Recently in Links Category

"Dealing with Internet Trolls - the Cognitive Therapy Approach" is a "must read" article for anyone that deals with trolls in chat rooms, bulletin boards, and so on.

The strategy comes from Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, which is a self-help book that I highly recommend. In fact, I recommend this book in both TPOSANA and TM4SA.

Feeling Good suggests this strategy as a way for people dealing with periods of depression can deal with criticism. It works surprisingly well when dealing with trolls too.

The full article is here:
http://shlomifish.livejournal.com/909.html

It was broadcast on Feb 9 but you might still be able to catch it on your local PBS station. It is an hour long and is in-depth without requiring a CS PhD to understand.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth.html

System Administration Soft Skills: How can system administrators reduce stress and conflict in the workplace? by Christina Lear
Christina is a co-author of The Practice of System and Network Administration. The article is a great overview of the soft skills needed by system administrators and for non-sysadmins it is an interesting peek into sysadmin life. Check it out! (If you didn't recognize her name, that's because it changed when she married this guy.)
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1922541

Handling HDD failures with Ganeti by Lance Albertson
Lance uses the Ganeti virtual cluster manager (think: VMWare ESX with Vmotion but completely open source) and has written another great post about how it is making his life easier. I work on the team that develops Ganeti.
http://www.lancealbertson.com/2011/02/handling-hdd-failures-with-ganeti

Testable System Administration: Models of indeterminism are changing IT management. by Mark Burgess
Mark is the author of cfengine and explains the new thinking in system administration. If you've heard terms like "Configuration Management", "cfengine", "Puppet", or "Chef"(http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home) and weren't sure what they're about, this article will give you the theory behind it all.
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1937179