Interesting study commisioned by Google on SMB buying behaviours for IT products. In order of importance:

Reliable 73%
Integrates easily with existing systems
Service/support
Appropriate for a company of my size
Flexible  44%
Inexpensive to service/ maintain
Lower cost 37%
Requires minimal training/ education
Company is a well-known, established brand
Scalable
Includes comprehensive training/education
Discounts/promotions
Have purchased from company in the past 27 %

There has been a lot of commentary written about News Corp playing with the idea of exiting Google’s search index. Cringely said that News Corp would be denying themselves valuable traffic, handing them to competitors. Mark Cuban, on the other wrote that Twitter is heading to be THE news search site, leaving Google News has [...]

I don’t know if you recall this article from the New Scientist discussing whether obesity is spreading through social norms.
However, there may be another pathway.
A 2007 Scientific American article mentions that bacteria can cause subjects to gain weight faster.
For one thing, bacteria produce chemicals that help us harness energy and nutrients from our food, Huffnagle [...]

Over the term 3 school holidays, we (my family) spent 11 days travelling in Japan, and I’d like to share some observations.

Osteoporosis is common among the elderly, far more prevalent than Australia for example. Despite the (relatively) higher consumption of soy products in Japan, this comes across as a little surprising
People are generally taller in [...]

According to The Register article here:
[Special Operations contractor] will, at a minimum, develop Internet-based marketing procedures such as use of Google AdWords and Search Engine Optimization to prioritize search result listing of the applicable websites
What next? Affiliate programs? Cost per action? I know! email submits. Any creatives with landing page ideas?
Here’s a visualization of what [...]

Came across this site Allergy Translation Cards. They do a supreme good.

The information is supplied here: http://dotgov.gov/help_qualify.aspx
Good luck!

I have this problem when driving my wife’s car: Why Do Cars Have Fuel Doors on Different Sides
But here’s the kicker. Commenter spewlman advised:
Want to avoid the frustration of not knowing what side your gas tank is on? Car manufacturers actually solve this mystery for you. On your dash is a picture of a fuel [...]

Mary Garden writes about her thirst for transcendence, but instead finds mystics and charlatans, who make ordinary human beings look like saints. Serpent Rising 2nd Ed

It is now thirty years since I first set foot in India and felt at last I had come home. From time to time in my now busy life, I [...]

I just tried to “go back” to the previous page, but still want to retain the current page I’m reading. Middle click on the back arrow did the trick, and opened the previous page on a new tab.
Sweet.

Alfresco uses JNI on Netbios to serve files over CIFS on windows servers,
http://www.codase.com search for win32netbios.c
Uses a combination of

[NetBIOS]-> NCBADDNAME
[NetBIOS]-> NCBLISTEN
[NetBIOS]-> NCBRECV

Also see their JLAN product.
Unfortunately, this is apparently not supported on Vista, Windows Server 2008. Source: MSDN
There seems to be some workarounds documented on the Alfresco wiki Vista And Windows 2008 through firewalling [...]

Using a combination of floor, mod and div, we can implement bitwise tests in XSLT. I happened to need to do that today. Thanks to the power of Google, and the Mulberry XSLT forums, the following snippet implements XSLT test for 000010

<xsl:comment>
Bitwise test for 00010
</xsl:comment>
<xsl:if [...]

From a BBC Foreign Correspondent, who is leaving the US:
I deplore the superstition and the eating competitions and the tatty dreariness of so much of America, and I note that the new president is also unimpressed by the infrastructure and not a fan of fat but, after more than seven years living here, I am [...]

Tamara from Mark Robertson’s Plumbing did a good job for me sorting out a leak this morning. She did a good job and didn’t overcharge like my last one, so here’s an unsolicited plug. No, they don’t have a web site, but you can look them up in the Yellow Pages.

Dan Bricklin points to a new generation of applications that will utilize a new mode of interaction with the computer, beyond mice and menus.
In a podcast with Scott Hanselman, Dan also said that it will also affect the way programs are written, similar to the transition from text/console programs to event-driven ones [not his exact [...]

An Australian company is working on a AusIndustry grant on rapid application modelling.
I’d love to interview these guys on the blog just for some insights they gained from the process.

The traceback module has utility functions for printing the currently running stack, not just tracebacks.

import traceback
import logging

# somewhere in your buggy code
logging.log(1, "".join(traceback.format_stack())

Bill Gates bought and put Feynman’s physics lectures on line. Unfortunately, I couldn’t watch it using Chrome (which has outstanding stability compared to IE8). However, once in a while, I’m prepared to pay the Microsoft Tax, fire up MS IE and watch:
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html
Update: It appears that the site is down at the moment.

Escaping escapes can be a near impossible task with XSLT.
Here is the standard form of testing whether a string matches

<xsl:if
test=”countryName=’USA’” >
Name matches
</xsl:if>

What happens if the country name is People’s Republic of China instead?

You can’t use the apostrophe because the single quote is already used to delimit the string.
You can’t use double quotes [...]

Like any other information junkie, my browser is full of open tabs of material that I would have liked to have read, but simply lost interest or took too long to read. It occurred to me that I would normally read books at a faster pace, but somehow the screen wasn’t conducive for speed reading. [...]