Plenty of interesting stuff on the web this week -

This is my pet peeve too - Do IT Certifications Matter ?. Actually a half decent slashdot thread for a change. While you do need to study a lot to pass todays Cisco / Sun / Microsoft exams its still an ephemeral type of knowledge (much like most of school and university). Unless you put it into practise on a daily basis most of this information will never get used. Apart from indicating a willingness to apply yourself (you can stick with a mind-numbingly boring program of study so you can definitely work with us) it doesn't truly reflect on anyones ability. I've come to think of IT as more of a trade / craft - more like a builder, electrician or plumber than an engineer or mathematician - as a craft there probably should be some form of apprenticeship to learn whatever you need to learn on the job (perhaps like a medical intern). Erica Ann (who made the slashdot post) has some more information on this from another perspective.

Robert Cringely asks Has Google Peaked ?.

Handy graphics applications - Artrage (win32 & mac) and ImageWell (mac).

This looks like its pretty nifty - from IBM's AlphaWorks R & D people - Real Time File System File Restores (for end-users). In fact this looks potentially very cool. Veritas had a product which did something similar but it just wouldn't scale beyond about 30 people.

Genius - Daniel Dennetts take on Intelligent Design. Daniel C. Dennett co-edited one of my favourite books on the self/consiousness - The Minds I

P2P app for the Mac - Poisoned.

A collection of 404 messages for web servers everywhere.

RIP - the death of the Rio MP3 brand. My old Rio500 cost me almost $500USD about 6 years ago. My new iPod Shuffle cost me $250NZD and stores 10 times the music in a smaller form-factor. Now thats progress.

Debian Administration is running a CFEngine distributed configuration series - CFEngine part 1, CFEngine part 2, CFEngine part 3.

Oh to be a kid again - now you can download an app to Design Your Own Lego Kit.

Domino / Notes 7 - IBM Answers Tough Questions R7.

Tim Bray gives a brief insight into a first time Mac Mini user.

A free partition manager - Visopsys PartitionLogic. Looks pretty good. I've used PartitionMagic for this type of thing in the past but I always feel ultra paranoid about shuffling drive data around at such a low level.

A nice review of the new QEmu release.

Via Tinyapps is this little Windows application which will let you view your Address Book, To Do, Datebook files - DeskPilot.

Some debate as to wether this is entirely serious or not but given that bandwidth is given over to notebook fetishists (Moleskin Notebooks) then its only fair that the writing instrument itself gets equal time - Pencil Revolution.

Fantastic - miniature valve stereo amplifier - ImpAmp.

I just realised my Blosxom 'categorytree' plugin wasn't working. The Blosxom web page was loading fine but none of the sub links/categories were working.

A quick search of the faq turned up this tidbit on url-hiding.

And I just had to add to my .htaccess file

Whats wierd is that I thought I had this fixed already.

(bands on my big iPod Shuffle for the week ending 28 August 2005) -

Now I can cram in about 240 songs (instead of 20) I'll probably only update this once in awhile with whatever seems to pop up on 'shuffle' . . .

God, Pelican, Stina Nordenstam, Billy Holiday, Afghan Whigs, Godspeedyoublackemperor, Godflesh, Three Colours Red, Tindersticks, Labradford, Moby, Laika, Lamb

Post inspired by Jesse.

Probably my favourite lightweight Window Manager for Unix is Ion. Heres a brief interview with the developer.

DrunkenBlog has a wonderfully damning review of a OS X gambling application. Points out all that is wrong in application development.

Jason Kottke has a piece about the new WebOS that seems to be springing up from the likes of Google (their new Sidebar, Mail and IM clients) and Yahoo (Mail and the newly acquired Konfabulator). The WebOS concept was touted back in the early 90's by Netscape as the Microsoft killer - Microsoft promptly woke up to the Internet and rolled out Interner Explorer 4/5 and focussed on content/messaging via their MSN service. The Netscape 'browser as desktop environment' never really saw the light of day.

Reference - Crontab Guide.

A guide to creating a shell based weblog engine.

Gamespot have a nice article on Game Easter Eggs. Love the idea of the Diablo II - Killer Cow level.

A nice article on Conserve - a tool to help you consolidate your unix/linux console interactions.

Google have release Google Desktop v2 which includes a Dashboard/Konfabulator like Sidebar.

OS X tool - Watch file system activity in real time. A little like the windows Filemon tool.

Architecture - Micro Compact Houses and Cardboard Houses.

There has been quite a lot of discussion recently on the Kansas School Board allowing the teaching of 'Intelligent Design' alongside the Theory of Evolution. There is now a movement to have Pastafarianism taught too. Details here, here and here. Bow before our new mighty Flying Spaghetti Monster and his Noodly Appendage.

Nifty - Oblique Strategies is a Brian Eno invention designed to help you out of a creative cul-de-sac. Originally designed as a pack of cards you can now use it via the web or on your Palm.

Cool - Smallest RC Plane. I have a sneaking suspicion our cat would tear it to shreds.

