The Tech Teapot

I personally think the doom & gloom is being overplayed at the moment, every bit as much as the euphoria overshot during the boom years.

Things certainly are going to be different for a while, but I don’t think we’re all going to go back to depression era levels of unemployment and the social deprevation associated with it.

Whilst the various world wide responses to the crisis haven’t been great, they’ve been a whole lot better than the response during the great depression.

One thing is for sure, people with deep pockets and an eye for the longer term, are going to make a killing.

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Occasionally, when the mood takes me, I read up on a topic to a reasonable depth. This time it was Brian Clough, the eponymous ex-manager of football clubs Derby County & Nottingham Forest.

The two books that stand out are The Damned Utd by David Peace and Provided You Don’t Kiss Me by Duncan Hamilton.

The Damned Utd book is to be turned into a film next year starring the talented Michael Sheen as Brian Clough. The book is a semi-fictional account of Brian Clough’s ill fated appointment as manager of Leeds United in the mid 1970s. Interlaced with the account of his 44 days in charge are flashbacks of Brian’s rise prior to joining Leeds.

Provided You Don’t Kiss Me documents the career of Brian Clough through the eyes of Duncan Hamilton, a young sports writer, for the local newspaper in Nottingham. If you only want to buy one book on Brian Clough this one is the one to go for. I read this book in a couple of sittings and thoroughly enjoyed it, even though it was the third book I’d read about Brian Clough.

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I thought it would help you to visualise the increased competition in network management by producing a graph of the links in the Network Monitoring Tools directory @ SLAC.

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I think it’s about time you had a chance to give me some feedback on The Tech Teapot blog. Please fill out the survey, it’s only four questions long, and should take no longer than a minute or so. You can be assured that your answers will be kept in the strictest of confidence, in fact, I couldn’t identify you even if I wanted to.

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If you think of Giffy as Visio delivered as a web based app you’d be about right, just like Google Docs. Google, if you’ve got a spare few million bucks (and we all know you do), will you just buy Giffy? And then integrate it into Google Docs. This stuff is way too good to waste behind a paid-for monetisation strategy.

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When I was doing the research for the Open source network management in Google 2001 vs Google 2008 I came across the Network Monitoring Tools website run by Stanford.

Network Monitoring Tools @ SLAC 2001

Network Monitoring Tools @ SLAC 2008

I think the above images illustrates the heightened level of competition in today’s network management market rather well.

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Jane Curry has completed her Open Source Management Options [PDF] white paper.

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Mike Wilbur provides a great post on scheduling a PowerShell script to periodically run using Windows 2003. Somehow I think that’s gonna prove very handy when used in conjunction with PowerTime.

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The classic problem with facilities people running the air-conditioning systems.

[via The Daily WTF]

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If only data centres looked like this…

[via Devicelnn & Frederik Perman]

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