Cool Tools

Simulating Data with the Splunk Event Generator

Posted by Kevin Chu on Friday, February 22, 2013 - 13:29 Operational Intelligence, Cool Tools, Development Cool Tools, Data Inputs, Development, Event Generator, eventgen, Splunk

While installing a new app to your Splunk search head can usually be considered a rather benign action, sometimes the introduction of a TA on your forwarders and indexers requires more attention. This is commonly the case, especially if your production environment is guarded by change control. The problem is that without the data generated by those inputs your newly installed app may not display properly, and without seeing your new app’s dashboards populated with data, you may not be able to conclude how useful it really is. I suppose deploying a fully mirrored “dev” environment to...

Passwords: Sharks Can Smell a Breach a Mile Away

Posted by Jon Reid on Tuesday, February 5, 2013 - 14:22 Best Practices, Cool Tools, Data Security Best Practices, Cool Tools, Security

2013 is not shaping up to be a banner year for Internet security. 2012 saw data breaches like 6.5 million LinkedIn password hashes leaked, 420,000 member accounts from social network Formspring, Yahoo! Voices more than 400,000 usernames and passwords, 1.5 million passwords from the online dating site eHarmony. Twitter is the latest system to suffer an embarrassing security breach with accompanying data loss. Approximately 250,000 accounts holders have had their usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords stolen. Twitter has been as proactive as...

WebCenter Sites CSDT tip: Recommended Order of @ALL_ASSETS for Error-free Imports

Posted by Somen De on Friday, January 18, 2013 - 15:06 Web Experience Management, Cool Tools, Development, Best Practices Cool Tools, CSDT, Development, FatWire, Oracle WebCenter Sites, Web Experience Management, WEM

As anyone who has worked with Oracle WebCenter Sites "Content Server Development Tools" (CSDT) already knows, the import process can get a little “tricky”, especially when trying to import "@ALL_ASSETS".

Regardless if you're operating from the command line or via Eclipse's CSDT plug-in, there are inevitable errors that occur because of the complexity of certain sites, and all the dependencies that arise between workspace resources.

When a CSDT import error occurs during “@ALL_ASSETS”, it’s typically difficult to pinpoint which specific element caused the error, and there’s...

Packing Passwords

Posted by Avani Cheriathundam on Thursday, August 16, 2012 - 14:56 Cool Tools, Best Practices Best Practices, Cool Tools, Security

A common problem faced at the workplace and at home is finding a way to securely store your passwords. With people like “Anonymous” and identity thieves out there, gone are the days for scribbling passwords on post it notes (who would do such a thing?!?), or keeping word docs with your passwords listed on your hard drive. Users now want a more secure way to not only store passwords, but share them as needed.

Recently for a client site, we implemented Passpack (http://passpack.com/en/home/) as our online password repository, and so far, it...

I, for one, Welcome our new JavaScript Overlords

Posted by Jon Reid on Monday, July 30, 2012 - 13:59 Cool Tools, Development, Enterprise 2.0 Cool Tools, Development, Javascript

You are probably most familiar with JavaScript as that sometimes useful, often quirky, client-side scripting language used on websites to enhance user interfaces and enable dynamic content.

Wikipedia describes JavaScript as “dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions … a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.” Fairly generic technical description there. Wikipedia fails to point out that JavaScript may also be a ravenous monster intent on infiltrating every bastion of technology we have!

JavaScript is not...

On meetings and coming together

Posted by Allan Mai on Tuesday, May 8, 2012 - 17:35 Cool Tools 37signals, basecamp, Collaboration, Cool Tools

It is hard to justify calling a meeting. Do all five of these people need to be here for the next hour? Are we brainstorming? Is something unclear?

Brainstorming during a meeting is not always a good use of time.

When is the last time that, when called upon, you were able to summon all of your creative energies to focus into a burst of inspiration about something, anything? Can you do it in the next 10 minutes? Hour? Or in a room with all these other people, at the same time? In the ideal situation this would be a difficult task, in reality, Mary didn't get her coffee yet and...

Using the Visualization Editor to Create a Dashboard in Splunk 4.3

Posted by Rupak Pandya on Thursday, April 5, 2012 - 16:09 Operational Intelligence, Cool Tools Analytics, Cool Tools, Dashboards, Simple XML, Splunk, UI, Visual, Visualization

Hello world! This is my first blog post with Function1 and I hope you find it useful. This post will give you an idea of how simple it is to use the new Visualization Editor in Splunk 4.3 to create a dashboard. This neat new feature is great because it simplifies the dashboard and panel creation process by allowing any user to create a custom dashboard without having to write any XML code and/or book time and consult with the IT guy! Each Splunk user can create their very own custom dashboard with panels that can include a table, pie chart, line graph, or a variety of other options with...

Cool Tools Part XVII: Heroku

Posted by Ashish Bhutiani on Monday, April 25, 2011 - 20:59 Cool Tools, Development Cloud, Cool Tools, Development, Git, Heroku, Rails

You know that we at Function1 can help you out with all of your Plumtree/AquaLogic/WebCenter needs. That's not all we do though, and we hope to show you some of that on this blog.

Recently, we were building an employee review site for a client. We made the decision to build it in Ruby on Rails. If there is interest, I'll do a later post talking about what Rails is or it's merits. While we were developing the application, we were looking for a way to rapidly deploy changes we made to the application so the client could use it and stumbled upon...

Cool Tools Part VI: BareTail

Posted by Ashish Bhutiani on Thursday, November 29, 2007 - 02:30 Cool Tools Cool Tools

Do you look at a lot of log files during the course of a day? Are you sick of closing and reopening files in NotePad and EditPlus to see the changes reflected in those files? Do you wish there was an easy way to see things in log files that you care about? If so, then this "Cool Tool" is for you...

BareTail allows you to have multiple text files open at the same time and it auto refreshes the text files as new entries are added to it. You can even specify custom highlighting so that important information from the log files is immediately visible to you. In the screen shot below, I...