Two products I came across while reading a previously linked article offering datacenter tips - PlateSpin PowerConvert and Leostream.

The fantastic thing about these products is that they let you seamlessly migrate physical servers into virtual servers.

This is amazing stuff:

Stream servers between physical servers, blade infrastructures, virtual machines, and image archives over the network

Gone are the bad old days of Systems Admin where you needed to audit and plan every aspect of a server migration to new hardware. Even then it was so easy to miss something - particularly with Windows which doesn't offer much in the way of storing a running config - sure you can restore a registry but if you try that to different hardware you'll render the target system inoperable. Now the only risk is a virtual machine going 'stale' as it gets moved from one virtual environment to another. At least with a hardware refresh you're forced to look at what services can be dropped or how an install can be improved when starting with a clean slate.

Mouth watering Laotion travelogue. Shame I'm a vegetarian - most of the recipes seem decidedly porky/beefy/fishy. An excellent read if you enjoy exotic food and travel.

Followup to Singularity Sky but better. The protagonists race to discover who destroyed a planet before a retaliatory strike takes place. A must read if you like hard sci-fi.

I find it hard to read non-fiction books about science and mathematics - the last one I read, completed and actually enjoyed would have been James Gleicks 'Chaos'. Sync is actually not to bad and actually pretty interesting and (comparitively) easy to read with lots of personal anecdotes about the nature of synchronisation (how does the body know when to wake up or sleep ? why two pendulum clocks fall into sync ?).

Humourous look at rudeness from the author of 'Eats shoots & leaves' (she'd have a field-day with my typos and grammatical faux pas). A nice light read which leaves you nodding in agreement to pretty much every point she makes regarding the increased rudeness encountered in every day life.