When the "best tool for the job" isn't argues that what we might think is the best tool for the job isn't. (I'mnot going to mangle its ideas by trying to summarize it more than that.)

This is an issue that I sometimes feel moderately acutely, since I useX Windows in preference to something like OS X, while the general viewis that Apples are the machines for people who want both Unix and adecent user experience (and there's a

How to to really irritate your successor sysadmin on a Solaris machine:

Set the machine's hostname not by changing /etc/nodename , but byhand-editing a ' hostname foobar ' into the /etc/init.d/network startup script.

Of course, you won't want to keep the machine current on patches either;otherwise, your successor might take a much longer time to find this,and have a much less exciting day.

Important caution: for the safest results, insure that you

I've recently had the experience of installing Ubuntu from one of their live CDs, and I now have tosay that this is a genius idea that should be widely imitated, and assoon as possible.

For me, the genius of a live CD installation is three-fold, and is onlytruly compelling when the machine has a network connection:

• I can Google around to figure out what I want to do next, understandany peculiar questions the installer is asking me, and so on.
• if anything goes

I hate RS-232 serial connections, because something always goes wrongwhenever I have to deal with them and then I have to figure out howto make the things work. Needless to say, there are next to no commondiagnostic tools for troubleshooting serial communication problems.

In this case the problem was a mysterious inability to type anythingto the remote device when I could receive the remote device's outputfine. For my future reference, this can be caused by having hardwareflow control on when the remote