday folks! I’m happy to report in that so far this morning I’ve been reading up on the latest version of LTM (10.2.1) that just got released, while rocking out to some (probably too loud) tunes, of course. The new version is a dot release, so it’s largely improvements and fixes, but there’s some very groovy stuff in there. Here are a couple good ones: Application templates This release includes one new application template and one upgraded application template. An application template corresponds to a particular application, such as email...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
In the first 20LoL of the new year I bring to you a diverse offering of iRule goodness ranging from HTTP Authentication via iRule, to nesting switch inside if and why it’s important not to use elseif when doing so, as well as re-writing partial URL strings for redirection.
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We made it! We’ve survived another year and as such are one step closer to the future we’ve been promised for so long, complete with jetpacks, teleporters and press-button meal preparation. That’s my hope, at least. While we’re all just sitting around, waiting for such amenities to arrive, I bring to you some reading to entertain and educate. This week we have an overabundance of options to pick from so I apologize in advance for any wicked cool content that gets left out. What did make it in, though, are a couple of the coolest iRules I’ve seen written in...
While I don’t necessarily believe this to be accurate, this is sure a strong depiction of how it feels when coding on a large project sometimes. Credit goes to xckd.com for the image, and for “getting” us geek types. I hope your Friday and your weekend are awesome, and bring you many lines of non kludged code. Technorati Tags: Levity,Friday Funny,Coding,xkcd,Colin Walker #Colin
It’s Friday! Your work week is wrapping up (most of you, anyway) or perhaps it’s even over already, depending on your time zone. You’re looking forward to your weekend and trying to wrap up the last few loose ends at work to get yourself set up for a solid Monday. One of those things should be this week’s Top 5. With the 5 coolest things to grace DevCentral this week in hand, you can go spread the good word about how cool this stuff is to anyone that will listen. Well, that’s what I do, anyway. You do with it...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week I bring to you two cool iRules from the forums and one from a secret squirrel internal mailing list OF DOOM!!!. Okay, maybe not of doom, but it’s a list with some wicked smart people on it and I’m lucky to get to harvest good stuff...
After another few blazingly fast weeks in the DevCentral world, I’m back with another injection of wicked cool topics from DC land. From upgrades to slick iRules to Australian escapades, to holidays, there has been much afoot as always, and there is much goodness to report on. With that, let’s get right to this week’s Top 5: SSL Profiles Part 3: Certificate Chain Implementation http://bit.ly/eAfvMW Jason is three parts into his amazing SSL Profiles series already, and I’m a major fan. In this series he’s tearing open the protocol and describing exactly how it...
We’ve survived the ghouls, ghosts and goblins which means it’s now time for gobbling, guests and gastronomy galore. Through it all DevCentral continues to be a steady, reliable source for hard to beat technical how-to docs and commentary. With more community involvement and action than ever before it’s a great time to be a part of the DevCentral movement so get on board if you haven’t already, and bring your friends. This week I’ve got some great stuff for you, including an exclusive interview with iHealth’s proud uncle, Matt DuHarte, to get you the low down on that...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
This week I’m happy to bring you some very cool iRules dealing with client access to admin sections of an application, strict RR Load Balancing, and client connection limiting. Moreover, I’m even more pleased that two of the examples in this episode are from spark himself, one of the core...
Adding to the already wicked cool selection of stuff I get to talk about on a weekly basis, we’re starting to see more and more content submissions outside of normal forums use from our user base. It’s fantastic to see folks contributing articles that share their first-hand experience using F5 gear with others. This week I get a chance to talk about two different MVP contributed Tech Tips that are both interesting as well as educational. It’s been a good week so sit down, buckle up and let’s hit the DevCentral Top 5: It’s Midnight. Do You Know Where...
Part of the joy and pain of picking the Top 5 is the embarrassment of options available. If I were to go on and list all of the things that I think you should probably read each week on DevCentral this would likely turn into a top 72 or something far less catchy and consumable than the Top 5. As such, I encourage implore you to read through the goodness that gets most unfortunately left out of these lists by checking out DevCentral yourself. Now then, before I get to the actual topics, I want to take a...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week we dive into parsing SSL encrypted payloads until a given string is found, logging user login info as it comes across the wire, and enforcing a subsite ACL. http://devcentral.f5.com/Community/GroupDetails/tabid/1082223/asg/50/afv/topic/aft/1172756/aff/5/showtab/groupforums/Default.aspx#1175124 In this first, rather cool, example from user mattrm we get a peek at...
Many happenings abound these days, enough that it's hard for even me to keep track of them all. Amongst them in the past couple weeks have been wicked cool iRules projects, video projects, and likely most importantly of all, the expansion of the DevCentral team. Some of it I can talk about, some of it is still secret squirrel status, but here's what I can tell you for sure: there is no shortage if hawesome stuff to be seen on DevCentral. Here are five things, as a matter of fact, that you definitely shouldn't miss. I give you this week's...
A great post over on ajaxian got me to thinking today. Why is it whenever you hear people talking about speed on the internet, they use a single metric? Whether they’re discussing the connection in the datacenter, their residential DSL, or the wireless connection via their mobile device, everyone references the bandwidth of their connection when talking about speed. “Oh I just got a 20Mb/s connection at home, it’s blazing fast!". That’s all well and good, and 20 Mb/s is indeed a lot of throughput for a residential connection. Unfortunately for Joe Average, about 98% of the population wouldn’t know...
Phew! Having DC5 successfully out the door, I'm happy to resume my regularly scheduled programming. I'm back, bringing you my Top5 picks off of DevCentral every week. I'll help you sort through the content pouring across the (now new and improved!) site and offer you a few things that you should definitely check out. It's good to see that the content has still been chugging away even while the team was heads down working on the new site improvements. A big thanks to the awesome community and the extended DC team folks (Lori, Pete and co.) for keeping the lights...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. With the onslaught of work required to get DC5 up and running it’s been a while since I’ve offered some cool iRule goodness to the community from the community. There have been plenty of examples cruising through the forums, that’s for sure, I just haven’t had the time...
