Web 2.0

You've got to check out Writely.com, it's exactly what I've been looking for:

Writely is a word processor that runs in the browser. It offers everything you'd expect from a word processor, including spell check, extensive formatting capability and support for dropping in images. Writely also makes it easy to collaborate with others. Your colleagues can log in and edit a document you started. Users can also collaborate over e-mail, and then publish the results to a blog when they're done. And, yep, it's free.

It's so cool, you can upload your word documents and eidt there and save as whatever you like, word, html, even PDF. Now I can put my work log there and access it from everywhere, it rocks!

DTrace

DTrace is the new tool on SUN Solaris for debugging and tuning, I am very impressed with it.

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris Operating Environment. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.

A few features that really stand out:

1. Non-intrusive nature. Probes are implemented with dynamic instrumentation.
2. Efficiency. It greatly streamlines the tuning process.
3. Cost-effective. It does not cost much performance degradation on production boxes.
4. Reusability. There are a lot scripts already there, don't have to start from scratch.

In hindsight it makes so much sense to trouble shoot and fine tune systems in this way, why didn't it come out earlier? Or why didn't I ever think about this idea :-) ?