Paul’s Journal

So, I didn’t rush to get one on launch day; But enough people have said good things about it, and it doesn’t look like a flop, so today I went up to the Valley Fair Apple Store in Santa Clara at about 4pm.

Walked in, and it was crazy busy, people all huddled around the demo units. I figured they were sold out, but asked an employee, and he said to just go to the checkout. And so now I have an iPhone.

The migration was painless. I ported my existing Cingular/ATT account. When I originally signed up with Cingular, it took 3 hours to activate the phone in a store. With Apple, I did it form home, in 3 minutes, via iTunes. It is about time cell phones stopped sucking.

I’m happy to announce the release of a new piece of software that I’ve written. Cluster Tail or ctail for short. Basically, it multiplexes lots of SSH connections, to invoke tail -f on a large set of machines or log files.

It isn’t the most amazing idea, but if you have ever had hundreds of machines (or even a dozen), trying to understand what is going on across all of can be very difficult, and this is just another tool to make that easier.

Most other methods of reading log files on large clusters get away from classic Unix Philosophy, but ctail can easily be piped into other commands.