Wow – just found a site dedicated to Open Source CMS projects – http://www.cmsinfo.org lot of interesting articles. Including this one from ZDnet about the rising popularity of OS/FS projects as alternatives to the big commercial leaders, Interwoven and Vignette.

While not exactly a judge of shear PHP coding power, many programmers have learned to touch type and pride themselves on how many words per minute they can crank out.

Here’s your chance to claim the crown and demonstrate your prowess, take the typing test! Quite a nice applet that runs this thing, worth checking out for the interactivity, even if you can’t type

In a recent US case a judge ruled incriminating evidence presented against a Virginia man was invalid as it had been obtained by hacking into the accused’s computer without his consent.

a little cross-pollenization

Assuming current trends continue: computer hardware continues to improve apace, and Python continues to become more robust, powerful, and efficient, the number of computing problem spaces for which Python is a viable solution will grow. Today, Python is an excellent candidate for most common programming tasks, especially the following:

• scripting
• prototyping
• “glue” language
• web applications
• graphical tools
• XML processing tools

from Infoworld.com
IF YOUR ORGANIZATION has a number of older PCs running Microsoft Office, there are now several good reasons to seriously consider switching to the OpenOffice.org office suite. Most of these reasons have been supplied by none other than Microsoft itself.

According to published reports, Office 11 (due next year) won’t support Windows 95, 98, or ME. The earliest supported version, per the reports, will be Windows 2000. This means that a substantial number of organizations with pre-W2K systems will have to undergo a serious upgrade path or risk becoming incompatible with new versions of Office.

Aside from being a site that’s offering quite an interesting OO PHP framework, http://www.blueshoes.org has a PHP cheatsheet that scratches an itch for many programmers. When is a variable false, null, isset(), or empty(). Make sure to check out the syntax exam while you’re there, and watch out for the questions on references.

I wonder if anyone has had a chance to compare ADSL prices in various countries.  I live in Spain and pay the average €45/month for a 256/128 kbps line.  I’m now visiting my family in Canada and was stunned to find out that ADSL over here is 1/11th of the cost!

from ZDNet News
In a possible attempt to stop Linux from gaining momentum in the country, Chairman Bill Gates visits the Asian IT hotbed and stresses India’s “strategic importance” to his company.

from russellbeattie.com

I just ran across a link on Pete’s Rasterweb to a detailed summary of why Microsoft is so bad. Wonderful, you can even download a PDF here. Some highlights:
What’s So Bad About Microsoft? From a Software User’s Perspective

• Bloat
• Backward incompatibility
• Perpetual upgrading
• Vaporware
• Hostile treatment of customers
• Predatory practices
• Bundling of inferior products
• Bugs, bugs, and more bugs
• Insecurity

an amusing story about Britney Spears and Google
The data below shows some of the misspellings detected by our spelling correction system for the query [ britney spears ], and the count of how many different users spelled her name that way. Each of these variations was entered by at least two different unique users within a three month period, and was corrected to [ britney spears ] by our spelling correction system (data for the correctly spelled query is shown for comparison).