Date for new Harry Potter book revealed. The sixth Harry Potter book will hit the shops on July 16 next year, the publisher Bloomsbury has announced. [Telegraph News | Breaking News]

6:11:13 PM    

Why Students Struggle When Pressure Is On. Psychologists are reporting that intense exam pressure is actually more likely to impair the performance of very good students than mediocre ones. By By BENEDICT CAREY. [NYT > Health]

6:10:46 PM    

OpenOffice 2.0 Preview Available. UPDATED The OpenOffice folks are giving the world peek-plus at version 2.0, which looks pretty snazzy. Of course, the Mac OS X version is still basically missing in action. At the rate things are going, it'll never be close to ready for prime time, much less at parity with the other versions. UPDATE: More from The Inquirer. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

6:10:14 PM    

Searching the Web for Copycats. Here's a useful application of the Google API: Copyscape, a free service that can find Web sites plagiarizing your content.

The service takes any URL as input, looking for a suspicious number of matching words on other sites. Most hits for Workbench came from sites and aggregators making legitimate use of my RSS feed.

Copyscape found several plagiarists of my book Sams Teach Yourself Java 1.1 in 24 Hours, using the first chapter as input.

The service might be too fast on the trigger: Another suspected copywronger was a person who quoted one of my jokes as his .SIG. [Workbench]

6:09:30 PM    

On Laziness. On Laziness --

"There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it."
    -- Mary Wilson Little

[From Quotes of the Day - The Quotations Page.] [Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog]

6:06:30 PM