On October 13 source code to Blender will be released under GPL license to everyone. They managed to get $100 thousand in donations to pay for the source code when the company developing Blender went out of business. Interesting. $100 k looks like a lot of money but I bet it's only a fraction of what it took to develop it ($100 k is one-year salary of a good programmer).     

On September 30 MIT will release first courses on the Internet as part of their OpenCourseWare initiative.     

The history of bookfinder. Imporant lesson in their story: they always were low-budget.     

I won't say it better. I couldn't say it better. A thought for today: a popular assertion exists that if there is no legal protection for various forms of so-called "Intellectual" so-called "Property" (copyrights for books, music etc., patents for inventions) there will be no new more books, music, inventions created. This is baloney. It is a fact that people wrote books and composed music long before any copyright protection was available. It is a fact that there is an increasing amount of software written where people deliberately give up the rights they get automatically. Imagine that! They make additional effort to give up the "rights" they were given because they think those rights don't serve them well.     

A tip for using Powermarks. Powermarks is a great bookmark manager. I'm no good when it comes to web design yet I have a few web sites that I have to "design". I can, however, appreciate a good design when I see it. The only viable approach for me is to steal other people's design (or, as some would say, "get inspired by"). So when I browse a web and see a nice design that I would like to be inspired by in the future, I it bookmark with Powermarks and add "webdesign" keyword. That way when I get to "designing" I can easily get back to interesting pages by typing "webdesign" in Powermarks's window. In other words, I use keywords to categorize links for easy retrieval. This can be extended to any category. The challenge here is twofold:

• do not forget keywords you're using
• keep adding keywords to bookmarks

I use Macros (a feature in Powermarks) to make sure I don't forget about keywords.