Tuesday, December 9, 2003

Searching along the path of least resistance. Yesterday's experiment reminded me that I've been meaning to spend more time with search engines other than Google. So I visited the Mycroft download page and picked up Mozilla plugins for AllTheWeb and Teoma. It's funny how arbitrary factors can influence your behavior. Mozilla's search box orders the plugins alphabetically. AllTheWeb is thus on the path of least resistance, and I've been using it often. Of course, it's really impressive. ... [Jon's Radio] 11:03:33 PM

Tech Gifts a Luddite Will Love. What to buy for the dad who loves movies but still can't program a VCR? Is there any hope for these non-geeky relatives? Check out our techie gift guide for non-techie types. By Katie Dean. [Wired News] 5:14:01 PM

DocBook redesign ponderings. Norm Walsh ruminates over DocBook's possible need for a redesign. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Weblogs] 5:06:54 PM

Open Source Network Administration. In Open Source Network Administration, MIT netadmin James M. Kretchmar introduces an extraordinary collection of open source tools for streamlining and improving network management, monitoring, alerting, optimization, troubleshooting, and much more. Kretchmar provides detailed explanations, plus easy instructions for retrieval, installation from source, configuration, and usage. He covers SNMP, MRTG, Neo, Flow-Tools, Oak, Sysmon, Nagios, Tcpdump, and much more-even building your own tools with Perl. An indispensable resource for every network administrator. [Safari Tech Books Online] 10:54:30 AM

For Mac sysadmins, an upgrade checklist. As columnist Ryan Faas weighs an upgrade to Panther, called Mac OS X 10.3, he offers Mac systems administrators a checklist for whenever it's time to upgrade. [Computerworld News] 10:44:54 AM