Time does fly when you're having fun, and trying to keep up with everything that's been going on with DevCentral is my kind of fun. I love watching what everyone is up to, from updates from the con to new folks blogging about their hippy proclivities, there's never a dull day in DC land. And all of this while we're hard at work on many things behind the scenes that aren't readily apparent just yet. Of course, I realize I may be slightly biased and not everyone is as apt to stay immersed as I am, hence the introduction of...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
This week we’ve got a couple awesome new examples from two of the community all-stars, and one dusty old example from my archives. They’re all cool and useful, so take a peek and see what you think. If you want a problem solved or to submit an example, feel free,...
This week I bring to you a full house of content, docs over blogs. To say there have been more than a few pairs on DevCentral lately though would be an understatement. The rush of content could be likened to an avalanche but without the messy death and destruction bits to deal with. From interviews to tech tips to blog posts to original songs pertaining to cloud computing (no, I'm not joking, and no, the link isn't in here…go find it yourself), DevCentral never seems to sleep these days, which is just how we like it. In case you're overwhelmed...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
I bring to you your weekly dose of short yet cool iRule goodness. Check out what these iRule fu masters have crammed into less than 21 lines of code. This week we’ve got hex translation of HTTP payloads, intelligent redirection including port handling, and some snat intelligence in just a...
The new LTM VE has opened up the possibilities for writing, testing and deploying iRules in a big way. It’s easier than ever to get a test environment set up in which you can break things develop to your heart’s content. This is fantastic news for us iRulers that want to be doing the newest, coolest stuff without having to worry about breaking a production system. That’s all well and good, but what the heck do you do to get all of your current stuff onto your test system? There are several options, ranging from copy and paste...
The hits just keep on coming. Between the release of the LTM VE, some internal DC projects that are brewing, some new site stuff we're trying to polish up, and all that daily stuff that just keeps showing up out of nowhere, there has been no shortage of distractions. There has also, however, been no shortage of amazing content cruising through DevCentral, so this week's Top5 is packed full of it. You know there's a lot of cool stuff out there when I actually had to make a list of about 15 things I'd like to highlight and start whittling...
Many people in the networking world are aware of BIG-IP as a powerful load balancing and security device. Those that don’t dig deeper, however, are truly missing out on the incredible features just below the surface. Sure load balancing and security policies are interesting and important, but what truly makes BIG-IP stand out from the crowd, at least in my opinion, is the immense breadth of functionality available via the programmatic interfaces of the system, namely iRules, iControl and now tmsh. To me these are the most exciting, intriguing things happening in the market right now. Network side scripting, full...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. With the announcement of the BIG-IP LTM VE this week, the iRules world just got a little more interesting. Between the new commands and features that have come out in the past several months, and now the ability to build and test iRules from your laptop, without having...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. It’s been hectic here in DCland and finding time to write has been more difficult than normal, though that shouldn’t be a problem much longer. Fortunately for all of us this awesome community keeps kicking out the jams so I can rely on their hawesome knowledge to provide...
Wow! What a whirlwind it's been the past few weeks. Between holidays and vacation and people traveling out of town, it's been an absolute zoo around here. Though I've been out the past week or so there has been an avalanche of content. I've hemmed and hawed and finally managed to slim my picks down to just five, though there are at least a dozen awesome things worth checking out on DevCentral in the past week or so. So don't be shy, get out there and poke around for yourself. For now, though, here are my top 5 picks for...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. So here we are in the future. Surely by 2010 we should have jetpacks and hover cars and personal teleporters, right? Well, technological advancements may have fallen short on some of those things promised to us time and time again by the world of sci-fi, but advancements there...
There has been plenty to do the past couple of weeks, which means there's plenty to talk about today. Ranging from gaming to storage virtualization to interviews and more, I bring you my Top 5 picks of the week from DevCentral. And yes, of course there are some iRules in there. Here's your Top5: Delivering SaaS Solutions with Hobsons Patrick McFadin http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/interviews/archive/2009/12/07/delivering-saas-solutions-with-hobsons-patrick-mcfadin.aspx In this interview with Patrick McFadin, Ken Salchow talks about software as a service, virtualization, spikes in traffic causing delivery challenges, and more. Perhaps more importantly the two talk about how F5's offerings,...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week the answer to that question is a good one – Win the iRule do You? contest! Rather than trolling the forums, CodeShare and my personal archives, this week I bring to you a special 20LoL edition. This week’s entries are pulled from the winners and honorable...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. SIP topology hiding forward proxy http://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/default.aspx/iRules/SIP_topology_hiding_and_forward_proxy.html If you’re passing SIP traffic and want a way to mask the via & or from headers when passing traffic to the outside world, this might be just the rule you’ve been waiting for. It’s a cool look...
While ramping up for "The Next Big Thing" continues amongst the DC staff, there is much to talk about in regards to content that's happening in the here and now, not just in the eagerly awaited future (with jet-packs and stuff…). DevCentral has seen its share of cool content this week, as it does every week, so let's talk about what needs talking about. Bringing you everything from TCL strings to a philosophical discussions of when vs. where and which is more important, I'm here with my Top5 picks for the week. And here they are: When...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week not only are the examples cool and interesting, but one of them at least is extremely timely. You’ve no doubt heard about the client-initiated MITM attack for TLS that was recently disclosed. It’s front-page news around the web and for good reason. While research needs to...
Released into the wild, the DevCentral team is back from our week of being sequestered in a conference room discussing the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Well…everything as it pertains to DC, at least. We even rolled successfully to save against being mauled by zombies or turned into newts (hey…it's almost Halloween, gimme a break…). As such there is plenty of content to pour through this week, including a very cool talk with a newbie to the F5 family. As always I'll give you my picks and hope they serve you well. Here is the Top5 for this...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
Well we made it to 30 editions of the 20LoL. Soon we’ll break 100 iRule examples that are under 21 lines of code each. Pretty neat stuff, if you ask me. This week is the hoolio show, it seems. The guy is just a monster in the forums, what can...
After some much needed vacation I'm back at the helm this week to deliver your Top5. I'm sure you've managed to find some tasty morsels on DevCentral while I was away, but hopefully I'll be able to help out and point you in the direction of some more DC goodness now that I'm back. The past couple weeks have been busy and I have only 5 slots to fill with my picks, so make sure to keep checking out DevCentral if you're looking for more, but here is this week's Top5: DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 107 -...
