IM + Email + Social Networks

Here is a neat tool that manages all your existing IM, email, and social network accounts. It is called Digsby. IM accounts that can be added are:

• AIM
• MSN
• Yahoo
• Facebook chat
• ICQ
• Jabber

Social network sites that can be added are:

• Facebook
• myspace
• Twiiter

I have been looking for a tool for twitter, and this seem to be what I have been looking for. This tool is in beta and other social network support is comming soon.

Network tools for Linux

Here are few network tools when working with the Linux OS

• ifconfig : This tool can be used to display the current configuration of a network interface. A privileged user can also use it to change any parameter of a network interface, be it an Ethernet card, a serial PPP link, or the loopback interface. For example, to show the configuration of all network interfaces on the host, we can use:

• netstat : This tool is able to extract a lot of different kinds of information on all or just one network interface. A short rundown of some of netstat's arguments
  
  Argument Effect
  (nothing) Display open connections (sockets)
  -a Also show listening and non-listening sockets
  -c Redisplay selected table continuously
  -i Display network interfaces
  -n Display IP addresses, don't resolve names
  -r Display network routes
  -s Display network statistics
  -v Provide verbose information

• snoop and tcdump : Both these utilities enable an administrator to examine the packets being sent on a network.
  Either tool allows packets to be examined as they appear on the network. Various options allow packets to be filtered according to source IP address and port, destination IP address and port, protocol, message type, and so on. For example, Apache's communications could be monitored on port 80, filtered down to data packets.
  


• spray : A variant of ping . spray floods a destination server with ping packets to test the handling capacity of the network and server. The higher the percentage of packets that reaches the destination, the better the network. This is an unfriendly thing to do to a network that is handling real network traffic, so it should be used with caution

The Life long learner

For those life long learners , like my self, check out Itunes U. There are a wide range of topics from different universities. Its all free to download. The format is mostly audio, however there are some video presentations as well.
You will need to install Itunes to download the content. Hey it beats paying college fees.

The Linux Desktop - reality ?

I just recently completed a course called Organizational and Buisness communication at Fanshawe College. One of the course requirements was to do a presentation. My presentation was on Data Mining, more on this in a later blog.
One of the class members did a presentation on Linux, and showed some open source alternatives to the common windows applications. Most members of the class was intrigued, however one class member asked the following questions :

• Can you have MSN messenger ?
• Does the open source equivalent has the same functionalities as MSN messenger ?
• Does i tunes work on Linux ?

These questions showed that the Linux desktop has a long way to go before it is adopted as desktop equivalent to windows. Sure you can use an windows emulator like wine, but which non-geek computer user will have the time to configure a windows app to run on Linux.
I have three Linux boxes at home, and I too use windows sometimes. Mark you this is running a vm on Debian.
From the view of outsiders, Linux are for geeks who relish at writing complex command line statements.It will be a while to convince individuals born in the world of Microsoft windows.
Hey, I can't convince my wife to switch.