From: Jeff Allen <jra@corp.webtv.net>
After long hours of postponing the inevitable, I have released Cricket
0.64. This is a big release -- more lines of code have changed than
ever before.
There are some useful new features:
* Cricket ignores comments in retrieved data
* You can defeat the cache during testing
* You can monitor US Robotics modem chassis and all types of
Portmasters now.
* You can grab snapshots of GIFs easily
* You can pass arguments thru to RRD Tool when graphing
* You can set mtargets-ops to "sum()" and The Right Thing will
happen
* Less Perl code needs to be parsed when displaying cached
GIFs, potentially making the grapher a bit snappier.
There was a MAJOR infrastructural change too, which resulted in
Cricket relying on a compiled form of the config tree (which lives in
a file managed by the DB_File module). The collector will
automatically recompile it when necessary, and the grapher will try to
alert you when it needs to be recompiled. Creating this compiled form
was necessary since for future features I need to have more info from
the config tree available, and it would have been too slow to load it
all every time. I will not go so far to say that the compiled form
makes anything faster now -- it's actually a bit more cumbersome, and
the startup time is comparable. But it will make future things easier,
and that's really important, since we have a lot of good ideas that
need to get implemented soon.
I also renamed the confusingly named collect-subtree script. It is now
named collect-subtrees, and it operates on a file named subtree-sets,
which has subtle changes to it. Be certain to read the CHANGES file to
see how to migrate to the new (correctly named) system. It does the
exact same thing still, it's just got more appropriate names now.
In other news, I will soon be transferring to a slightly different job
within WebTV. I will be taking Cricket with me, and this new job will
leave me about the same amount of time I've had to work on Cricket --
not a huge amount, but you can rest assured it won't get ignored
either.
Finally, keep the kind words coming. I've always said that WebTV wrote
Cricket first and foremost to solve real problems we were having. But
it's really nice to hear from people who are happy with it too. If you
have a story about how it helped you, please send it to me. I'll keep
them in a folder here and read them for inspiration when I am in the
middle of fighting a heinous bug. :)
-- Jeff R. Allen | jra@corp.webtv.net (work) WebTV Networks, Inc. | jeff.allen@acm.org (personal) Service Operations Toolsmith | http://www.munitions.com/~jra------------------------------------------------------------------------ ONElist: bringing the world together. http://www.onelist.com Join a new list today!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Mar 06 2000 - 19:00:49 PST