The Usability Special Interest Group has provided a great Usability Toolkit that contains a collection of forms, checklists and other useful documents for conducting usability tests and user interviews.

Image Capture, a utility that comes with OSX allows you to Share a Camera or Scanner over the network using Rendezvouz.

Anil Dash recently participated in a search optimization contest, based on a challenge to see who could be the first result for the gibberish phrase “Nigritude Ultramarine”. Being a novice in the SEO industry, and a little angry at SEO’s, he dedided to try very hard to win – and he did!

Optimizing Search Engine Optimization is the article where he discusses the why’s and how’s of his participation in the competition. It’s really a good and funny read!

[link via Digital Web Magazine]

Mike Papageorge has written a nice article at his weblog that discusses Caching on the Server and Client Side. The article discusses the benefits of being able to control the caching of pages and is full of some great links to other resources.

D. Keith Robinson presents The Big Web Design Details List which contains a rather long list of items that he looks for when evaluating good website design.

Simon Collison presents his second “round table discussion” and this time asks some noteable designers about Using H Tags . The panel explores the appropriate use of heading tags in our designs

The designers who participated are : Richard Rutter, Jason Santa Maria, Andy Budd, Andy Clarke, Mike Davidson, D. Keith Robinson, Jon Hicks and Paul Scrivens.

Dave Shea at mezzoblue.com is presenting an interesting exercise titled – Design Theft: Crossing the Line. He has taken an image and modified it eight times and asks his readers “which one crosses the line of no longer being theft?”. Make sure you read the comments for some eye opening discovery.

PearPC – the PowerPC architecture emulator that allows you to run OSX on your PC – has released an experimental build that includes Altivec support. The advantage of the new Altivec support is…

• that you have better compatibility in future programs (Tiger already runs better with it)
• more speed, because of the processes floating point math operations can be handled which makes the client faster
• your nifty PearPC installation runs as a G4

Another site worth checking out is PearPC.net which is a new community site for the PearPC project. Lots of good information including downloads and howto’s can be found here.

Eric Sink has written a good article for the MSDN Longhorn Developer Center titled the Hazards of Hiring. In the article he explains that hiring decisions are tricky, and offers four general guidelines for how to proceed with hiring decisions.

Ian Hickson has a paper titled – Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful – that outlines why authors intending their work for public consumption should stick to HTML 4.01.