Resolving elasticsearch exception for Parse Failure [No mapping found for [@timestamp] in order to sort on]

elasticsearch logo

We use Kibana at work (which is a nice UI to sit on top of logstash – I think logstash has adopted Kibana now that I check up on it – which also makes use of elasticsearch) as our visual tool to dig into our system logs from instances we host on AWS. To my dismay I received the alert this morning that we were running out of disk space on our dedicated logging box (it aggregates rsyslog data, with our other production boxes pumping information through to logstash). Mind you, it has been running for close to a year without missing a beat so it was time for some maintenance.

Unfortunately I hadn’t setup a trimming cron job to deal with the eventuality of the logs blowing out on disk space so there was very little disk space left when I finally decided to go take a look. Continue reading “Resolving elasticsearch exception for Parse Failure [No mapping found for [@timestamp] in order to sort on]”

Dipping my toes into Lisp – Getting Common Lisp with FastCGI support working with Apache

CLISP
CLISP (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I haven’t to date posted anything tech related to the blog, not because I haven’t wanted to but because mainly there are people out there better than I who have already written a great deal about the topics I’m interested in. So here’s my first post, and I’m going to write a little about my latest venture doing some exploration with Lisp.

Lisp is a language that has intrigued me for a while. How did I come across it you might ask? Mainly through the influence of two individuals who have had a fairly large impact in my profession.

I’m an avid reader and long time lurker of Hacker News (HN – for short), it’s definitely my number one go to source for current tech industry information. I know I’m sure to find some interesting tidbits here and there and spend at least a few hours per week reading articles I find linked. Continue reading “Dipping my toes into Lisp – Getting Common Lisp with FastCGI support working with Apache”

A change of scenery

For those that didn’t know, I left my old job at OnTechnology as a Senior Software Engineer just before the birth of my son Dashel in July of 2009.

It was an extremely difficult decision, but I had to make a choice between living in a place I love and being able to watch my family grow up here, or continuing to make the sacrifice of commuting and working long hours in Sydney.  Something had to give and I decided that it was more important to focus on my families future in Wollongong rather than continue working in Sydney.

I took a risk and decided to keep an eye out for suitable work in the ‘gong, not just any work mind you, but with a company that has similar ideals and a vision that I agreed with strongly. Luckily for me, iQmultimedia, a Wollongong company with a strong and growing presence were looking to hire! Continue reading “A change of scenery”

Start at the beginning!

I’ve been encouraged by some friends of mine to actually get my act together and setup an online presence. Why you ask? It’s mainly to do with self-promotion, a topic I’m not really all that comfortable with. However, in order to attract some attention and bring in some cash to put food on the table, it’s necessary.

What do I aim to achieve?

Hopefully this little corner of the web I have decided to claim as my own will become a repository where I can show off some of my work, detail my interests, perform experiments and perhaps also use as a memory dump.

I will be aiming to at least post something every week, whether it’s related to work, software development in general or the latest thing that has taken my fancy.

We all have to start somewhere right? So I’m going to start at the beginning.