The school's weather station webpage seems to have stuffed it sometime around Thanksgiving. Today somebody finally noticed and alerted the support staff.

My boss asks "where's the documentation?".

Right.  There is none. This system has been in place for ten years or more and fails occasionally.  When that happens we go in and fix it.

Start with the webpage that actually displays the data. It's pulling the data from a file that is supposed to be automagically updated. Except we don't believe in magic. The file didn't get updated. Now to find out why.

Since this is a scheduled event, cron has to be involved. Let's have a look at the crontab file. Hmmm. It's pulling the changes from another file that is supposed to be automagically updated. That one hasn't been changing either. What changes that file? It isn't cron. Or is it? That file is symlinked to a file on another computer. Let's go have a look at the other computer. Ah, I see. There's a crontab running there which generates the contents of the update file from a data file via a collection of python scripts. Let's have a look at those. 

As I suspected, they are pulling data from yet another file that is automagically updated. Right. It hasn't changed since November either. What changes this file? Time to scan the logs. Nothing.

OK, it's time to start from the other direction. The weather station is connected to a PC in the corner of a lab. Let's have a look there. It's hung and totally unresponsive. OK, maybe that's the problem. I reboot it. Then go back to the webpage. Nope. Nothing has changed.

OK, somehow the data has to get from the weather station computer to the other computer where the python scripts can munge it. Let's have a look at the logs.

The logs say everything is fine, but it isn't fine. Nothing. It's not happening. Well this is interesting. I check connectivity and network connections. They're OK. We've got an IP addess and pings work just fine. A closer look reveals that there's a Windows task scheduler which occasionally FTP's the weather files across the net to the second Unix box. The logs don't show any errors. Hmmm. The files aren't being FTP'd though. They aren't making it. Then I see a notice at the bottom of the screen. Updates were applied some time since the computer was last powered on - six months ago. OK, what updates? Windows firewall. Right. So I have a look, and sure enough the computer's FTP connection has been firewalled because of an automatic update. The FTP's are silently failing - and indicating success. This is pure evil. After several minutes I'm able to get in with an administrator account that can fix the firewall and do so. 

Then have another look. Still nothing happening. What could be the problem now? Ah, on reboot FTP is automatically disabled on the weather station software - again without any warnings. The logs again say everything is working and files are being transferred. More evil. What's the use of having log files if they lie to you? I turn on the FTP. Bingo - now the files get through. Now back to the second computer to manually process the files and dump them into the directory where the third computer can pick them up. Then back to the third computer to manually update the processed files.

Yay! It works.

Back to the documentation. How would somebody document stuff like this? There's just too much that can go wrong. I could use up a tree or two writing it all down. This is why we've got systems folks. 

If you're a techie and are ever really bored, here's something you can do for amusement...

Assume you're running on some flavour of Windows. First create a virtual machine running Linux. 

Now in your virtual machine, let's fire up a CP/M emulator. A machine running in a machine running in a machine.

Now wasn't that fun?

Now let's take it one step further...

In your virtual machine, run a windows emulator. Now run some cygwin tools.  Maybe ssh (from within a Bourne shell) out to a Mac and do something there.

So now you've got Mac stuff running under Linuxy stuff running under Windows running under Linux running under Windows.

Like I said, you need to be really bored to do stuff like this. And don't even think about trying to explain to anybody why it's even amusing.  

Unless you've been watching closely, this announcement was easy to miss. Sun Microsystems is acquiring MySQL. This has ramifications both good and bad.

This will likely affect a huge number of people who are currently using open source web applications; a majority of which are being stored on MySQL databases. Their future viability is now questionable. It all depends on the license and revenue models Sun chooses to adopt.

I would also try to steer clear of the pending 6.0 release as it is likely to involve significant re-structuring of the code to suit Sun's business requirements. It may be a year or three before it stabilises again. Sun is legendary for introducing layers of bureaucracy into development projects.  

While Sun may make public announcements of their intent to continue to provide the product for free [and it should be noted that there was no such announcement in the press release], it is difficult to imagine the corporate bean counters not making a recommendation to derive as much revenue stream as possible from the acquisition.

You can read the announcement here. 

Also of potential interest is this (dated) history of MySQL 

After a continuing feud between Intel Corp and the One Laptop Per Child organization, Intel finally walked out with a huff.

OLPC has been trying hard to get cheap computers into the world's poorest countries. But in order to keep the price down, these have AMD chips instead of the higher-priced Intel processors, and use open source operating systems rather than the also pricier Windows.

Intel joined the organization a while back, seeing that it was a huge market opportunity. But they used their insider knowledge to get their own Wintel machines into the running for the purchase orders, at almost twice the cost. Then they put their biggest sales reps into the field to make sure that they got all the orders. 

OLPC cried foul. Intel responded by leaving the organization (presumably taking their support money with them).