Links 12-10-2007

Nobel winner blames cultural decline on “blogging and blugging”

Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing recently used her time on the nobel stage to state that “blogging and blugging”, in addition to the increase in the use of the internet and television is causing the cultural decline. In the first sense, I completely agree with her, people are beginning to use the internet to receive content, and turning away from print. However, the internet has widened the scope of authors and readers. Content is no longer held in the hands of the elite; the publishers no longer decide who gets published, and who gets sold. What is read is then dictated by those who read, and that which is written is no longer dictated by those who sell. While I think you might see a decrease in the total quality of all works published, you see a widening in perspectives and differing levels of digestion for everyone.

(From Mike)

Tags: blogging, cultural decline

The $100 iPhone/iPod Touch Stand Made from a Piece of Paper

We’ve got a fair amount of iPhones around the office, and what better way to show off your $400 phone than by showing how disposable your income is that you can use it as a stand for your iPhone!

(From Mike)

Tags: iphone, itouch, apple

Digging Deeper: Systems Management

Very interesting post, I think the thing that hits home is that there is the desire to combine the following into a single application. That’s one of the Zenoss key goals.

Monitoring makes us omni-present. It allows us to be constantly aware of change in our environment to which we should be aware and to record data points over a period of time to allow for trend analysis, capacity planning, and fault isolation down the road. Thus, we can divide monitoring applications into 2 categories:

• Data Collection & Reporting Applications. Examples: Cacti, MRTG
• Threshold & Conditional Alerting Applications: Examples: Nagios, Big Brother

(via John M. Willis)

Tags: Systems Management, open source, Nagios, Cacti, Big Brother