metautonomo.us

meta- one level of description up
autonomy independence; self-direction
metautonomous enabling autonomy through code

Portfolio

The following is a small selection of some of the applications I’ve developed over the years.

PALADIN

PALADIN is a Perl/Tk application that runs as a stand-alone Windows binary. It is a feature-rich customer database, equipment tracker, and trouble-ticketing solution that some users described as "a better remedy than Remedy." Some key features:

• Heavy use of optional hotkeys to speed user navigation and ticket entry.
• A “My Tickets” window keeps users apprised of service outages and any tickets currently assigned to them or their group no matter what they’re doing in the application, leading to an increased sense of ownership for open issues.
• Customer, equipment, and ticket data is subjected to stringent data validation and formatting prior to data entry, including prompts upon a suspected duplicate entry, reducing the likelihood of data entry errors.
• Detailed reporting capability allows for the generation of Excel-compatible spreadsheets detailing most active users, most problematic customers, total time to ticket resolution, and other useful statistics matching a number of filters.
• Integrated device polling allows users to poll the customer’s equipment for various provisioning and RF statistics in real time from within the app, while viewing a customer’s account.

This application enjoyed a high level of user appreciation and was used for nearly 5 years in a network operations and call center environment logging tens of thousands of tickets per month. More information about my experience with building PALADIN can be found on this post.

OffenderDB

OffenderDB is a Ruby on Rails application which allows an ISP’s security and abuse team to track AUP violations and account suspensions. Though its functionality is simple, it has been enthusiastically embraced by its users, who were directly involved in its development through an iterative development cycle. Its primary features:

• Intuitive, tab-based interface for accessing search, edit, and administrative functionality.
• Export search results and reports to Excel.
• Authentication via Active Directory.
• Administrators have full ability to administer user roles and manage offense types, account statuses, and other drop down options at their discretion. Rails validations and foreign key constraints ensure they cannot harm data integrity.

The success of this application, which was largely used as a testbed for agile development using the Ruby on Rails framework, has led to the addition of Rails as formal part of Insight’s tool set.

N.A.D.S.

N.A.D.S. (yes, really) is a Perl application that was designed to provide comprehensive cable modem monitoring across a region. SNMP is used to gather information from various Cisco uBR cable modem routers and aggregate it into flat text files. This storage format is entirely arbitrary, and can be changed when scalability requires, as all data access is accomplished through a Perl module that acts as an abstraction layer. From this information a variety of functions are provided, including:

• Status overview of all uBRs, including total online and offline modems per uBR and broken down by interface as well.
• Overviews of cable modems on a particular uBR interface, including vitals such as the cable modem MAC address, percent online, cable modem IP, RX power, SNR, etc.
• A similar overview of cable modems matching a given search criteria, either modem MAC address, modem IP, or customer NIC MAC/IP.
• Any cable modem MAC can be clicked on from the overview in order to perform a search on the customer database for a customer having that cable modem. If the customer has called technical support, their record will be displayed.
• An individual modem can be zoomed, providing more detailed statistics as well as an option to do real-time connectivity testing and polling.

Additionally, the front-end provides access to distributed NetSaint information, direct access to CustDB (a simple web-based customer database), and cable modem provisioning functionality via a frame-based wizard, preventing the provisioning of unavailable client class types.

NeoMail

NeoMail, released in February of 2000, is an open source web-based e-mail client that can be installed on any UNIX mail server. It handles all access to UNIX mail spools directly, and thus eliminates the need for a mail server admin to run a POP3 or IMAP server if they wish to offer client access exclusively via webmail.

NeoMail adheres to a minimalist design philosophy, eschewing flashy HTML e-mail and spell checks for a simple, plaintext e-mail experience. It is extremely easy to integrate because of this simplicity, and was integrated in several large web hosting “panels” such as cPanel.

NeoMail is no longer maintained. At its peak, it was used by thousands of people and organizations, including several large web hosting firms, universities, and even foreign and domestic government organizations.

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