If so, you had better hurry. You’re running out of time to submit your cool, unique, amazing or otherwise interesting iRules to this year’s iRule. Do You? contest. All you have to do is fill out one simple form and you’ll be entered to win some pretty hawesome prizes. If I weren’t disqualified for being an employee (and one of the judges) I would have submitted 10 entries by now for a chance at not only the sweet swag, but the glory of being the #1 iRuler on DevCentral. This contest is fun, for sure, but it’s also a...
Side-projects and behind the scenes activities abound as the DevCentral team works towards the next goal on our plans for world domination, carefully sketched on Jeff's whiteboard. I'm glad to say that the extended DC team has been helping, as always, to keep the content flowing though, and there's plenty to highlight this week. Take a look at this week's Top5: Closing in on the iRules Contest Deadline http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/jason/archive/2009/09/15/closing-in-on-the-irules-contest-deadline.aspx Jason points out a very important, timely fact. It's nearly the end of your window to submit killer iRules for great prizes! The iRules contest is...
The extended DevCentral team has been hard at work this week, as always, fulfilling your geek needs and then some. As such, this Friday's Top5 brings to you all types of DevCentral-y goodness. From text, to audio, to informative pictures, we've got it all this week. I've picked a few of the best, five to be exact, to share with you. Here they are: The Threat Behind the Firewall http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/psilva/archive/2009/09/09/the-threat-behind-the-firewall.aspx Pete Silva dives into drives this week in his piece on the dangers lurking behind seemingly benign usb drives. These undeniably handy devices can do...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. 29 editions later and still going strong. The 20LoL is a testament to just how many different things can be done with iRules in just a few lines of code. Just imagine the possibilities if this were the 30LoL. This week I’ve got three more examples,...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. Nearing the thirty mark with the 20LoL it occurs to me that I’m having a harder and harder time with something. No, it’s not finding interesting ideas to feature. The community has been absolutely stellar with that part. There are always plenty of iRules for me to grab...
I submit to you my second attempt at this week's Top5 after a vile BSoD swooped down and smote my first attempt into a pile of fiery ash. There were a couple announcements this week on DevCentral along with the expected awesome technical content. I'll try to touch on those as well as a couple other things that you should definitely check out in this week's DevCentral Top5: Announcing F5 Management Pack 1.4 for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/sfisher/archive/2009/08/25/announcing-f5-management-pack-1.4-for-microsoft-system-center-operations.aspx The hard-working, quick-moving management pack team here at F5 brings you the newest version...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. Today I bring you a few more fine examples of iRules kung fooery in a brief fashion. These tidbits of iRuley goodness could be used by themselves, as the beginning to a bigger project or solution, or just to get the creative coding juices flowing for you to...
As the extended DevCentral crew continues to crank through the summer months, churning out more and more awesome content, there is lots to see. Whether you're looking for short, easily consumable pieces of media to get you pointed in the right direction or longer posts about the practicality of running your crew or your servers close to the ragged edge, I've got both for you this week. Check out this week's Top5: pyControl Apps #2 - Deleting BIG-IP Routes http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=63&articleType=ArticleView&articleId=2318 In Jason's continuation of the pyControl Apps series he continues to walk you through how...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. Here are a few more cool iRules from the forums. This week I’ve included one of the simplest, shortest iRules to ever make the 20LoL. It just struck me as something quite useful that I’m willing to bet several people will look at and say “oh, that’s handy”...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
This week we’ve got more cool iRules toys to show off. That’s not the impressive part, the impressive part is that only two of the three examples are from hoolio. I know, right? Joking aside, a huge thank you to hoolio for his astounding contributions to the community, and to...
Summer vacations, travel and distractingly favorable weather may interrupt the normal work weeks for some, but they can't stop the content. DevCentral has been alive and well through these sunny days thanks to the blogs, docs and media cruising through from various contributors. With many irons in the fire, plans on the drawing board and other assorted clichés at work helping to drive the "Next Big Thing" for the DevCentral team, you can only expect to see things scale upward and onward in terms of content pacing. I'll try to help you keep up. To that end, here's this week's...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. Digging through the forums this week turned up a couple more great examples of iRules that can fit in the palm of your hand. They’re so cute and cuddly at under 21 lines, but they pack a punch. It seems there’s more and more to keep up with in the forums these...
It's been busy! The DevCentral team and all of the awesome people in our extended family have been working away, putting out all kinds of great content for your perusal. Now that we're out of the hardcore v10 push and back into a more "normal" flow of content there has been a myriad of tasty morsels flowing through the DC channels. From a posh search experience to security secrets and new wrappers, we've had plenty to talk about. Let's get to this week's Top5: The Secret of the Security Safety Dance http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/06/03/the-secret-of-the-security-safety-dance.aspx This week Lori...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week is apparently the week of encryption! I bring to you from my fellow DevCentralites a trio of encryption/hashing goodness via iRules. Two of today’s iRules were pulled from the samples page, one was recommended to me by Jason. All are very cool examples of iRules geekery and creativity, and they...
It’s Friday, the last day of work before taking off (literally) for Interop Monday morning. It’s been insanely busy trying to get ready to leave. So busy, in fact, that I somehow managed to miss T minus 2 in the series. Oh well, I was likely working on one of my presentations for next week, the presentation I gave this morning at 9, my blog, getting video gear together or … something. I leave super early out of Seattle, so you won’t hear from me until I’m settled into my room in Vegas. I’ve got my presentations finished, I’ve...
It’s Wednesday already, and it feels like the week has just flown by. I’m finishing up my presentations and getting things together to leave. I got a copy of the schedule for who’s going to be talking about what next week, and I’m quite pleased to be in great company. Fellow DC bloggers Lori and Alan will be there, along with several other sharp F5 folks talking about a myriad of interesting stuff. Hopefully some of them will keep the geek level high enough for our fellow engineer types. It’s always interesting to me trying to put together content...
It’s the second day of my Interop countdown, and there’s plenty of buzz coming from those getting ready for the show. I had a meeting with one of the people here helping to manage the show from our end to discuss time-frames and scheduling, when to be where, topics I’m going to talk about, who else is going to be there at similar times … even what shoes to wear. Apparently that’s caused many a newcomer to the convention scene grief. Lucky for me, I’m a seasoned vet and merely grimaced at the “he bought new shoes for...
