An interesting summary of the impact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is having, and about to have, on the world.

Sure, sure, MIT is well known for their high-tech education, blah, blah, blah. What I think is *much* cooler is that MIT's Open Courseware project has also put up a large number of courses from the Sloan School of Management, where I can learn all kinds of investing, finance, marketing and business basics from folks that aren't trying to upsell me. I wish MIT provided discussion forums so that I could talk with other students "taking" the OCW courses when I was or MIT students or faculty that didn't mind answering questions, but just having the materials up is *huge*. I think I'll start with 15.433...

This 3-part series really belonged as a chapter in my WinForms book, but after doubling the estimated size of the book (not to mention the amount of time it was supposed to take to write it), my publisher was anxious for me to stop writing. For those folks accustomed to the document management support in MFC or for anyone that needs to build document-centric WinForms application, I think you'll like this series. Part 1 discusses the basics of document management in SDI WinForms apps. Part 2 discusses MDI apps and deeper shell integration. Part 3 wraps most everything up into a reusable component, turning the construction of document management features in .NET largely into some drag-n-drop and some property browser settings. The resultant FileDocument component is available in the latest Genghis sources (although not yet in the release zip) @ http://www.genghisgroup.com Enjoy.

Tim talks on the topic of the business value of XML and web services, the difficulting in programming XML, and the strides that tools like .NET are making in making XML less difficult to program.

As well as women would do without us, it's clear to me that the two sexes have evolved as a pair, although whether that'll be enough to make saving us worth the trouble, I don't know. For example, my wife may well decide to replace me with a footstool to reach things on the high shelves and call it good. : ) [boingboing.net]

When I read a Dilbert like this, it amuses me in ways I don't understand.

The GFS is interesting not only for how fast it lets Google be, but also for it's dependence on standard, commodity hardware and it's expectation that failure is the nominal case. [boingboing.net]

I thought the days when I'd have to use a download manager were gone when the cable internet guy showed up, but that's not the case. This morning I was dying to see the new Matrix: Revolutions theatrical trailer, but the thematrix.com site was slashdotted, so no amount of viewing in streaming mode or downloading would work because my connection to the server kept being reset. So, from my modem days, I remembered GetRight and was pleased to see that they were still there, but now on version 5. With a quick install, I went back to thematrix.com, clicked on the link to download and GetRight instantly took over. Of course, the connection was reset again, but GetRight was all over it, resuming it w/in 60 seconds ('til I set the resume pause to 5 seconds : ). And, as if that weren't enough, GetRight let me download the file in 4 separate segments, further speeding things up. I used to recommend GetRight all the time to my friends and now I'm doing it again. While this kind of stuff should be built into IE or the OS, if it's not, I'm glad that there is somebody out there filling the niche. BTW, the new Matrix trailer rocks...