Gaping Void has some pretty darn funny (and yes, somewhat racy at times) cartoons. Business card cartoons. Funny. You. Click. Read.

One of the best books ever is about to be released as a movie. It opens in theaters on April 29th.

Attention businesses of Earth: We hereby call for all businesses to close their doors for one day to allow all workers to see the film on opening day. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Trailer: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 
(note: huge smooth QuickTime file -see below for options)

The official film web site (with more trailers in different formats and other cool stuff) is here.

This is going to be AWESOME.

Many have linked to the videos, but I am going to link to Steve, who summarizes the goodness about what exciting and interesting things Microsoft is doing with IIS in v7.

Read Steve's comments and check out the two videos (nearly an hour of interviews with Scott Guthrie of Microsoft talking about the future - IIS7 and ASP.NET.

From Steve's comments:

• The continued focus on making IIS a great platform upon which people can build additional infrastructure richness and of course great applications. This is achieved by modularising the platform and documenting the APIs of the standard modules and allowing new modules to be easily created.
• The second is that with IIS a raft of the most common open source applications are going to be provided, and integrated,  from forums to blogs, another really great move.

Good stuff.

Buried deep in a press release that mentions several announcements about various SQL Server releases and enhancements are details about an item many may find useful. Later this month Microsoft is releasing new reporting packs for SQL 2000 Reporting Services aimed at Great Plains and Internet Information Server (IIS).

The IIS one in particular catches my eye:

The Microsoft SQL Server Report Pack for IIS Logs is a set of 12 predefined report definition files that work with a sample database of information extracted from Microsoft IIS log files. The SQL Server Report Pack for IIS Logs allows users to monitor Web site statistics including visitors, page views and bandwidth for various time periods and geographic regions, to get more insight into their Web site usage. Users also can leverage the 12 sample reports as templates for designing new reports, and the database can be populated with individual data using the Log Parser included with the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit.

Cool. Not so sure about using the log parser (which, by the way, was recently updated), but I can think of a few things I would like to try to do with this one. Looking forward to the release. Links when they're available.

From Microsoft, news announcing SQL Reporting Services SP2, which will include two web parts for SharePoint 2003 that can be used for displaying reports in the SharePoint portal or site:

Along with security and product enhancements, SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services SP2 will include two SharePoint® Web Parts, which enable users to explore and view reports located on a report server through Windows® SharePoint Services or SharePoint Portal Server. The Web Parts will make it easy for customers to build business intelligence (BI) portals with SharePoint that include Reporting Services reports. This, in turn, will give their end users access to their enterprise information from one seamless interface. SP2 also will support a rich client-side report printing experience directly from Microsoft Internet Explorer, so customers can quickly print their reports by clicking on a single button.

Good move. One of SharePoint's strongest points is that it can act as a "one-stop-shop" for finding, aggregating, viewing and using information across a company or organization, usable by both individuals and groups. The more web parts are made available to do this kind of thing out of the box, the better. It should be a requirement for any Microsoft business product, I think, and other companies should follow suit.a

I bought a HP DeskJet 5850 from woot.com a week or so ago (if you're not familiar with woot.com, check it out, but I warn you now - it's an addition).

The printer arrived and was waiting on my doorstep last night. It's a decent photo printer, on par with the 7760 model I have used in the past, but it has one thing the 7760 lacks - built-in networking support.

And the DJ5850 not only has ethernet support, it has wireless networking hardware built right in.

All printers should work like this. I just pulled the printer out of the box, powered it up, stuck the cartridges in, set up the software and drivers on my laptop, and within a couple of minutes the printer was live on my wireless network, and I was printing borderless 8.5x11 photos that look just like they came from a photo lab.

Now I can stick this printer anywhere in the house I desire and print to it over the network from any computer I want.

Nice.

Jeremy Wright has posed a weblog entry discussing ethics and blogging. It's an interesting start to what should be (and needs to be) an ongoing conversation.

Jeremy starts with a discussion of the premise that bloggers are not ethical.

My take? It's very simple in my little world and point of view: Honesty, authenticity, objectivity and credibility are qualities that all people should strive for, regardless of their profession or avocation. It's not so much about the blogger vs. the journalist - these qualities apply across the board. It's about doing the right thing, and doing it the right way. It's about responsibility.

I've been both a journalist (several years ago) and a blogger. Ethics has been central to every job I have ever worked in: Journalist, police officer, security professional.

I get Jeremy's points, and agree with what he says in large part. There are, however, certain minor points with which I disagree (surprise, surprise, heh). I don't believe ethics was born of capitalistic need (early ethics was a Greek endeavor, and only a couple of ethical views like Marxism and social ecology are actually tied to economic or financial systems), and I tend to disagree with the idea that applying journalistic standards to blogging doesn't work. Rather, I think it can work - but that there's more to both sides of the equation than just journalistic standards, and that trying to oversimplify the discussion or pigeon-hole any aspect of it is a mistake. It's always tempting to try to divvy up different behavior characteristics and assign each of them to their own neat little groups, but it's never that simple.

Jeremy offers his own opinions and positions, and they are certainly worth reading and will hopefully start readers thinking about what ethics means to them in terms of blogging and publishing information in general:

"At the end of the day, the only thing we as creators of the written word have is that which our audience gives us - their eyes, their ears and their minds. And to violate that trust is the cardinal sin of everyone who values the written word. Be they blogger, journalist, poet or playwright.