Today I begin my five day countdown to Interop 09. I’m finalizing thoughts on presentation ideas, making lists of things to do both at work and around the house before flying down to Las Vegas on Monday for the show, and getting all of my other projects to a stopping point so I can leave them for a week. Interop should be a good show this year, as it always is. It’s huge, and there are always some interesting things to pick up there, as well as cool people to meet up with. I’ll be attending this year to...
From Web Accelerator to iRules to the release of the new Management Pack, this week's Top5 has it all. As always, there was plenty going on this week on DevCentral. These are my picks that you've just got to check out. Whether it's because they're incredibly useful, interesting, or just plain cool, all of these are worth a read, or listen, as the case may be. Here's this week's Top5: Announcing the Release of the F5 Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/sfisher/archive/2009/04/28/announcing-the-release-of-the-f5-management-pack-for-microsoft.aspx Aside from being the longest title of anything I've ever put...
As you've no doubt seen by now, BIG-IP v10 has brought with it all kinds of powerful new features. Among those are some very cool changes to iRules. I've already talked about the new class command, the killer new after command and a brand new namespace for you to utilize in your iRuling endeavors. These are far from the only additions to iRules in v10, however. If you're familiar with our iRules Wiki, then you'll likely notice that the new commands are already showing up in the appropriate places. They're both in the main commands page, as well as...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. Catching up with a couple weeks of iRules goodness, I've got some cool ones for you again this week. I'm happy to see people are adding plenty of handy iRules in the CodeShare. It doesn't just make my job of finding cool, succinct iRules easy, it makes your lives as iRulers easier,...
Whether you're looking for the best bits of v10 coverage or how you can make SAP and your F5 devices work together, this week's Top5 has what you need. The v10 content just keeps on coming, with some great additions this week. It's been a busy week and there are also some excellent non-v10 specific things that warrant highlighting, so you'll get a mix of both this week. Getting right to it, here's this week's Top5: F5 and SAP Integration - Auto configuration and monitoring under BIG-IP v10 http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/nojan/archive/2009/04/17/f5-and-sap-integration---auto-configuration-and-monitoring-under.aspx A welcome post by Nojan gets...
Lori's recent Dear Slashdot blog post was not only interesting and entertaining, but it was also very popular. So much so that it got picked up by, and posted on Slashdot. When you're one of the people responsible for the site hosting such a suddenly famous post, this is both fantastic, and a little bit scary. I'm always happy to see people writing compelling things that will draw attention to the other awesome stuff going on on DevCentral. Lori is fantastic at that, and this recent post is a prime example. By getting pushed out to a major geek...
Here we are, weeks after the announcement of BIG-IP v10, and the hits just keep on coming. It's been another busy, exciting week here in DevCentral-ville. There has been plenty going on to keep track of, and then some, so I'll try to distill it down a little, as always. That said, it's a shame to miss any of the great stuff that's coming out, so make sure to check the rest out for yourself. You're not here for all the content, though, just the best…well my Top5 picks, anyway. Here they are:
Dear Slashdot: You get what you pay for
http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/04/17/dear-slashdot-you-get-what-you-pay-for.aspx
Starting...
A couple weeks ago I started sending out tips for iRules users via twitter. I created a hashtag: #iRulesTips and I've been passing out tidbits of iRules advice / info on a pretty regular basis. The goal is to post something daily (or a couple times a day) but with the way things are going around here (see: super busy), I'm happy with "almost daily". Jason even saw fit to chime in with his own contribution, which is awesome. I'm hoping more people will add their own tips, tricks and advice as they see fit.
Here's a roundup of the...
It's an interesting relation that the more awesome, noteworthy content there is on DevCentral in a given week, the harder it is for me to narrow down what it is I want to call out in the Top5. That being said, this week is easily the toughest week to decide what to highlight in recent memory. With the BIG-IP v10 announcement dropping and the ensuing flood of killer content, there is an over abundance of options. That's a wonderful "problem" to have, though. I want to say this week especially that there are many killer things that are worth a...
To accompany the big announcement happening on f5.com today, we're rolling out all kinds of new content on DevCentral as well. We've got tech tips and blogs, forum posts and wiki entries...it's a veritable cornucopia of technical goodness to show off some of the awesome new features in BIG-IP v10. This release packs a punch, and it's definitely worth it to check out some of the new things you can do.
To help you get started, we've got a v10 page where you can go to keep your finger on the pulse of the new content we're pushing out surrounding...
Having failed to coerce the calendar to allow the Top5 to fall on April 1st, I'll have to leave you without any gag comments, Rick Roll links, or otherwise. That's just as well though, since there's plenty of goodness on DevCentral to cover this week. We've been busy, and that's usually a good thing. Hopefully you'll agree when I say it's reflected by more and more cool content. Here's your DevCentral Top5 for the week: iRules Event Order http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=63&articleType=ArticleView&articleId=344 I'm very pleased to present the definitive document of event order within iRules. It's been requested many times...
As I dig through forums, docs, emails, my own source, etc., there are often times little nuances that I pick up in whatever iRule I'm currently dissecting. Sometimes these are ideas that are short and succinct, and don't quite warrant a full Tech Tip or joining the esteemed 20Lines or Less. It's unfortunate to do nothing with them, though, as there are so many helpful tidbits that get dropped on the cutting room floor, if you will, in search of something a little meatier to talk about at length.
I've decided to stop wasting those little nuggets of...
Taking the rush of content on DevCentral in stride, I'm back again with 5 more items of interest for you that you really shouldn't miss. Hopefully the week's been good for you, whether that means bug-free code, trouble free system patching or happy clients. Things haven't really slowed down here since being turned "up to 11", so there's plenty to do and digest for everyone. Amidst the always churning stream of geeky goodness that DevCentral has to offer, there are rumblings lately of very cool things to come, so keep your eyes peeled. For now I offer you my picks...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. Wow! It's been a while since I was able to pull the cycles away from other things to get to the 20LoL. Many apologies to any of you out there that have missed it. Things here have been amazingly busy (in a good way) and I just haven't made the time. There...
