Last week, I wrote about some changes that I was making to Siteimp's monitoring module to better solve a more stringent monitoring problem. It was a monitoring problem that I had recent experience with - I built a small local AI model backed application that I use as a guide to recipes while I cook. When the model goes down, the chat just thinks so I never really know whether I just asked something too complex or whether my model died.
But back in the day, I was heavily involved in surveillance cameras. There was a brief point in the mid 2000s when I was a bit of a name in storage and retrieval. It was a big problem then as bandwidth had not quite caught up to the needs exposed when you had 16 surveillance cameras running in a business and the owners need offsite backup and remote view capability. I made a lot of serious mistakes and killed that business off within a few years - it turns out that distributing to retailers is a heck of a big problem and I just couldn't solve the problems that problem created.
However, I made some good friends and stay in touch with some of them. One friend of mine got into the legal cannabis industry and owns a small production facility. Or, small by the standards set by his ambition - it's a heck of a great operation. His operation uses a mix of cloud and on premises based equipment to automate as much of the farming process as possible - the margins in the legal cannabis industry are so small right now that automation is a big way for legal producers to provide a good product and compete with the black market in terms of price. Back in the day, I built a surveillance system for him and his now husband for a vertical farm they started.
It turns out that monitoring is a source of concern for him. And while Watch wasn't quite ready for mass consumption, I spent a marathon session in front of my machine and got a build out to him. And so, what started off as a quick catch up about family, my kid and our baseball obsession turned into a beta trial.
And so, Siteimp Watch is officially in beta. Through building it out, I had to come up with a few more features that made their way back to Siteimp. Our robots.txt policy is much stronger and we introduced two user-agent strings that will stop any Siteimp scan or monitoring request before they start. It's a great step to building a more honest product that we won't control once it gets released - we run scans and monitoring on a user's own hardware so there is a small potential for mischief.
Since Watch is a very focused product, it gets rid of some of the annoyances that make Siteimp Monitoring great, but not quite great enough for hardcore internal uptime monitoring. I can check stuff that runs in my network once a second and get notifications to (in this case) Discord.
And of course, I have to write a metric crap load of support documents. Metric crap load is a unit of measurement... if you've ever had to write user facing tech support documents for a product, you are familiar with it. There are two crap loads in a metric shit tonne and 20 imperial pounds in a metric crap load. Or something like that. :)
Happy Sunday.