I must admit that I don't really follow basketball. But, I do like to engage with folks at work, and every spring I've always felt a little left out when my work colleagues fill out their NCAA March Madness basketball brackets. If your office is like mine, it seems everyone gets very excited to build their brackets and follow the basketball games and play in an office pool.

If you're paying really close attention, you'll remember that in my last article, I was exploring the rudiments of a script that would accept a list of words as input and create a word search grid, suitable for printing.

I've been promising my 11-year-old for a long time now that I'd write a program that would let you build custom word searches based on a list of words given by the user. I wrote one years and years ago in C, but since I can't find that code any more and wanted to tackle another interesting project for this column, that's what I'm going to look at herein.

Alert readers will know that I'm working on a major revision to my popular Wicked Cool Shell Scripts book to come out later this year. Although most of the scripts in this now ten-year-old book still are current and valuable, a few definitely are obsolete or have been supplanted by new technology or utilities. No worries—that's why I'm doing the update.

Gah, so frustrating! Ten years ago I wrote a rather popular book called Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, and I'm working on a new edition—a Tenth Anniversary release. There are lots of new scripts, entirely new chapters and updates to the older stuff.

I know, I'm in the middle of a series of columns about how to work with ImageMagick on the command line, but when other things arise, well, I imagine that a lot of you are somehow involved in the management of servers or systems, so you all understand firefighting.

It's been months, and I'm still dealing with a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on my server—an attack that I can see is coming from China, but there's not really much I can do about it other than try to tweak firewall settings and so on.

We've been working on writing code for the game Cribbage, and last time, I created the code needed to pick a random subset of six cards out of a "deck" and display them in an attractive format—like this: $ sh cribbage.sh Card 0: 7C Card 1: 5H Card 2: 9H Card 3: 10S Card 4: 5D Car

I've spent the past few months reviewing shell scripting basics, so I think it's time to get back into an interesting project.

When I write my column, I try to stick to specific hacks or tips you can use to make life with Linux a little easier. Usually, I describe with pretty specific detail how to accomplish a particular task including command-line and configuration file examples. This time, however, I take a step off this tried-and-true path of tech tips and instead talk about more-general, high-level concepts, strategies and, frankly, personal opinions about systems administration.