From the projects sourceforge home: "Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar is an add-on for the Windows Desktop Taskbar that lets you launch searches quickly. With dozens of search engines, a calculator, clock, calendar, and more in one little textbox, it’s monster functionality in a flea-sized GUI" What is DQSD? From the projects sourceforge home: "Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar is an add-on for the Windows Desktop Taskbar that lets you launch searches quickly. Read on →

Googlism is an amusing way of wasting ten minutes of time you’d otherwise spend reading your email. A better explanation from the official Googlism site itself is “Googlism.com will find out what Google thinks of you, your friends or anything!” A bookmarklet is a snippet of code that adds or enhances a web browsers functionality. They live in the same place as your bookmarks and allow easy access to tasks ranging from the trivial (resizing the browser window or turning images off) through to the more complex (running searches with whichever text you have highlighted as the search term or validating the html and links on the current page. Read on →

Authors: Steve McConnell ISBN: 0735608776 Publisher: Microsoft Press One of the things that I used to find puzzling was how Microsoft Press released some of the best books on software engineering and application development while maintaining the level of quality they are famous for. I eventually realised that it was simple, all of the best programmers were writing books instead of code. When your sitting in front of a screen looking at another bluescreen cyou may argue with this being a good thing but if you’ve ever read any of McConnell’s other books such as Code Complete you’ll find the trade off to be acceptable. Read on →

Author: David H. M. Spector ISBN: 1565926250 Publisher: O’Reilly Building Linux Clusters was a book that I had high hopes for. Clusters are one of my hobbies and when I discovered that the same publisher that bought Running Linux to me was behind I saw good things ahead. And then I got it. This book was held back for months from its initial release date. I can understand this since pretty much anything in the Linux word is a moving target and around the release date clusters were a prime example so when I got my copy of this book I was looking forward to reading about a subject I have an interest in. Read on →

Author: Andrew Johnson ISBN: 1884777805 Publisher: Manning If you come from a non-programming background and you want to learn Perl go and buy this book. Now. The rest of the review will wait until you get back. If your coming to Perl from another language and you have basic to intermediate knowledge and experience of programming concepts go and buy this book. If you know Perl well then buy this book and when ever anyone asks you a lot of questions hand it to them and smile as you realise you’ve just done them a favour. Read on →

Author: Craig Hunt ISBN: 0782127363 Publisher: Sybex DNS is one of the elite few subjects that inspire newbie admins to break out in a cold sweat at the merest mention of its name, along with sendmail it has the stigma of being a critical system allowing no down time making it difficult to learn or tinker with and having documentation that is far over shadowed by an O’Reilly book. When i came to need a good tutorial on DNS i went to the Linux Documentation project and skimmed over the introductions provided there and then prepared to shell out for the newest edition of the rather unfriendly cricket book after being left hungry for more in-depth coverage. Read on →

Authors: Simon St Laurent, Ed Dumbill, Joe Johnston & John Posner ISBN: 0596001193 Publisher: O’Reilly Programming Web Services with XML-RPC is a slim concise volume that cuts out a lot of the current XML hype that plagues too many recent books and is all the better for its absence. The first two chapters of the book contain an overview of the XML-RPC standard itself and provide both a good overview of the technology and a flavour of the current implementations. Read on →

Author: Stefan Norberg ISBN: 1565927680 Publisher: O’Reilly I must admit that I was dubious about volunteering to cover this book when I saw it on offered on the list, I was expecting to open it up and see in huge letters, one to a page, Step 1 “Unplug the Ethernet cable.” Step 2 “Remove the power lead.” Step 3 “Feel secure.” But I thought what the hell, I work in a Windows shop so I’ll read it during the work day and get the company to cover my time. Read on →