Another excellent collection of Windows Freeware. The CD/DVD emulator in particular looks handy. . .

Certainly bigger than the HP5500 we've been getting for A3 work - Mitsubishi Diamondstar 90. I wonder if it has a USB port ;-)

Linux CLI load balancing tool - Balance. Looks interesting and pretty easy to use.

I'm always on the lookout for a nice place to drop information I come across on the web - I'm currently using Sidenote but for URL's these two OS X utilities look pretty handy - URLWell and Urly.

Graphic app - DrunkenBlog has a brief piece on a new OS X application called Seashore - an attempt at bringing the GIMP's functionality to a Cocoa native application (no X11 cruft).

(bands on my little Rio500 for the week ending 21 August 2005) -

Post inspired by Jesse.

Interesting - How a distributed outliner could be used at Microsoft.

An open-source web shrinker for mobiles and pdas- Phonifier.

Nifty - Mini-cluster with Gumstix Waysmall PC's.

The New York Times has an in-depth article on Private Security Firms operating in Iraq.

PDA - Where is the intelligent PDA ? The Newton promised a lot and delivered on a fair hunk of this functionality - its a shame that 'assistive technologies' haven't made their way into other PDA's or even other software applications.

Aaargh - I remember carless days from the 1970's oil-crisis days. God I'm old.

From the always interesting Thomas Jefferson - father of the HipsterPDA. Amazingly these people still sell them.

From IBM Research comes the SoulPad. Essentially a portable computing environment you can carry around with you. Nothing particularly new for those people running QEmu Linux Distro's on memory sticks but still pretty interesting.

Via Tinyapps - access Linux partitions from Windows using these tools.

Amusing statistics collected since putting in Statcounter.

From this graph it appears the majority of visitors stick around for less than five seconds - I'm guessing they ended up here by mistake :-)

From this graph it seems visitors from the US have superceded even my occassional visits to the site; although I usually visit my site via RSS which doesn't register as a site-hit.

From this graph theres a monthly summary overview. Thanks to the returning visitors - nice to know my collection of links is useful to someone other than me.

Don't forget - google seems to cache / index the blosxom cgi itself rather than the permalink so chances are if you found this place via google then content would have rolled lower down the page or under one of the category headings (use the local search or google cache).

On my Rio 500 for the week up to 13 August 05 ....

Mood: Eclectic

Yet another article on the perceived crappy-ness of Tiger and lack of QA at Apple. I'm surprised to find my iBook is still working happily on Panther (OS X 10.3) and although I'd love Tiger I'm not convinced I need all its bells & whistles. At the moment I reboot about once a month when the swapping starts to get out of hand.

A Microsoft Mac Developer discusses Endian Issue related to Apples switch to x86.

The smallest implementation of Tetris (unfortunately its in BBC Basic).

IT - Preventing Unplanned Downtime.

Enterprise IT - Best Practice Implementation.

Windows - Microsoft Server 2003 R2 to include Services for Unix enhancements. Maybe Microsoft are getting carried away with feature creep - in a server OS this might be a considered a 'bad thing'. For basic file/print server functionality I wonder how pared down in terms of size and services a W2K3 server can get ?

If you have a PlayStationPortable of other portable Memory Stick compatible devices then this gadget lets you record video direct to memory stick.

Interesting paper - Overzealous Systems Admins are Breaking the Internet.

Snapshots - Filesystem snapshots with UnionFS. On the same site theres a brief article on MoodSS. Looks like a really useful open source monitoring application - sourceforge project page is ere.

Windows Bootdisk - Reatogo is based on BartPE-Builder.

Physics - What to Do If You Have a Proposal for the Unified Field Theory?. I'm sure this poor Physicist has to deal with his fair share of amateur whackos...

Tiny Palm Size UNIVERGE WNX Server from NEC.

Useful resource for open source PABX - Asterisk Documentation Project.

A new music video a day from ClipTip.

Convert 3D models in foldable paper 3D models via Pepakura.

A historical guide to Paint by Numbers.

An article on an interesting open source documentation tool ThoutReader. Looks similar to RoboHelp and its cross-platform.

This looks fascinating - Facade. With a 'game' review over here.

(bands on my little Rio500 for the week ending 7th August 2005) -

Almost forgot

Drunkenblog wonders who is steering OS X as releases seem to lack focus and quality. I remember the bad old days of MacOS 7.5.3 for new PCI PowerPC's - this was a nightmare after a rock solid OS 7.5.

Cambridge - wonderful images from my favourite English town - Cambridge In Colour.

Oh no the world is coming to an end - Apple Releases Two Button Mouse. It only took them 20 years....

As seen on slashdot - 29 Vector Drawing Packages Compared.

Windows - Authentication auditing.

Good ideas - Five Tips for being successful at Microsoft. Three and Four are pretty good but I don't think many people have the luxury of Tip One.

Security - Assess system security using a Linux LiveCD.

TV - OpenVision. Looks like a potentially cool way to watch your favourite shows via the the internet.