Looks like sdf had some kind of spaz attack and reset my html permissions rendering the site unreachable for the last 24 hours or so. Joy.

Apple - Ten Things Apple Might Announce at Macworld next week.

Interesting - What is your dangerous idea ? The mini-essays from experts in a variety of fields are all pretty good. Particularly good - Richard Dawkins - Lets Stop Beating Basils Car, Diane Halpern - Choosing the sex of one's child, Judith Rich Harris - The idea of zero parental influence, Simon Baron Chogen - A political system based on empathy, Clay Shirkey - Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account.

Following in the same vien is Dave Pollards Dangerous Idea - No one is in control. More Dangerous Ideas from him here at Dave Pollards site.

Useful Reference - Network Port Numbers.

To counterbalance my weekly Ricky Gervais MP3 fix I'll be trying out these Zencasts - Buddhist teachings. Sounds like a relaxing way to wind down on the bus home.

I had to followup on a hilarious Ricky Gervais spiel against the Cambodian Midget Fighting League he refers to in his Gaurdian Podcast (episode 2) - and sure enough its a rather fantastic hoax - Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight.

Music - If you're a Swervedriver fan they have all of their albums available for download as live MP3's. Sound quality is a little tinny but the essence of each song is there. Their best stuff is contained in their early Creation EP's, awesome first and second album. After that they seemed to have band & label problems and I never really bothered tracking them through their third or fourth albums (and eventual split).

Presentation tips - Guy Kawasaki (one time Apple Evangelist Extrordinaire) discusses his 10/20/30 rule for Powerpoint. Seems to be sound advice.

SOA seems to be a new enterprise buzzword (Service Oriented Applications). An interesting look at how Motorola is deploying SOA's with a great quote from their VP of IT Strategy on how it helps assist business growth & efficiency - "Small agile kills big slow. Big agile is just scarey"

I guess having a small team of killer developers that can churn out useful web-apps that can be easily maintained and re-used throughout an organisation means you can make IT an indespensible contributor instead of just being one of those annoying necessities to keep communications ticking along (like a plumber or electrician).

I think I've linked to this before but heres a list of Portable Freeware.

Just had to link to this Spectator article hosted on a recent South African emigre's site - Kiwis Bleak Moody & Suicidal. Pretty amusing and possibly partly correct.

Cool - Belkin have a Wireless USB hub in the works.

Nifty - apparently not a new idea but it looks to be becoming more commonplace - Linksys have a wireless access point which is powered via ethernet. No need to string power leads into all sorts of hard to reach places.

Paul Thurrot has a couple of interesting glimpses into Microsofts upcoming products - an overview of the new bells and whistles in Office 12 and a look at the new Vista 5270 build. Interesting that he recently purchased a Mac Mini for his wife - I guess if you just want to get things done without having to mess around with the PC the Mac is still the one to get. On a related note Russell Beattie recently switched back to Windows precisely because he wanted to mess around more with his PC - arguing that more cutting edge tech is first available for Windows (which is definitely correct).