For a while now some people have been trying the beta of Google Apps. Apparently it's out of Beta form now and in full-fledged action mode. The current system gives you Gmail, Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Google Page Creator, and more with technical support as well. If you want to run your own domain without any administration, this may be the way to do it.

My mom called a couple days ago and said she read in the paper that Microsoft was going down the tubes. I didn't know about all that, so I thought I'd figure out what she meant. (Silly mom, even if you read it in the newspaper you can find it online in seconds and e-mail me a link. It works just as well. Oh wait, you'd have to dial into the Internet - nevermind. ;-) )

Angie over at Lullabot put an interesting, short document together of "Best Practices in Open Source Development". I enjoyed reading it, and I think it's true.

I don't do design too much, but enough to get my hands a bit dirty. I kinda enjoy it, although I rarely get really inspired works that look amazing. So I mostly stick to programming. However, this funny post of "23 Signs That You're Becoming a Design Geek" has some funny things that mostly only designers will understand.

In an interesting move that proves Google is as much an advertising company as a research company, it seems that Google has decided to buy AdScape media. AdScape has been in the news a lot recently because of a bleeding-edge market that they've almost created, and that is advertising inside videogames. Apparently last year Microsoft bought Massive, another prominent in-game advertising. It also continues the Google trend of buying non-web advertising companies.

Some people have called it a "mash-up generator". It's Pipes and it's now in the Web 2.0 Beta over at Yahoo!. You can take data from RSS feeds or other sources and cross-reference them with something else.

Just in case you wanted to tell your girlfriend that the relationship isn't going well, I've got some good pictures of some of the biggest drains in this world! (Just kidding and Happy Singles Awareness Day!)

The folks at GeekBrief.tv are looking to set up a Linux-based Home Theater PC system. I definitely don't blame them. One of my coworkers has one and the folks at Systm have done a video podcast about them. They look amazing.

Last week the Infuze Magazine news blog mentioned a great, quick look back at Windows over the years. It's great to remember how far we've come from the maturity of DOS to a large, resource-heavy graphical interface just to type up text documents and play games. I mean, look at Windows 3.1 in its 265-color glory:

For the uninitiated, DRM stands for "Digital Rights Management". It is usually some sort of encryption put upon content to restrict the usage of data. For example, DVDs came with encryption that was intended to make sure you didn't copy it. Music from Apple's iTunes music store comes with DRM that only allows you to play it on 5 computers and burn it 10 times (or something like that).