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I was reading a NY Times article about these cool workspaces that had lots of high-end industrial machines available for members to use and noticed that the workspace chain called Tech Shop mentioned in the article seemed to be located around the San Francisco bay area.   Perusing the Tech Shop’s class list, I saw they had location that wasn’t too far from me and signed up for a “Safety and Basic Use” class about their Epilog Laser Engraving/Cutting machines.

Epilog Helix 24 Laser Engraver/Cutter

I took the two hour class on Wednesday night with three other participants.  The class was taught by Laura Mapping, who has been a laser-working enthusiast for about three years.  The class covered:

• Shop etiquette
• How the machine works & basic operations
• Safety
• Appropriate materials

Everyone in the class got to take turns trouble-shooting and optimizing a design that we “lased” onto some cardboard, showing how the dots-per-inch, speed, and power settings affect the final outcome.  At the end of the class we were given souvenir dog-tags and allowed to etch whatever we wanted onto them.

I really enjoyed the class, the machine was neat and the instructor was great.  Once Clio and I finally find our permanent location in the bay area, I’ll probably get a membership at the Tech Shop so I can go back and play with the laser and maybe learn about some of the other machines.

Here are a couple of systems tools I’ve been using lately and have been very happy with:

Puppet (configuration management) – I’ve used CFengine a lot on the past for configuration management, but I now prefer Puppet due to its wide scope of manageable resources, ranging the gamut from standard file distribution to  packages, services, users, network configurations, etc.   We are currently using Puppet to bootstrap systems from a base CentOS image to having all the components needed for their role and it is working out really well. I read the book Pulling String with Puppet to get ramped up, and while it is helpful, it lacks an index, so I’d recommend getting an electronic copy.

Splunk (log/event parsing) – I haven’t seen any other locally deployed tool that can come anywhere close to Splunk for taking various log files and making the information immediately usable on a wide scale.  The search interface is super shiny and has a lot of very interesting capabilities for creating dashboard, performing data mining, and alerting.  Splunk came out with a new release (4.1) last week.  If you last looked at Splunk more than a year ago, check out whats new.  If you are looking for a cloud-based solution, Paglo (recently bought by Citrix)seems to be an interesting option.

Func (command & control) – while almost all of the management in the environment is done via Puppet, there are times when we want to run commands across a set of hosts. Func fills the niche nicely by providing the ability to use wildcards and grouping for host selection and running against multiple targets in parallel.  For folks wanting to get a quick overview of Func, I recommend Dan Hank’s Managing Your Minions With Func presentation