Time

In my first blog post, I had said that I was in the process of creating my own website. As I said my charter, scope and WBS have been created. However, nothing has transpired since then.I started my blog and this is my latest post in weeks.
As a result the thought came to me , how do IT professionals find the time to upgrade their skills.
The IT industry constantly changes, new programming languages, new platforms, and new paradigms emerge at a rapid rate. To ensure you are not a dinosaur in the IT industry you have to keep up.
However most IT professionals have a life outside IT. They have other responsibilities:wives,children,house,etc. Even at work one is confined to the projects and deadlines.
I myself try to fine the time to learn. I listen to IT podcasts when I exercise, doing stuff around the house. When it comes to hand on learning I usually have a laptop with me listening to the TV.
It would be interesting to hear feedback from other IT professionals as to how they find that balance.

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