Blogger's horrendous user experience

Wow, Blogger/Google didn't execute as well as they should have:

Try to sign in.
1) Requires Google Account, give it my google account and password, submit.
2) Says I need to give it my Google password, I do so (again), submit.
3) Says my password is weak, and I need to change it. I try my existing password and the indicator says its "strong", but when I try to save it, tells me I must use a different password.
4) Finally make a new password, but what did I just change? My google account or my blogger account? Guess I'll find out next time I try to access Gmail.

Man thats an awful lot of work to sign into an account you didn't forget....

Huge List of Programmer cartoons

True gem on Stackoverflow - huge list of programmer cartonns.
Click Here for computer geek amusement.

Hell freezing over? Microsoft Sponsors Apache Software Foundation

Lots of good information here including that Microsoft is actually sponsoring the Apache Software Foundation.

snazzy bookmarklet for css

Just caught wind of the XRAY bookmarklet - allows you to see the box model for any element on the page.
Slick!

DeepZoom meets Death and Taxes

Had to pass along this link to a Silverlight DeepZoom rendition of the where tax dollars are going - very cool.

Website SEO grader

Check out http://feeds.downloadsquad.com/~r/weblogsinc/downloadsquad/~3/189293946/  for a link to WebSite Grader. 

Website Grader reviews your site, taking into account traffic, social sites, Google Page Rank, Alexa rankings, inbound links etc... and comes up with a score out of 100.

This is a nice report to let you know how you are doing and makes some solid suggestions on how to improve.

IBM: $5B for Cognos

Interesting moves this year:

SAP AG bought Business Objects AS for $7B

Oracle bought Hyperion for $3.3B

Now IBM has announced a $5 billion in cash deal to purchase Cognos.

 

http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/I/IBM_COGNOS?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2007-11-12-11-31-57