With the Real IT series in full swing, the team got together this week to hash out plans for the coming months. It's always productive and exciting when we get the team together in one room, and this was no exception. I'm eager to share with everyone all the things that are coming your way, but for now a recap of the last weeks of DevCentral's best will have to do. There has been some great content in the last couple weeks, so enjoy. TFTP Server via iRules http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=63&articleType=ArticleView&articleId=343 This example iRule that spawned out...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. For this week's 20 Lines or Less I thought I might bring you some iRules that are fresh off the presses. I've been digging through the iRules forums today, trying to keep up with this outstanding community and their many innovations, concepts and questions. In doing so I got to answer some...
It's Top5 time again, and I swear it should only be Wednesday, yet the calendar says Friday. My week must have gone missing. If you see it, please let me know. I'm sure it's lonely and scared, and wants to come home. There have been so many things going on this week that it's been dizzying even for me to keep up with them…and that's kinda what I do, right? I will, however, attempt to sift through all the awesome contributions to DC to bring you the goodness you so rightly deserve, as is always my intent. This week we'll...
It's the 20th edition of 20 Lines or Less! Wait...is that a recursion loop or something? To celebrate this momentous occasion I'll still be asking What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? But I'll be recalling my three favorite examples from the past editions of the 20LoL. These are things that not only made the list but were interesting enough that as I was going over them again they stood out to me as cool or compelling examples that were worth noting again, in case...
I can't believe it's only the second week of this year's Top5 series. There are so many things going on that it feels like it's been weeks since I wrote last. I know the output to the site has only been bumped up marginally but trust me, things behind the scenes are beyond busy trying to get things ramped up, polished and ready to push hard all through the year. This week saw some continued series', a couple of really interesting new blog / docs posts, and plenty of awesome action in the forums / wikis. Here's this week's Top5:
Accuracy...
Google, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, Nokia, Comcast - all in one room. Either the complete domination of the Internet is being plotted, or these giants are getting together to talk about Social Media. Last Thursday, January 8th, representatives from these companies and several others got together to discuss Activity Streams and what the future holds for them. What is an Activity Stream you ask? It's your status update, your facebook profile update, your twitter message, etc. It's how you communicate your recent activities to your online crew, if you will. So why are these giants meeting to talk about your Activity...
Welcome to the first DCTop5 of 2009! It's a new year and that means you survived the holidays, the in-laws, the traffic jams, the elections, and if you live in Seattle, record breaking snow-storms. Congratulations, it's time to do it all over. There's been so much great stuff going on in DevCentral Land in the past 12 months that it's been hard for even me to keep up at times. So when I tell you that there's even more to come, and that we're turning up the dial further still this year, believe me when I say that it's going...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week has been fantastic here in DCLand. I've been sequestered in a room with the awesome minds of the DevCentral team for most of the week brainstorming, collaborating, sharing, and thinking up generally cool new stuff! It's always a good time when the team gets together and there are almost always...
Wow it's been a busy month! Travel, holidays, and so much great content coursing through DevCentral it could make your head spin. I'll do my best, as always, to guide you through the massive amounts of cool stuff and pick out a few of the gems for you to dig into. This week's Top5 is action-packed, with F5/Geeky goodness bursting from every seam, so make sure you check out each of the items below. That said, here's this week's Top5:
F5 ARX and Data Domain - Reduced Expense, Streamlined Storage
http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/dmacvittie/archive/2008/12/11/f5-arx-and-data-domain---reduced-expense-streamlined-storage.aspx
Don recently got a chance to chat with some of the folks...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
This week's examples are all brought to you by the very awesome and yet to be published Top50 iRules examples. This collection of cool iRules (many directly from your killer DC contributions) is something that was put together as an easy to use, portable reference to some very cool iRule examples. I'll work...
It's no surprise to any of you that aren't just tuning in that I'm a bit of an iRules guy. I love the stuff, and I work with them pretty often. As such most of the articles that I write here have to do in some way with iRules, TCL, etc. So as I'm working on building out my list of articles to write in the next few months, I'm wracking my brain to come up with cool iRule ideas to share with the community, parts of the iRule language that haven't been delved into deeply enough yet that I...
It's day 3 of my week long Tokyo adventure. Day 2 kind of disappeared into the ether with meetings and prep for meetings and forum posts and the like, so no blog post for day 2, even though it was quite a good day. Today though, day 3, has been outstanding so far. I just got back from an awesome customer visit with some really cool engineers. We talked geek, we white-boarded, we wrote some code and pontificated about possible solutions to problems they're having as well as future solutions they want to put in place...it was hawesome. It...
As I try to wrap things up and wind down a bit for the Thanksgiving holiday here in the states I'm busy working on coordinating Turkey Day, wrapping things up here for the holiday weekend, and my travel that follows. I'll be in Japan next week with our awesome team there, and I'm looking forward to meeting any of you that might be attending the User Group meeting there that I'll be speaking at. If anyone has any good tips on where to go or not go, what to see and do, etc., I'd love to hear them....
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question (almost) I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week I bring you some more groovy examples of the power that iRule can bring to the table in just a few short lines of code. We'll touch on Protocol specific header insertion, port re-writing, and configuring partial gets properly for PDF reading. Many thanks to the awesome forum and CodeShare...
The past few weeks have brought with them plenty of travel, a pair of cool conferences, a great chance to spread the DC/F5 word about application goodness and integration, and much killer content flittering its way across DC's ever present feeds and pages. Now that I'm back in stride and the wake from the recent happenings has cleared I'm here yet again, as you know I would be, to point you towards some of the many cool things happening on DevCentral this week. Here's this week's DC Top5: Investigating the LTM TCP Profile: Nagle's Algorithm http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=63&articleType=ArticleView&articleId=282...
Whew! It's been a whirlwind of a couple weeks. Between the annual F5 sales conference, where Joe and I presented to a bunch of awesome F5 techies, followed immediately by a very cool trip to present with the famed Lori at the SD Best Practices event in Boston, I've barely had time to do laundry, sleep in my own bed and feed my puppy. It's good to be back, but what cool stuff I got to see/hear/talk about! The Software Development Best Practices (SDBP) conference was hawesome. It's great to be around so many people that get "it" and...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. Finally back into the swing of the 20LoL, I'm happy to give you the 15th edition of this blog series. Today's offering is brought to you by me, F5, and the power of iRules (tm). Okay, not really (tm), but it sounded cool. I still find myself on a journey to seek out...
