directions
To search for someone's first name, prepend your (potentially
wildcarded) search like so, Alexan*. Guess what you
do for searching by last name.
what's this?
Frustrated with the fact that MIT's people search does not
allow for first name searching (arbitrarily, I might add—it seems to
just search MIT's LDAP directory)—I wrote this little Perl script (change the extension to pl to run) to search the directory. Currently, it handles wildcard searching of people's names, which is all I needed it for.
If someone cares enough to ask, I'll add regex support and display the results a little more coherently. Feel free to download the script and play with it yourself. I'll gladly post any revisions here.