Imagine a program that makes clustering easy to do and was also able to manage automated deployments? Well there's a tool called SwitchTower that makes both of these tasks unbelievable easy. Nifty stuff!

• http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/2005/10/19/introducing-switchtower-distributed-deployment-for-rails

Here's a really great explanation of why you should care about the new OpenDocument format found in OpenOffice.org, KOffice and others, rather than using proprietary formats like those used by Microsoft Office. Unlike most technical articles this one is straight forward enough that almost anyone should be able to understand it.

• http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8616