This week, I have found several links that you might find interesting.

WebExpedition18

Here is a cool tutorial of how to create an undersea abstract wallpaper by Philip Brunner.
http://webexpedition18.com/articles/how-to-create-an-undersea-abstract-wallpaper-in-illustrator/

Kevin Martineau

Three ways to find rest when you really need it by Kevin Martineau.
http://kevinmartineau.blogspot.com/2010/02/three-ways-to-find-rest-when-you-really.html

makeuseof.com

In the latest makeuseof.com site, I found this interesting article that lists 3 Firefox Add-ons to help you save money when shopping online. I love shopping and even more, I love saving money when shopping.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-firefox-addons-save-money/

buildthatlist.com

Tom discusses the importance of focusing when blogging, describing his experiences and goals.
http://www.buildthatlist.com/internet-marketing/f-o-c-u-s/

PSD Collector

In this site, you will find a huge collection of wallpapers for Mac (or any computer).
http://psdcollector.blogspot.com/2010/02/400-most-wanted-apple-mac-wallpapers.html

Eternal Storms Software

This application allows you to hide your top bar in Mac OS (also the dock) in your chosen applications.
http://www.eternalstorms.at/utilities/presentyourapps/index.html

Dan Rodney

Dan has compiled a list of keyboard shortcuts for Mac OS X onto one page. It is a very useful list.
http://www.danrodney.com/mac/index.html

Autodesk Project Dragonfly

I absolutely LOVE this site! It allows you to build your own house and save it. It provides all the tools needed. The only problem is that once I’m on this site, I’m on it for hours building my dream home.
http://dragonfly.autodesk.com/

I hope that you find these links useful. If you have any links or news you’d like to share, click on ‘Submit News‘ in the top navigation bar and fill out the form. Please, leave a comment and tell me what you think. Don’t forget to share this with others!

I was inspired by one of my readers to start creating a list of links that I find interesting. He has his list Favourite Links Friday, I’m not sure what I’m going to name mine, so I’m starting my list as Links of Interest. Please bear with me, I am new to writing a short review of other links. The following is a few of the links that I have found interesting this week in random order:

Kevin is the man who had the idea to start posting his favourite links on his site. So, here I am, following suit. He has a variety of well written articles and I usually check out his list on Fridays.
http://kevinmartineau.blogspot.com/2010/02/favourite-links-friday-21910.html

This site has a lot of cool panoramic images. It almost makes you feel like you are at the location you are viewing.
http://panoramas.dk/

This is a useful article about GeekTool with fairly fresh information.
http://therealmacgenius.com/2010/01/geeking-out-with-geektool/

This is a useful article about the iPhone app ‘Bills – On Your Table.’
http://appadvice.com/appnn/2010/02/review-bills-on-your-table/

An instructional article about how to access facebook in your Yahoo profile.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/access-facebook-profile-yahoo/

An article about a web app service ‘betterme.’
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/betterme-improvement-anonymous-feedback/

Drawter is a web-based xhtml/css layout tool written in JavaScript using the jQuery library. It allows you to literally draw your website’s code by dragging boxes within the onscreen canvas to create divs using the dimensions of your rectangles, and then to edit each div’s style properties within floating inspectors.
http://drawter.com/

This site has a good list of PhotoShop plugins for all of you PhotoShop users.
http://www.smashingtips.com/photoshop-plugins-addons

This article is for WordPress users that want to tweak up their themes.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/safely-experiment-customizing-wordpress-themes/

This article discusses influence over making money.
http://www.fuelyourblogging.com/blogging-is-all-about-money-right/

I hope that you find these links useful. If you have any links or news you’d like to share, click on ‘Submit News‘ in the top navigation bar and fill out the form. Please, leave a comment and tell me what you think. Don’t forget to share this with others!

Another customization tool that I have seen being searched on the Internet is Cacti.

This is another tool that I do not know very much about. Again, I went directly to the source (http://www.cacti.net/index.php) to obtain information about it. The information below is from the Cacti web site.

Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool, it stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely PHP driven. Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, cacti handles the data gathering. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating traffic graphs with MRTG.

Cacti’s features consist of graphs, data sources, data gathering, templates, graph displays, and user management. The latest version of Cacti is 0.8.7e

LINKS:

Below is a list of links from the Cacti website.

Additional scripts for use with Cacti here: http://www.cacti.net/additional_scripts.php

The Cacti Manual

Cacti Documentation Site

Installation Guide For Unix/Linux

Upgrade Guide

Cacti Forum

FAQ

To download Cacti:  http://www.cacti.net/download_cacti.php

Spine (formerly Cactid) is a poller for Cacti. It is written in native C, makes use of POSIX threads, and is linked directly against the net-snmp library for minimal SNMP polling overhead. It is a replacement for the default cmd.php poller so it must be decided if using Spine makes sense for your installation.
For more information about Spine, go to this link: http://www.cacti.net/spine_info.php

To download Spine (Cactid): http://www.cacti.net/spine_download.php

This concludes this article about Cacti. This is another tool that I myself am not too familiar with. I am however considering trying out this tool to use with tracking the usage on this web site. We shall see. When I do finally work up the nerve to try it out, I will be sure to post an update as to my experience with this amazing tool. If there is anybody reading this who has expertise or has tried this tool and wants to share their experiences and tips, feel free to leave a comment and spread the wealth with our fellow readers!