Google, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, iTunes - They've all been changing the way that the average person goes about their day for a long time now. The thing that sets these monolithic figures in technological history apart from others is that they are not only changing the game for those of us that have long been denizens of the web. Indeed they are making the web and the delicious, bountiful fruits therein accessible to the masses. This is what is allowing them to change the face of the world as we know it. A prime and quite pointed example of...
Amongst the myriad of tasty bits floating across DevCentral this week brings us a cool iControl Tech Tip from one of our usually prolific bloggers. That doesn't mean she stopped blogging, of course. Much to the contrary, her contributions were welcome as always and added to the array of info at your fingertips. Here to guide you through to some of the meatier morsels I act, as always, as your faithful guide to DevCentral goodness. Here's your Top5 for this week:
WebAccelerator Beta and Toys
http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/dmacvittie/archive/2008/10/03/webaccelerator-beta-and-toys.aspx
Don jumps into the fray talking about the brand new news in DCLand - WebAccelerator! We've signed...
Android, Google's hot new mobile device platform, is the buzz around the mobile world, especially amongst the giants like Motorola and Nokia. They've been looking for a way to crack the iPhone market for a while now, and Android seems to be the pony they're betting on. TechCrunch has the whole article detailing how Motorola is expanding their current, 50 person Android development team up to a whopping 350 members. This makes sense given the reception that Android as a whole and the new G1 phone as an example of its use have gotten....
In this special Monday edition of the DC Top5 I'll recap last week's must see DevCentral hits. Along with the standard fare of cool tech info and insight, we've got another new series to introduce from a new member of the DC blogging family. I also get to share some news that got me pretty excited to hear on a somewhat personal level, though it definitely relates to our industry even if in a somewhat tangential manner. All that and more in this (last?) week's DC Top5: Protocol of the Week http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/kris/archive/2008/09/26/protocol-of-the-week.aspx Kris Plunkett is...
Game over man, game over. Jack Thompson has been a pox upon the gaming community for far too long. From ridiculous allegations to even more absurd trials and suits, he's done nothing but lie and cheat his way into the news with his mindless lashing out towards video games. Finally disbarred, this pup is now officially all bark with no bite, thank goodness.
Some days you just start your day off right. Double latte, tasty breakfast sandwich, and the felling of one of the greatest representations of evil and injustice that has ever reared its vile head towards the gaming community....
With all of the buzz about the G1 from Google / T-Mobile in the past 24 hours there have been some great comments and reviews. There have been insightful discussions and interesting banter weighing the pros and cons, the reasoning for the way they've done certain things, features it may lack or contain, etc. Those are all interesting and useful commentary. This is none of those things. I promise to do more of that in the future, as I did yesterday, but this was too good to pass up. So, this one's from pretty far in left field,...
One of the many feeds pouring into my trusty reader is Read Write Web. They're a trusty source of geek and "norm" information alike, floating out on the web and, more importantly, right here on my Ubuntu machine (I know you can't see it, but I'm pointing) where I can read it at my leisure. This kind of news blog isn't new. I read several of them on a daily basis just to try and keep up with what's going on in the world of the web. RWW just happens to be one of my current favorites. What is...
Well I knew it couldn't be all sunshine and roses. I started poking around looking at more info on the new phone from T-Mobile and Google, the G1, that I was just talking excitedly about an hour or so ago. So far first impressions have been resoundingly positive which is awesome, to say the least. There's always a catch though, isn't there? Cynical geeks across the globe were heard howling in distaste the second they discovered that the new G1 has opted to not include a standard headphone jack in favor of the proprietary connector they favor. What's that?...
Google and T-Mobile have announced the release of the G1, the new smart phone that looks to be a serious competitor for the iPhone. RWW has a great article that lists some features and links to videos/images of the phone. This touch screen, full QWERTY phone comes with Gmail, Google's Android OS, a lightweight browser, a full application market available, downloadable songs from Amazon with a single touch, and more. It's a pretty impressive offering, if you ask me, and just what I've been waiting for. I've been looking to replace my Razr for a while...
It's been a long month this week. Things have been blurring as they go whizzing by and I'm just trying to keep up. If I'm feeling like there's a lot going on, then that must mean that there's even more than normal going on with DevCentral. Hopefully that's an indication that there's more reason than ever to keep putting out the Top5. I'll doll out my picks from the week that I think are "must see" items amongst the torrential cascade of content that is DevCentral as I always do, and hope that you all agree. That said, here's this...
This week Don and Joe traveled to Boston while Jeff and I held things down here at DC Headquarters. Those guys were even contributing while on the road…hawesome as they are. There was plenty going on this week on DevCentral including a great announcement, so be sure to check out this week's Top5. Speaking of which, here it is: Support, Social Technology, and Trust http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/JeffB/archive/2008/09/11/3607.aspx Probably the most exciting news from the world of DevCentral this week is that we've entered into Forrester's Groundswell competition for social networking sites. Jeff's blog post discussing what that is, why...
If you've listened to the podcast this week, or seen the blogs, or haven't been hiding under a rock, then you've heard that we here at DevCentral have entered our community into Forrester's Groundswell awards. We're very excited to be able to add our hat to the ring, as it were, and it's really thanks to all of you out there in DCLand. We've entered in the "Supporting" category, and that's really all about how much the awesome community we get to be a part of is out there helping each other every day. The direct quote is...
It's almost the end of summer. Kids are back in school, vacations are wrapping up, and everyone's hunkering down for the fall months. DevCentral is as active as ever, and it's only going to amplify as the team keeps on kicking out the jams. I'm hoping this means the Top5 is even more useful as I walk you through what's been going on this week in DCLand and show you some of the things I think are a "must-see". That said, here's your Top5: The First VIPRION Review http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/Joe/archive/2008/09/03/the-first-viprion-review.aspx Faster than a speeding bullet and able to...
It's Beta software, it was inevitably going to have some bugs. This bug, however, is a little bit embarrassing for the good folks over at Google. RWW has an article that describes a potentially nasty security hole made possible by Chrome, a known Java bug, and an un-patched WebKit. You can read the whole article here, but the gist of it is that users can be duped with relative ease into executing just about any Java program that an attacker wants. That's bad. Very, very bad, in case you weren't already sure. "It's Beta software!" you say,...
