Sun's J2EE Blueprints site is a collection of best practices and architecture recommendations for building enterprise Java applications. I really wish I had the opportunity to do more Java development, but there's not much call for it in the sysadmin world.
Two great aritlces on perl.com today: the first is all about Mail::Audit, a replacement for procmail that lets you write mail filters in pure Perl. The second article is a good introduction to doing crypto in Perl. Covers most of the basic types of cryptography and their Perl equivalents.
Sun has released their Grid Engine distributed computing project as open source. I'm not sure I'd ever have a practical use for this software, but it's very cool. Essentially, it lets you spread computing tasks over multiple machines, taking resources from systems that are lightly used. I've always heard that ILM, Pixar, and the other big rendering companies do something like this -- when people go home for the night, their workstation becomes part of the render farm. Cool.
The article has been around for a while, but we're just now in the midst of our Win2k migration at work, so I've been re-reading it. Cricket Liu (co-author of the "BIND Bible", aka "DNS & Bind" from O'Reilly), wrote an excellent article for Linux Magazine on supporting Windows 2000 using the BIND DNS server.
A common theme in the security industry is that "security through obscurity is no security at all." While this is true, this article, from a developer on one of the security-hardened Linux projects, discusses the fact that security through obscurity doesn't necessarily hurt. In fact, it's a pretty good idea, when combined with "real security." All in the name of making it harder for an attacker to compromise your systems.
Here's an interview with Dave Lebling, one of the founders of the old game company Infocom, and author of the original mainframe version of Zork. I wasted so much time playing Zork on my old Atari computers.
A very good article from IBM's DeveloperWorks on using Perl and cfengine to automate system administration. I really need to start looking at cfengine. It seems to have a lot of features that I've been coding by hand.
Humor: Signs Your Preschooler is a Future Geek - my favorite: "counts from zero."
There's a new release of Python available. Now with a GPL-compatible license, if that kind of thing is important to you. I really need to start hacking more in Python, and get more comfortable with the language. Right now, it's just easier to fall back on Perl because it's what I'm comfortable with.
Yikes, it looks like there's a huge security hole in the commercial SSH 3.0 product. I only run OpenSSH on the systems I maintain, so I'm not personally worried, but wow, what a nasty bug.
I decided to move my weblog to a separate domain and keep my journal-type stuff on my personal site. Not that anyone reads this stuff, but I like to pretend. This site will be more for weblog-type links and such. The design is pretty bad (it's a stock Blogger template with very minor editing), but I'm still just a geek with little to no design talent.