Another tool that I have seen requested via Google is MRTG. Again, I decided to look up the information and there is a wide array of information on the Internet. I went directly to the MRTG website to see what it is about. As mentioned in another article, I am not as technologically savvy as some of my readers so I do not have the authority to speak about this subject. Here is a basic summary from what I read at the MRTG website:
MRTG is short for Multi Router Traffic Grapher. Created by Tobi Oetiker. The MRTG monitors SNMP network devices and draws pretty pictures (graphs) showing how much traffic has passed through each interface. MRTG is written in Perl and works on Unix/Linux as well as Windows and even Netware systems. It is free software licensed under the Gnu GPL.
Below is a list along with a snippet of information from the MRTG website.

mrtg
What Is MRTG?
The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is a tool to monitor the traffic load on network links. MRTG generates HTML pages containing PNG images which provide a LIVE visual representation of this traffic. Check http://www.stat.ee.ethz.ch/mrtg/ to see what it does. Go to http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg for all the details about mrtg.

mrtg-unix-guide
The mrtg 2.16.2 Linux/Unix Installation Guide
MRTG comes to you in Source Code. This means that you have to compile parts of it before you can use it on a Unix machine. These instructions help you to do so.

mrtg-nt-guide
The MRTG 2.16.2 Windows Installation Guide
Installing MRTG on a Windows box is not quite as “click and point” as some might want it to be. But then again, it is not all that difficult if you follow the instructions below.

mrtg-nw-guide
MRTG For NetWare
This guide is intended to aid in the installation and configuration of MRTG on a NetWare server.

Mrtg-reference
MRTG 2.16.2 Configuration Reference
The runtime behaviour of MRTG is governed by a configuration file. Run-of-the-mill configuration files can be generated with cfgmaker. (Checkcfgmaker). But for more elaborate configurations some hand-tuning is required.
This document describes all the configuration options understood by the mrtg software.

cfgmaker
Creates mrtg.cfg Files (for mrtg-2.16.2)
cfgmaker [options] [community@]router [[options] [community@]router …]

indexmaker
Creates Index Files For mrtg web sites (mrtg-2.16.2)
indexmaker [options] mrtg.cfg [other.cfg ...]

mrtg-contrib
Contribution Guidelines For MRTG
If you have written an extension to mrtg or created a bug fix, please consider contributing it to the project. As I get quite a number of contributions every week, here are a few guidelines which explain how to contribute so that I can use the contribution without too much additional work.

mrtg-faq
How To Get Help If You Have Problems With MRTG
MRTG seems to raise a lot of questions. There are a number of resources apart from the documentation where you can find help for mrtg.

mrtg-ipv6
IPv6 Support In MRTG
MRTG and cfgmaker support SNMP over IPv6. IPv6 targets can be specified by hostname or IPv6 address, and if the required libraries are present (see below), queries will use IPv6.

mrtg-logfile
Description Of The mrtg-2 Logfile Format
This document provides a description of the contents of the mrtg-2 logfile.

mrtg-mibhelp
A Table of Some interesting OIDs
This File Contains a collection of interesting MIB Entries … mrtg knows about their names … depending on the ASN.1 Syntax you may have to put gauge into the Options[]: parameter.
For information about how to create a Target[]: parameter which references these MIB entries, please consult mrtg-reference.

mrtg-rrd
How to use RRDtool with MRTG
After using MRTG for some time you may find some limitations, mostly in the areas of performance and graphing flexibility. These are exactly the areas addressed by RRDtool. To learn more about RRDtool check out its website on http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

mrtg-webserver
Hints for Web Server Configuration
If you want people to actually see the results of your network monitoring efforts you will need a webserver.
This document lists some configuration hints for webservers. Contributions welcome.

mrtg-traffic-sum
Builds Monthly Traffic Summary From mrtg Log Files
mrtg-traffic-sum [options...] config-file

3^rd Party Docs
MRTG Companion Sites
A variety of compantion sites consisting of:
MRTG Comunities and Portals
Setup Instructions and Installer
Config Builders
MRTG Add-Ons
Monitoring Special Devices and Applications

Support
Interactive Help for MRTG Users
There is a lot of written documentation for mrtg, but nevertheless you may have a problem where you can’t find the solution. In this case some Human Help may be necessary. With MRTG there are several ways to get Humans to help you.

I hope that these links will be beneficial to those of you interested in this amazing tool. Because I don’t have the authority to write about such a subject, I felt that the next best thing would be to compile the information from the MRTG website where you could get more information.  If you have experience with MRTG and would like to give your expert opinion on it, please, feel free to comment and share the wealth with other readers!
-TINA