"So protect your words, protect your readers and honor the trust you have been given. By doing so you will be the best journalist or blogger you can be."

Jeremy's article can be found here. Read. Comment. Write. Converse.

EDIT: Blog Resource has more comments here, as does Fifteen Seconds. And more yet - A Blogger's Code of Ethics, over ay Cyber Journalist.

From Yahoo News, an article about the first National Education Summit, where leaders from across the country are gathered to discuss what can be done to improve education.

Bill Gates had something to say about the situation, and I think there's a good chance he's absolutely right:

The most blunt assessment came from Microsoft chief Bill Gates... He said high schools must be redesigned to prepare every student for college, with classes that are rigorous and relevant to kids and with supportive relationships for children.

"America's high schools are obsolete," Gates said. "By obsolete, I don't just mean that they're broken, flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools - even when they're working as designed - cannot teach all our students what they need to know today."

(via Slashdot)

The other day, I was attending a conference in Redmond at a big ol' software company that is based there. I had the opportunity to catch up in person for a few minutes with Omar Shahine, who happens to work at that company, and who also just happened to be in the area that day (he actually lives and works in a different state, so it was a cool coincidence).

Omar is one of the principal people currently driving hard developing dasBlog, which is the weblog software I use here. It's an ASP.NET application and it's pretty darn cool.

Anyhow, it was great to meet Omar, even if just for a few minutes. It's funny how you "meet" people online, but never actually see them in person. I always like it when I can talk face to face with someone.

It's amazing to me how the world - and how we meet and interact with the people in it - has changed. It truly is a big small world we live in.

Oh, and Omar - it was great to meet you!

If you use the Firefox web browser, you need to get the latest release, v1.0.1, which contains a number of security-related bug fixes that are important to patch.

Here's what's new in Firefox 1.0.1:

• Improved stability
• International Domain Names are now displayed as punycode.
• Several security fixes

Download your preferred language version from here.

Press release is here.

If you use Photo Story 3 from Microsoft, now you can add a plug-in from Sonic to burn your story directly to DVD - useful if that's your targeted media.

Photo Story 3 brings your digital photos to life by making it easy for you to create professional-looking slideshows. Now, with the Sonic DVD Plug-in for Photo Story 3, you can save your favorite memories on DVD to share with family and friends. Making your own DVDs is just a click away with this powerful plug-in. Get more information on the Sonic Web site and download the plug-in for $19.99 US.

I'm in the Seattle area (well, Redmond to be exact) for a couple of days (Tuesday and Wednesday) for a conference that I'm not allowed to write about here, at a Very Large Software Company.

If anyone's in the area and wants to grab lunch/dinner/coffee/air, drop me a line via email or other means (see the sidebar).

The Tech Report reviews the new P4-600 series of processors. With 64-bit support, and double th eon-board cache, how does it stack up against the Prescott line and processors from AMD? Depends on what you want to do with it. Check out their side-by-side review, published today.

"Today, in the dead of early Sunday morning, Intel is meekly unveiling another new Pentium 4 processor core, and it may be just as consequential. The Pentium 4 600 series is a new tier of performance-oriented Pentium 4 processors that will be sold alongside the existing P4 500 series. Based on the Prescott design, the 600-series core adds key features intended to pep up Prescott's performance and curb its power consumption. Not only that, but these are 64-bit CPUs. With the introduction of a 64-bit version of Windows approaching, Intel has finally turned on Prescott's dormant support for the 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set pioneered by AMD."

The verdict in the end seems to be that these new processors hold their own, but offer nothing earth shattering in the 32-bit world over the 500-series Prescott line of P4 processors. However, for an extra $5 or $10, you get true 64-bit capability that's not part of the Prescott procs, so all in all, it's a pretty good deal.

Jon Stewart - comedy non-news guy - and team take a funny look at blogs, the blogosphere, blogging, journalism and government. You don't have to agree with his political positions to get the humor on his show, for sure.

It's hillarious.

Stephen Colbert, a.k.a. Ted Hitler, on Bloggers:

"They have no credibility. All they have is facts. Spare me."

Heh...

View the video segment here.
(Note: Some content probably not very good for kids.)

Jan Tielens posted the other day about their newly released "U2U RSS Feeds for SharePoint 2003," which is another tool for creating RSS feeds from SharePoint lists, but with some improvements:

• Aggregation of items stored in multiple lists on multiple sites
  You can create an RSS feed that contains information coming from more than one lists (or document libraries), that are potentially on different sites.
• Customizable layout of RSS items
  For each list that you aggregate in an RSS Feed you can specify how the items in the RSS feed should look like. You can do that by using some sort of formulas, referring to fields coming from the SharePoint lists.
• Non-intrusive installation
  The installation of the RSS Feeds tool doesn’t change a thing about your SharePoint installation, the IT-Pro guys will be happy! The tool is completely separated from the SharePoint sites and doesn’t require you to add metadata or web parts to SharePoint.
• SharePoint Authorization
  Are you afraid of exposing sensitive data? Well you don’t have to, our tool uses the SharePoint security model, so if a user doesn’t have access to the SharePoint list he or she can’t retrieve information from the RSS feed. Anonymous access to RSS feeds is also supported (if your SharePoint site is available for anonymous users of course).
• GUI Administration
  The administration of the tool (creating feeds, item layouts, …) is completely done by using a nice graphical user interface.

Software: http://www.u2u.net/software.aspx

Quick video tutorial: http://www.u2u.be/downloads/tools/U2URSSFeeds.wmv