It all started with tripped breaker. In fact it tripped multiple times before I got home. Luckilly the spinning rust drives with data survived that without any issues, but the flash drive didn't. So with system FUBAR and some (little) time on my hands, there's only one thing to do - upgrade.

Motivation🔗

Chances are, you never heard about Xymon (formely Hobbit), so let me give you some idea. It's actually pretty decent monitoring system - if you still live in 90s. :D But hey, let's give credit where it's due, compared to other systems at that time, it was reasonably fast, has quite easy to understand configuration, comes with many standard checks out of the box and comes with a web interface. Probably that's why some people still use it to this day.

In our company it's one of those legacy systems, that we need to replace, so as a first step, let's see if we can get some of the data out while we're still using it.

The waste of being present🔗

From time to time I work from home - nothing unusual here, I'm actually surprised that this practice isn't more common. After all - unless you're working manually, chances are you are working remotely anyway. Your email, instant messaging - you might be reading them locally on your computer, but they are all stored, transferred and received by server somewhere in datacentre. All your applications are moving to your browser, all your files are moving to cloud. The point is this: A lot of people are working remotely even while sitting at their office chair. Whole companies are like that.

Yet, every morning, there are traffic jams and the public transport is overloaded.. And it seems like a huge waste to move all these people around, just to have them working somewhere virtual anyway.

So there's this nice thing called Let's Encrypt, I'm sure you're already aware. If you want to get free certificate for your website in an automated way, it's definitely great. However in my case I would have to make sure to renew the certificate before it expires, which would defy the whole point of using static website on S3 - that is, unless I want to change something, I don't have to touch it. I could perhaps set up a daemon somewhere that would take care of it, but then again I would have to make sure that the service actually runs.

Fortunately, there is a way to get the same results with just AWS services.

There's one thing that fascinates me about kids. I actually only noticed it recently while watching my little son.

The thing is, kids do everything 100%. There's no multitasking, whatever they do, they only do that thing and they are completely focused on it.

My son doesn't even speak and probably only understands very few words, yet nobody else will listen to whatever you say like he does. Obviously that's only true when he is listening, when he's not, he's not listening at all. There's no pretending. You either have his undivided attention or you have none of it.