On Friday I was having a frustrating experience with our wifi system, a nifty setup from Extricom. Ping round-trips were varying widly but always going back from a 1 s to a sub-10 ms elapsed time. I ran ping for a bit, pushed the data through R and was extremely surprised by the results. Since this particular setup uses a controller that allows seamless hand-over from one access point to another, I suppose that my bits are being transmitted by different access points at least every second. A pleasant graph nonetheless. [caption id="attachment_82" align="alignnone" width="509" caption="Latency (ms) of sequential 1-second pings"] [/caption]

I have been reading the technical documentation from our SAN vendor in order to connect their SNMP agent to our monitoring rig (a collection of cacti and awk/postgresql contraptions designed to operate as performance data warehouses). Since they use private MIBs it is only fitting that they provide detailed documentation on the various probes available. The probes in themselves are fine, but the documentation is not. To be more procise the documentation format is not. I very much concur with petermr that PDF is absolutely not the proper format for technical documentation. Technical documenation tends to be very structured and, in this particular case, we are looking at page after page of table-formatted probe description, and entries are very similar to each other. You might argue that the .mib file contains all that information in a very easy-to-parse format. I would agree except that it does not contain as much descriptive prose as the manual does. So PDF prints well but is too restrictive for that kind of data since it does not interface properly with external search tools. Who wants to print reams of OIDs anyway? I'd rather grep in this case. I'm not here advocating for the use of some rich and rigid SGML/XML schema since documentation has to be free-form enough to not constrain technical writers to a preconceived form. Quite the contrary, a microformat would probably work very well here. Even ascii art and pure free-form text would work better than PDF. So if you're an entreprise vendor, keep producing nice PDF slicks arguing about great ROI and low TCO, but please, keep your technical documentation grep-able.