Somehow, I have let my Gmail inbox get totally out of control. I don’t know if it was the holidays or what, but as of this morning, I had over 800 unread messages in my Gmail inbox. I decided a little while ago that it was time to focus on getting the situation resolved. Gmail’s excellent search capabilities will help me solve this problem in a snap. What I’m going to do is use Gmail’s search to create a list of unread messages in my inbox and then work through them as quickly as possible. By the way, keyboard shortcuts make this go a lot quicker!

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A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2010-03-04 through 2010-03-05:

• Xensource updates apt repository missing GPG key | Steve Glendinning
• Cisco exiting WiMAX market
• An analysis on the DNSKEY query storm problem | Internet Systems Consortium

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2010-02-20 through 2010-02-24:

• Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey of Nearly 1,600 CIOs Shows IT Budgets in 2010 to be at 2005 Levels
  Virtualization tops the technology priorities.
• Cisco Offers Three-Year, Zero-Percent Financing to U.S. Small and Medium-Sized Businesses -> Cisco News
• Marc Alff's blog: Performance schema overview
  Really interesting stuff for MySQL developers.
• Locating and managing the IS security function

I track security updates for the following vendors: Apple, Cisco, FreeBSD, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. I chose these vendors based on my own needs for the networks and systems I manage. I’ve also found that updates from these vendors tend to catch the major updates necessary for common software applications. If you have other vendors you would like me to provide updates for, send me a message.

If you have an interest in information security from both a technical and managerial level, check out Principles of Information Security. It does an excellent job of presenting material for both audiences.

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A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2010-02-01 through 2010-02-17:

• Coding Horror: The Great Newline Schism
• Use Tab-completion for SSH 'host' aliases
• Geek Run – Affordable Xen VPS and cPanel shared hosting
  Inexpensive virtual private servers based in LA.
• Setting up a web service with Django and SOAP
  If you need to create a SOAP-based web service for your Django app, Ray's tutorial is a really nice introduction to using soaplib.