Little Girls

Haven't been around for a few weeks - My life got turned upside down about two weeks early. My spank'n new little girl showed up on June 20th. The doctor, my wife, son and myself were all under the impression that she would arrive in our hands July 4th. She obviously didn't get the memo...

So I got McKaia Ann at 14:08 MST on June 20th. She came into the world at 7.46 lbs, and 18.5 inches long - I think that was a bit of a stretch - she is so tiny. I can hold all of her in one hand - amazing!

I will try to get back up to date - have a very busy week in front of me - Service Provider is in town, need to finish the mockups for provisioning web pages, and look at the video channel manager.

New RSS Reader

So here we go again - trying a new reader on my Windows PC - Sauce Reader - I have been swapping as much well I live in Utah you make up the joke to go along with that.

I already like this reader it allows me from inside of various feeds to go ahead and blog about it, as well as just to create my own on the fly. makes it nice when I am sitting in a meeting come up with a thought after reading someone's feed and want to pass it along.

I am intrigued with RSS and what can be done with it. I have been working on an interface for the provisioning system, as an addition to the interface I have added a RSS feed that allows the NOC Manager the ability to see all the ports being configured. So we have a rolling status window of all the installs taking place in the field. Neat way to tweak the technology for a constant update. As an addition I also have the interface track all the configured ports per NOC technician and deliver a newsletter at the end of the day showing the productivity and errors broken out. Should be an interesting tracking model for the NOC.

Tcl_Dev_Kit 3.1 - Building TclApps

Tcl_Dev_Kit 3.1 - Building TclApps

So for the last week I have been messing around with this Expect script, fondly known in my office as the WardGUI, it will allow a NOC technician the ability to choose a specific community switch location, then the slot and port number associated with a specific house and finally the services that need to be enabled for that location. The script works, needs some spit and polish and to actually have some files to pull the variables from but it delivers the goods on my one test switch. (Please see the UTOPIA project if this makes no sense to you.)

So then I decided I needed to get fancy and as I like to consider myself a bit of a *nix nut let's add some fun to the mix. Originally the GUI part was going to be driven from the web but then I got the bright idea I could wrap this whole thing up in a pretty little TclApp - this would allow me to run it on my happy Mac, the Windows XP box I have been beating the script out on or the FreeBSD box I originally wrote the Expect script on. Now the people in the audience are watching this and someone just whispered, "you know you could do that on all those machines with a web interface?" Yes, I know that but where's the challenge and besides I am building it and you're not, so leave me alone.

To most programmers this would seem quite trivial - they could more than likely knock this little doodad out in a day but to a non-programmer (I build networks man!) this has been quite a struggle. ActiveState is doing their best to help me accomplish this with their documentation, and demos. I will let you know how this thing turns out.

If anyone has any good TclApps that I should take a look at let me know. Might as well learn how to do this right the first time.