Sean’s Obsessions

No Starch Press sent me Practical Packet Analysis, 2ed a little while back. At about 250 pages it’s a lot smaller than Chappell’s “Wireshark Network Analysis”, and more appropriate for someone who wants to get up and running quickly rather than going for a certification. The book assumes no knowledge of Wireshark, and a basic [...]

Books in PDF (or other online format) are nothing new, but somehow reading 400 pages on my monitor doesn’t do it for me. I’ve noticed a couple of publishers offering documents in the 50-60 page range on more niche topics though. After contacting the publishers and arranging for a couple of samples, I’m here to [...]

Greasemonkey is probably the coolest Firefox extension I’ve found. It lets you write Javascript code that can modify the page being displayed, either to add functionality, change the appearance, or even fetch data from other pages and merge it into the current page. So, trying to learn this new extension led me to Dive Into [...]

Linux Unwired Weeks, Dumbill, Jepson O’Reilly, 2004 $24.95USD/$36.95CDN While Windows users have no problem using all the wireless gear out there, not everything is supported in Linux. Add to this the command line tools for dealing with wireless, and you have a recipe for confusion. “Linux Unwired” demystifies the Linux Wireless system, and provides guidance [...]

Apache Cookbook Ken Coar & Rich Bowen O’Reilly, 2004 234pp, $29.95USD/$46.95CDN I finished going through O’Reilly’s Apache Cookbook a little while back, but it came in handy so often at work, I never brought it home to complete the review! Like the other entries in the Cookbooks Series, the Apache Cookbook focuses on common problems, [...]

I’m just finishing up Linux Server Hacks. Even with a few years of Linux experience under my belt, I found several handy hacks. O’Reilly’s Hacks Series bill themselves as “Clever solutions to interesting problems”, which I’ll agree with. The topics presented in the book aren’t generally introductory topics, instead they’re solutions to specific problems that [...]

My wonderful wife got me Gear for your Kitchen by Alton Brown. If you enjoy cooking, it’s got great advice on how to shop for the right gear, not to mention great recipes. The only downside is that now I have the desire for more kitchen stuff (KitchenAid Stand Mixer cough cough!) If you haven’t [...]