The best web development platform is...

... well, as always: it depends. But there has been an interesting contest called Plat_forms back in January with different teams using Java, PHP and Perl to solve a given task in 30 hours. (And if you asking why there were no teams using RoR/Python/.NET the organizer told that there wasn't a sufficient number of sufficiently qualified applications). The detailed report has just been published - go and read it for yourself.

For some fun there's a quiz to guess the technology used by a team just from pictures of the developers.

Picasa for Linux

Just found out via Google Operating System that there is a Linux version of Picasa. Looks like it is available for quite some time now (since 2006) but isn't mentioned at all on the Picasa website.

Installation was simple - Picasa is available as .deb - and just after the download I learned from the FAQ that there's even an apt-repository.

First impression: looks exactly like the Windows version (no wonder as Wine, together with Mozilla, is mentioned as used open source project - and Google contributed quite some patches to it)

Picasa is now importing our ~38000 pictures from the hard disk...