Plenty of interesting stuff on the web this week -

This is my pet peeve too - Do IT Certifications Matter ?. Actually a half decent slashdot thread for a change. While you do need to study a lot to pass todays Cisco / Sun / Microsoft exams its still an ephemeral type of knowledge (much like most of school and university). Unless you put it into practise on a daily basis most of this information will never get used. Apart from indicating a willingness to apply yourself (you can stick with a mind-numbingly boring program of study so you can definitely work with us) it doesn't truly reflect on anyones ability. I've come to think of IT as more of a trade / craft - more like a builder, electrician or plumber than an engineer or mathematician - as a craft there probably should be some form of apprenticeship to learn whatever you need to learn on the job (perhaps like a medical intern). Erica Ann (who made the slashdot post) has some more information on this from another perspective.

Robert Cringely asks Has Google Peaked ?.

Handy graphics applications - Artrage (win32 & mac) and ImageWell (mac).

This looks like its pretty nifty - from IBM's AlphaWorks R & D people - Real Time File System File Restores (for end-users). In fact this looks potentially very cool. Veritas had a product which did something similar but it just wouldn't scale beyond about 30 people.

Genius - Daniel Dennetts take on Intelligent Design. Daniel C. Dennett co-edited one of my favourite books on the self/consiousness - The Minds I