I just read a pretty good article discussing how IT professionals tend to blame Lusers ('lousy users') rather than face up to badly written software and poor implementation. The article does a great job comparing the IT world to other businesses involved with development:

This is an amazing new AJAX powered search engine for finding snipets of code. It is very fast and extremely slick. I searched for drupal source code and on the right side of the browser it displays the layout of a traditional drupal installation. Click on the files and it displays their source! Well worth a look for every web-based design team. Beautiful and simple layout.

Letter from Krugal:

We're very close to the end of our beta program, and have only one more critical test before we go live. We'd like to verify we can handle the load that thousands of simultaneous active users will put on our system, and so avoid the dreaded "We got slashdotted" syndrome.

This an a great and very thurough review of current speed tests for internet browsers on Windows, Linux and OSX. I do mean very thurough.

Some key summaries:

"Internet Explorer on Windows was either as fast as - or faster than Mozilla and Firefox for most tasks, with the exception of scripts, where it took over twice as long."

"So overall, Opera seems to be the fastest browser for windows. Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice."

The results alone won't make me switch browsers but it is an interesting view on where browsers are going. Personally I use FF 1.5 for everything I do and then have IE7 as a back up browser. I upgraded to IE7 to try out the tabs but the reviews are correct, Internet Explorer's tabs are immature and look more like an alpha than a real release.

In Internet Explorer 7 I can only open a new tab and nothing else. What happened to making IE 7 easy?

Okay so I installed Internet Explorer 7 today. Why? Tabs. I cannot stand having 20 browsers open okay? Now first let me explain a few of my positions on the IE and firefox debate. Plenty of people like it one way or the other. NO sweat, I totally understand. I have MS Windows on all of my computers and only a couple of Linux versions available. I am a big fan of MS Office. I believe in using the best tool for the job. That said I abhore having to use Internet Explorer. I won't rant about all of my frustrations but secutity and features are the two biggies.

A key building block for our development team was the use of open-source technologies. Both our business and IT teams agreed that this was almost a necessity for us at the early stages of development when items like operational costs, scalability and evolution of application are an important issue.

About 6 months ago I was working with a client that was interested in using VOIP to reduce the telco costs of his hotels. He had several locations spread between two states and he also managed an IT business in India.

I have listed below some of my favorite tools. The best part is that they are all free! Sure there are plenty of expensive tools that do amazing things, but when I find a free piece of software that makes my life easier, that is truely something that I cherish.