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.