Fonolo is a startup with a different take on contacting big companies with large, complicated phone trees. The company has written software to spider phone trees and create a web-based picker tool. 
Once you traverse the web-generated tree, Fonolo will dial that company, follow the path you set up and then wait on hold for you. Once your call is connected, your callback number is dialed.
It’s still in closed beta, but very cool thus far.
I just received the new Burton catalog and in it was an awesome story (p89) about FYI Design Studio who is responsible for Burton’s [ak] clothing line. The studio is situated in the middle of the mountains in Pemberton, British Columbia.
Inside the studio they surround themselves with state-of-the-art equipment and the finest fabrics to produce the most innovative products. They then test all of their gear by going outside and snowboarding down the mountains.
Tom Routh, one of the studio’s chief designers says,
One of the most important things in life is to be where you want to be, then make it work from there.
He goes on to say that the move to the eccentric location didn’t make any business sense at all, and that is precisely why it has succeeded.
Very awesome.
Here’s a really short regex that can be used to parse free space output and verify each mounted disk has at least 89% free space. This comes in handy if you do any of your own systems monitoring that include *nix boxes.
So let’s say you have this output from various machines:
db:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
47G 3.1G 41G 7% /
/dev/sda1 99M 16M 79M 17% /boot
tmpfs 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /dev/shm
www:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
76G 16G 56G 22% /
/dev/sda1 99M 17M 78M 18% /boot
tmpfs 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /dev/shm
email:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 13G 4.1G 9.0G 32% /
udev 1.9G 116K 1.9G 1% /dev
/dev/sdb1 241G 15G 214G 7% /var/data
/dev/sdc1 241G 15G 214G 7% /var/backup
This regex will do the trick:
/([9]).%/
It can be integrated into a Ruby statement as follows:
IO.popen(“cat /path/to/freespace_output 2>&1”) do |f|
while line = f.gets do
lowdisk_systems += 1 if line =~ /([9]).%/i
end
end
In this case, lowdisk_systems gets incremented for each line of “/path/to/freespace_output” that is 90% or greater.
This example by itself is extremely limited in scope, but if integrated properly it can be useful.
