A pair of brief articles on tools you can use to monitor your network for strange behaviour and/or attacks:

• Detecting suspicous network activity using psad
• Build an IDS with Snort, Shadow and ACID

It'd be nice if they walked through the actual setup of these tools but I guess its a case of RTFM.

Role based security combined with missile-command style two-key launch process - covered for Solaris Role Based Authentication. Nice worked example but it still looks overly complex.

DIY - MP3 Player. Pretty cool - can't be easy getting the PCB etched though. Wiring by hand would be a nightmare.

Can't wait - 50 Observations about Tiger. OS X Tiger is released on the 29th of April.

A promising article series - 10 Commandments of System Administration.

Nostalgia for people who grew up in the 70's and 80's - Do You Remember.

Another article series - Hardening Linux. Part 3 in the series at IBM's DeveloperWorks.

Be confused no more - ConfusingWords. Will tell you the difference between affect and effect among others.

Open source Crystal Reports style reporting tool - OpenRPT. Cross platform too.

Another nifty self contained wiki - DidWiki. Weighs in at a whole 25kb.

A tiny window manager designed specifically for handhelds and devices which don't need a full blown desktop window manager - MatchBox.

Interesting discussion on Mapping Identities and Single Sign On. Its a shame they have to develop yet another standard rather than trying to enhance something like LDAP.

Amusing article - You are your playlist. Discusses how people are precieved via their Rondezvous enabled iTunes playlists.

Fascinating article by Jason Kottke which outlines some of the potential in Apples new OS X search technology - Spotlight.

Semi serious - Rock Snobbery Explained.

The Cartoon Fridge allows you to stream some popular cartoons to your desktop via the web. Includes Simpsons, King of the Hill and Ren & Stimpy. Happy happy joy joy.

Review of a simple digital tablet - Ace CAD Digimemo. Its a little bit like a miniature electronic whiteboard.

Visual searching via GoogleBrowser. They have something similar for Amazon too.

Russell Beattie takes Orb for a spin. Looks promising.

Interesting background - The History of PDF. I didn't realise it was initially so expensive.

After trying Urlwell (mentioned in a previous post) I'm giving SideNote a go. It actually works in a similar way to a the excellent general purpose launcher DragThing. Essentially I was just after a simple app to act as a dumping ground for urls and clippings.

Fast web server - OKWS. The OK Web Server is designed specially for delivering dynamic content.

Specialist Windows syslog parsing tools from KiwiSyslog.

Specialists in Asian DVD's - Cine-East. Includes the recent movies Casshern, Appleseed and the House of Flying Daggers. Which haven't been widely released yet.

An interesting use for OpenMosix - a bootable distributed password cracking cluster - as featured in this Wired article.

Useful open source tool for stitching together images to form a panorama - Panotools.

People often complain about Antivirus Software causing disk churn and eating processor cycles - Tim Bray mentions (slightly tongue in cheek) one of the side affects of new multi-core processors is that while you do real work the other core can scan for viruses. Isn't Windows great ?

These guys have a cool OSX tool to turn your pictures into a comic book.

For language buffs - Ask the Experts at the Oxford English Dictionary.

This guy is a genius - TiddlyWiki Saves!. This is a self contained Wiki with awesome special-effects - it used to have two fatal flaws: couldn't easily save and you couldn't easily handle images. These problems have now been solved in version three of TiddlyWiki.

Simple parallel backup script for Linux.

Background History on multi-role Windows servers versus role-seperation. The part about Bob Dennys web server pretty much re-inforces the idea that Microsoft are evil.

This rather fantastic tool will Automagically create a Computer Science Paper. Apparently a couple were submitted for acceptance at conferences - which does little to inspire confidence in CompSci academia :-)

For fans of classic gaming (pre-IBM PC) try MDDClone. A clone of Mercenary and its two sequals for the PC. I remember loading this up on tape on my Commodore64.

Network cable ideas - the 5-in-1 Admin Cable and the Receive only network lead.

Over at Sun's Big Admin site - Solaris Zones Explained.

Useful - Guide to Chess Openings.

Awesome time waster - Whack Your Boss.

Wires begone - Wireless USB. Maybe the death knell for bluetooth. Once USB devices can be pocketed and shared wirelessly that'd be the true start of personal area networking - although how they do device arbitration is beyond me (a wireless memory-stick can be shared between how many devices ?).

A great IBM DeveloperNetwork aricle on using a Mac mini as an embedded device. He has a followup article on running Linux/FreeBSD on the Mac mini

For those with long memories - Top 25 Sesame Street Moments.... Near far near far near faaaaeegh :-)

Useful background from a Sun Engineer - Unix from Scratch.

Great piece on the Birth of a new application for OSX.

Neat trick - Convert a blog into a gopher site. Gopher preceeded the web by a couple of years.

Excellent article of the reformation of one of my favourite bands - Slint.

Article on why you need Xsan.

Be vigilent - 7 Myths about Network Security.

Installation - Deploy software via DFS.

This makes so much sense - rack mount wine rack :-)

I used to work above this company. Looks like Alphamosiac hits the bigtime.

(just because I was getting tired of Safari autocompleting 'Interesting Links')

All IT staff should read this - Small shops tackle DR on a Budget. DR/Failover is more and more important these days as disk capacities outstrip tape library capabilities. After all if it takes two days to pull your tapes from offsite storage whats the point ? Why not colocate critical servers and mirror/cluster your data for immediate failover - initially expensive in hardware and bandwidth but less hassle than dealing with tapes and teaching people to drive the backup/restore system.

Most robot-drones are sensor platforms - this Grenade-bot looks like it'll be a huge step up in terms of offensive firepower and area suppression.

These guys have made their media streaming service available for free - Orb. Access your media from almost any device remotely.

Ed Brill brings up some historical points in the internets history - Do you remember when ? I remember 5 of 10 so that probably makes me a middle-aged internet citizen.

The Indian 'Simputer' has finally entered production. It looks pretty cool in terms of features and of course its OS is Linux. As you can see in this email from John Hall (Kernel Hacker extrordinaire) I suspect a lot of geeks will want one of these.

Musical bootlegs

• Interesting list of Bootleg MP3 Sites.
• Live - My Bloody Valentine MP3's.
• Cool - Fugazi, Slint, Shellac MP3's.
• Classic - Butthole Surfers MP3's.