So, you are thinking about or decided to use Nagios to monitor your server. Nagios also provides a plugin, NRPE, to permit remote monitoring. But how can you use Nagios to monitor your Drupal installation? 

Nagios provides examples for monitoring various system stats. The check_users command is provided by Nagios as a plugin (nagios-plugins-1.4.15 and nrpe-2.12 -- start your search in /usr/local/nagios/etc).  If you are logged into the remote system, you could just execute it from a shell command line:

Drush is by far my favorite tool when it comes to working with Drupal. While graphical tools are often easier to use initially, command-line tools more often give you more power and control. The drush project is an active Drupal project with a major release (3.x) in the works. While it does change some of the basic command names, it organizes and restructures the design to make it easier to extend.

Apple released Mac OS 10.6, aka Snow Leopard today. The big question is whether to run out and get a copy to install over the weekend.

The corollary question is whether I want to have to go out and upgrade all my applications this weekend and spend the weekend backing up, installing and debugging. With Snow Leopard's push to be 64 bit, along with other changes, some applications and support software (printer/scanner) drivers will require updates (http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/). While a number are already documented, there are probably a few gotchas to come.

Do you want to do some automated Web testing, but you don't want to have to spend a lot of money on one of the commercial test automation suites? Consider Selenium (http://seleniumhq.org/). Selenium IDE permits you to create, modify and run tests as a Firefox plug-in. It is a great way to learn the tool and work on basic tests. The tests are based on HTML tables, so you can use any editor to create or edit the test suites and test scripts as well. I like Eclipse with the Aptana editors. This also facilitates integrating with our subversion version control system.

As a mostly Mac person, I approached Windows 7 with much skepticism. My destination was a Windows 7 virtual machine under Parallels. I was a little concerned as there were postings on the Parallels site about issues...I also was drawing on my years of installation experiences of prior versions of Windows. Setting up XP could take a few hours.