I'm pretty sure everyone's heard the old adage, "When it rains, it pours". It's the same pretty much everywhere, it seems. Whether it's your personal life or in the business world, there isn't much of a difference as far as I can tell. This is likely because most things are somehow coupled together to form a chain of events that, given proper analysis from an informed yet detached point of view, would become clear. I.E. The DB's index got corrupted because the third spindle has acted up because the AC is on the fritz and overheating things and even though...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week we've got three more fun examples of iRules goodness for you, thanks to the awesome community driving the forums and the CodeShare. As always the goal is to show off some of the things that you can do with iRules in less than 21 lines of code. Let's dig in: ...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
After a couple of weeks out of the office, I'm back at it with your weekly dose of iRules goodness in under 20 lines. This week's 20LoL comes from the forums as well as the codeshare. We've got some great examples here, including one iRule that can be used to help augment an already existing...
It's been a while since I've been in the South. It's funny how some things came back almost immediately as fond memories. Even the heat and humidity felt comfortable from my years spent in Atlanta, so when I found myself in the midday New Orleans sun, it wasn't as bad as it would be for perhaps the average Seattle-ite with gills.
Today I arrived in The Big Easy to help put on the iRules course at our annual Partner Summit. This is my first trip to New Orleans, and as an avid jazz/blues fan I have to say I'm excited for...
I'm back with another week's worth of DevCentral goodness for you. The DC team just keeps rocking along and putting out all sorts of awesome content. That is of course in my completely neutral, un-biased opinion. This week I'll take you through five more great reasons to visit DevCentral, ranging from an exclusive interview with Joyent's CTO and co-founder, to real-world examples of PowerShell coding in the wild, making use of the BIG-IP and iControl. That said, let's get to it. Here is your Top5 for this week: Scaling in the Cloud with Joyent's Jason Hoffman ...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. Here we go again, three more examples of the powerful and interesting things you can do with iRules in less than 21 lines. Dipping again into the forums, with a few tweaks here and there (don't worry, I stayed honest to the rule, just took out comments and extra case comparisons, that kind...
So it looks like Joe and I are going to have to take a trip down to San Fran to check out Nick's Crispy Tacos with Jason Hoffman, CTO and co-founder of Joyent. Jason puts on a "Taco Tuesday" on the third Tuesday of just about every month. We've been invited down to check it out and geek out over the hawesome iRules/iControl/Ruby/*Nix/geeky stuff they're doing. Yeah...I'm not completely geeking out and excited, honest. Don't worry though, we'll try to make the best of it.
We got a fantastic opportunity today to talk with Jason about Joyent, what they're doing, their...
This week's Top5 takes you from Application Health Monitoring to queues formed by CS students. The team has been hard at it, as always, and there's plenty to dig through on DevCentral this week. Choosing just five things to talk about seems to be an increasingly difficult task thanks to the mounds of content out there every week, but that's a good problem to have. Here are this week's Top picks: Scaling Ruby on Rails to 1 Billion Page Views a Month http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/Joe/archive/2008/07/15/scaling-ruby-on-rails-to-1-billion-page-views-a.aspx Joe talks about Joyent's successful scaling of their Ruby on Rails deployment for Linkedin's...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
This week's 20LoL comes care of both the codeshare and the forums alike. I got to deal with a couple of particularly cool forum posts this week, one of which made the list, as did an iRule from the infamous hoolio himself. Dealing with HTTP and ranging from spiders to working around a work-week, these...
After a Friday off for the holiday here in the states, we're back at it again, and DevCentral is as busy as ever. There's been some great content and some really fantastic banter alike on the site this week. Today we'll dive into cookie security, go back in time with iControl, and more, but not to worry, I'll step you through it all so you don't get lost in the white water of information rushing through DevCentral. Please keep all hands inside the raft, here's this week's Top5: Persistent and Persistence, What's the Difference? http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2008/07/11/3443.aspx ...
There I was, poised on the precipice of doom, fighting back the hordes of upgrade gremlins with naught but my wit, my savage faith in my distro, and these two hands when all of a sudden there was a blinding light and silence overwhelmed me. I was warm. I was calm. All was well. Ubuntu had delivered me into the safety of my new version, running smoothly with all of my settings, configurations, scripts and cookies wrapped with a shiny new v8.04 bow, ready to be played with.
I swear that's how it happened. That's my story, and I'm sticking to...
So here I sit, working away on my windows box, watching my Ubuntu system churn away, fetching packages for the impending upgrade. I saw that 8.04 LTS was released, so I figured it was time to move from my old and dusty, previous LTS release to this presumably hot and tasty new offering. After downloading a scant 1530 packages, I'll be ready to start installing the upgrades. I'll try to bite back my overwhelming sense of exuberance so as to not cause a monsoon like wave of jealousy to wash over you as you behold in sheer awe induced stupor...
Well it's a short week for me here in DCLand. I'm trying to figure out where it's gone, suddenly realizing it's already 4:30 on Wednesday evening, and I'm soon to be gone for the week. I'm not in tomorrow in preparation/celebration, since Friday is the 4th of July. I'm looking forward to it this year as it's going to mean a BBQ out at the fam's place and blowing things up that turn into big, shiny, sparkly things. That's always fun, no? The most fun part of the event for me is going to be showing...
With the amount of content washing constantly across the pages of DevCentral it can sometimes be impossible to keep up with everything, or to know what to read first. It's because of this that I started the Top5 series. The intent is to allow me to act as your guide and lead you by the hand to point out the Top 5 things that I would choose to make sure you saw amongst the many awesome things gracing the DC pages in a given week. Broadening the reach of this series, I'm going to start making it a part of...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
With another three examples of cool iRules, this week's 20 Lines or Less shows even more things you can do in less than 21 lines of code. I still haven't heard much from you guys as to the kinds of things you want to see, so make sure to get those requests in. I can...
Wired delivers an article that has a truly shocking image. Make sure you read the text in order from smallest to largest. What a great way to give a perspective of the kind of data that we're processing these days. That's a lot of bytes! I remember when downloading a 3 Mb file took "forever", and browsing the web I'd get really annoyed at how many images many pages forced me to load. Okay, I still get annoyed at that one, but that's not their fault. With the pipes getting bigger and the technology ever advancing, we're pushing more...
