with 'docker' tag

big, heavy, and wood

justin mason flagged this article about "The log/event processing pipeline you can't have" a while back, and it has been on my mind ever since. our digital infrastructure is split across a few machines (virtual and not) and i often wish that i had a more cohesive way of collecting logs and doing even minimally interesting things with them.

i think the setup there is probably overkill for what i want, but i love the philosophy behind it. small, simple tools that fit together in an old-school unix way.

i set up an instance of graylog to play with a state-of-the-art log management tool, and it is actually pretty nice. the documentation around it is kind of terrible right now because the latest big release broke a lot of the recipes for processing logs.

right now, the path i am using for getting logs from nginx in a docker container to graylog involves nginx outputting JSON that gets double-encoded. it’s all very gross.

i think i am having a hard time finding the correct tooling for the gap between “i run everything on a single box” and “i have a lot of VC money to throw at an exponentially scalable system”. (while also avoiding AWS.)

(the very first post to this blog was the same ren & stimpy reference as the title of this post.)

the state of things

just over seven years ago, i mentioned that i had decided to switch over to using scat, the point of sale software that i had been knocking together in my spare time. it happened, and we have been using it while i continue to work on it in that copious spare time. the project page says “it is currently a very rough work-in-progress and not suitable for use by anyone.” and that's still true. perhaps even more true. (and absolutely true if you include the online store component.)

it is currently a frankenstein monster as i am (slowly) transforming it from an old-school php application to being built on the slim framework. i am using twig for templating, and using idiorm and paris as a database abstraction thing.

i am using docker containers for some things, but i have very mixed emotions about it. i started doing that because i was doing development on my macbook pro (15-inch early 2008) which is stuck on el capitan, but found it convenient to keep using them once i transitioned to doing development on the same local server where i'm running our production instance.

the way that docker gets stdout and stderr wrong constantly vexes me. (there may be reasonable technical reasons for it.)

i have been reading jamie zawinski’s blog for a very long time. all the way back to when it was on live journal, and also the blog for dna lounge, the nightclub he owns. the most recent post about writing his own user account system to the club website sounded very familiar.