Platypus is Tucows' billing system for web hosting and internet access providers, offering invoicing and billing, customer management and service provisioning. Version 6 is coming out soon, and on this Tucows Blog podcast, I chat about it with Bill Ford, Tucows' Director of Billing Services, who came from the Starkville office last week to visit us up here in Toronto.

The podcast is an MP3 file 10.7 MB in size and is 17 minutes, 16 seconds in length. Click here to play it (or right-click and choose "Save as") to save it to your hard drive.

Update: We've had the interview transcibed; you can find the transcript here.

There are more details about Platypus and how to download a free 30-day evaluation copy after the jump.

[via dzone.com] Sang Shin, who runs the javapassion.com site ("the site of people who have Passion for Java Technology"), has some interesting free online courses:

• Ajax Programming with Passion!
• J2EE Programming with Passion!
• Java Intro Programming Bootcamp
• Web Services Programming with Passion!

More details after the jump.

Even if you've got a full-time graphic designer at your disposal, going with standardized icons is a good idea. They'll give your designer more time to work on the graphic requirements that are unique to your application. Furthermore, we've established certain conventions that define the "language" of graphical user interfaces over time, so in most cases, it's probably a bad idea to re-invent icons for common elements like documents, folders, users and so on.

Luckily, there are a number of good icon sets for sale, but I'm going to talk about the free ones today. The MaxPower.ca blog maintains a list of sites that offer icon sets that are both "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" (they're public domain or licensed under one of: Creative Commons, GPL or LGPL).

My favourite of these is the "Silk" set by Mark James, and you can get them on this page at his site, FamFamFam.com. I've got screenshots of the entire set after the jump.