Ajax Workshops is an excellent site with a series of Ajax tutorials, starting with the absolute basics of what Ajax is ("a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications") to building tabbed content to creating a live data viewer. An excellent way to learn Ajax fast and get it working quickly for you on [...]

Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) fixes tons of BUGs, adds enhanced securityinfrastructure for defense against viruses, worms, trojans + hacking exploits, increased manageability + control and improved user experience (English):

XP SP2 Full (Network) Install [266 MB].
XP SP2 Express (Web) Install 1.58 MB, Setup only. XP SP2 Express requires an [...]

Found an Article by James Hunt (Software Engineer @ IBM). Parallelize Linux system services to improve boot speed
This article shows you how to improve the boot speed of your Linux system without compromising usability. Essentially, the technique involves understanding system services and their dependencies, and having them start up in parallel, rather than sequentially, when [...]