Hugh MacLeod posted a question on his site: If open source is such a phenomenon, where are all the open source billionaires? That is the premise of a recent Wired IT article.

Some would say that not all rewards are financial ones. Open source is motivated by community, social interactions, and peer recognition.

Here is a cool tool I ran across that will allow you to convert any html into a pdf file:

http://www.htm2pdf.co.uk/

This is nice for people who want to save a file with all images in one file. Usually when you use the "Save As" option from a browser it creates a separate folder for images. This makes it difficult to share docs. This tool, as well as other like it, allow you to create one single file with images embedded that can be emailed and shared easily.

Here is an innovative way of using your web browser to run a fully functional unix shell. If you go to http://cb.vu you will actually be logging in to a shell terminal on a web server. You can define which commands "www" users will have access to run. For those of you from the Windows world this is like having your windows desktop available over a web browser without the need of any special clients

I believe this site actually launches a shell within a bunch of java scripts. A very nice use of a web browsers capabilities. This type of utility may have some good practical uses.

Being able to monitor web traffic to your sites is very important. You want to be able to gather metrics like where are users are being referred from, how long users stay on your site, what ads are working or not. Being able to gather statistics helps you find out what types of things are working and helps you adapt and build content users enjoy.

There are several very expensive web statistics packages that do a great job, but there are also plenty of free tools out there that do very well.

Here we've compiled a list of some of favorites:

Cfengine is an open source tool that allows system administrators to maintain 1 to thousands of unix based systems. It automates almost every aspect of system administration. Cfengine is a direct competitor to commercial software from Blade Logic and OPsware. Both of these commercial packages come with fancy GUIs and nice features, but they also come with hefty licensing fees (can get close to $1K per server managed + maintenance fees).

Wikipedia administrator Henrik has created a tool at stats.grok.se that shows how many times any particular page has been viewed on Wikipedia. It allows the public to view web stats on how many time a particular page has been viewed or accessed.

BitTorrent has been getting a lot of press recently with regards to the amount of illegal activity that is associated with this tool. Many companies and universities have banned it from their organizations to limit liability.

Ever wish you could take that long nasty looking URL and make it into something small and compact that can be easily forwarded to email or phone devices.

For those using Microblogging these tools are a necessity. Other useful purposes for small URLs include embedding links with ugly uid's, certificates, or other commonly seen tags when user hover over hyperlinks.

Unison announced at CeBit that it has launched what it claims is the best Linux based communications suite available. It combines IP telephony, e-mail, instant messaging, address book, capable of running on a single Linux server. It is available free as a public beta.

Microsoft SkyDrive is now offering 5 GB of Online Storage Space for free. AOL XDrive is the only other provider offering this much online storage for general purpose files.

Now that it is out of beta it is available to many different countries.

Windows SkyDrive features include RSS feeds for folders so your subscribers will know when you upload new files. You can also embed files / folders in web pages for your readers to download files directly from your website.

More info can be found here:
skydrive.live.com

Ever wonder how Google and Yahoo!

I'm a big fan of the Firefox web browser. It's far superior than IE or any other browser that I've used. I'm happy to see the release of v3 (beta) out today. It is available for developers and testers. Here is a link to some Firefox v3 screen shots.