It's probably not much of a mystery, for those of you following along at home, that I'm a bit of a music guy. I play in a band, love music, listen to all sorts of it all the time, etc. etc. Not much of a logical leap from that is that I tend to also be a bit of an Audio/Video nut. I have a pretty decent home stereo, love the stuff, geek out about balanced inputs vs. 5-way bindings, speaker sensitivity, the pros vs. cons of working at a lower overall impedance, etc. That said, there is a particular...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
This week I've got a combination of entries from our awesome forum users, and a rule I wrote a while back to meet a certain need at the time. We're almost at 10 editions of the 20LoL, and I'm looking forward to many more. Hopefully you're still finding it interesting and useful. Shoot me a...
I'm back! I know you were all waiting anxiously with baited breath for me to announce my triumphant return to my DevCentral duties, so I wanted to be sure that you could exhale and calm your nerves. Okay, on a more serious note, I'm just excited to be back at it and doing more cool stuff here with the community and the team. I'm rested, I'm recharged, and now I'm ready to get back in the trenches, as it were. I visited with some family, took a nice long drive across some pretty countryside, relaxed, gamed, and generally had a...
Here it is, 3:45 PM, the day before vacation, and I have to admit I'm feeling pretty good. Things here at DC headquarters have been busy as heck and I'm looking forward to the time to relax and recoup. I have to say though, I'm going to miss being here even for the week I'll be gone. It's nice to have a finger on the pulse and be on a team that really gets to sit at the tip of the spear, as it were, when talking about what's going on with our users and some of the...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. For this week's 20LoL sampling I've dipped into my own private stash of iRule goodness. Some of these are oldies but goodies, one of them I actually just wrote yesterday as an example for Lori's Blog. As such the newly written example is the only one with a URI. The others will just...
There's an interesting (albeit brief) article over on gigaom.com that talks about the competitive broadband market in London and how this has led to a few things. First of all, it's led to solid service for the users in that area. This is because if you aren't the only act in town, you'd better have your ducks in a row or users will get frustrated and just jump ship. Secondly, it's lead to broad and deep adoption of broadband as a media delivery mechanism. This is interesting to see, and very well may be a glimpse of what's to come....
Twitter is one of those services on the web that you'll find galvanizes people into two real groups. The lovers and the haters. Some people love twitter for how easy to use it is, how up to date with their friends they can stay, the breadth of reach they can so easily find, and more. Others hate it, considering it too much noise in the signal to noise ratio, inane, or even self-centered. I, personally, fall squarely in the middle of these groups. I do personally use twitter, but only for updating what I'm doing while...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. This week we've got some more great examples from the community. I've had the chance to sit in with some fellow F5 iRulers the past couple of days and wow, is it ever inspiring to hear all the things they're doing/seeing with iRules, and the kind of stuff heading our way...
Today I'm getting the chance to sit in with some fellow iRulers here at F5 and chat about this technology we love. This is a multi-day event, so I won't be able to sit in for every hour of it, but I'm trying to soak up as much of the geeky goodness as I can while I'm able to play with the cool kids. It's pretty hawesome to see this much knowledge and experience in one room, with such a broad range of perspectives and stories to tell about what the technology can do, where it should be heading,...
It's not news that some network providers aren't a huge fan of the continually growing BitTorrent phenomenon. They claim that it overburdens their network and unfairly utilizes resources by a few of the network consumers. I've heard many arguments against it, a few I even kind of agree with. Comcast has been among the loudest of those complaining, going so far to actually admit that they were limiting BitTorrent traffic during periods of excessive network utilization. If these decisions were truly being made with the general userbase in mind, I could get behind them. Assuming there were a rational...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. Continuing to draw from the forums, this week's 20LoL is packed with user-contributed goodness. From massaging packets to avoid app-server maintenance, to setting up a customer persistence/re-selection mechanism, we've got it all. This week the iRules range from exactly 20 lines, down to a scant 7 lines of code. Don't be fooled though,...
We all knew it was inevitable. The iPhone was always bound for use by geeks and gadgeteers world-wide. That's no surprise. The iPhone continues to be used in new and interesting ways every day. The buzz has died down, but the geeks of the world haven't forgotten the craze and continue to find ways to use/promote/brag about this cool gadget. That's not so surprising to me, either. I know a fair amount of iPhone users and, while I'm not one of them, I can certainly see the draw behind not only the standard iPhone features, but some of the nifty...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting complicated.
For the real 20LoL this week, we go back to pilfer the wonderful collection of raw brainpower that is the DevCentral forums. Digging through just a few forum posts gave me a couple of tasty little iRules to share with the class for this week. Not only is this stuff cool, easy to implement, and done in less...
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting complicated. Last week I was out on vacation, serenading the good people of Shelton, WA with some thick, groovy funk. As such, the 20LoL had to be put on hold You can consider this your special, super-elite, bonus edition of 20 Lines or Less though, since that sounds cooler. This edition is all about the forums....
It's no surprise to those that know me that I'm a voracious music fan. I love many kinds of music, ranging from blues to opera, hard rock to classical and just about everything in between. As such I've been a long-time fan of Nine inch Nails, a love no doubt held over from my angst-ridden younger years spent thrashing about in mosh-pits and rolling D20s. It's been interesting over the years to watch, as a fan of both music and the interweb, as NiN and specifically Mr. Reznor have taken an active role in Digital Distribution and furthering that cause....
As some of the more astute, frequent DevCentral fliers may have noticed, there was no 20 Lines or Less this week. Fear not, brave souls. I was out on some planned vacation to bring some high-powered Rock N' Roll to the masses. I'm back now, of course, and you can expect the 20LoL to hit this week as normal. Heck, I might even double up this week, so stay tuned! Technorati Tags: Ramblings,F5,DevCentral,iRules,Rock and Roll,Colin Walker #Colin
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask every week, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting complicated. We've got a couple of codeshare entries and an entry courtesy of Joe in the forums. I figure with all the ribbing he gives me for the 20LoL series it's only fair he contributes, knowingly or not. Then again it's in the true spirit of a programmer to steal ... err ... borrow code from all...
