Dan Gillmor’s new book We the Media is out. Looks like I’m doing some book shopping 🙂 More at boing boing.

If you do web development, you should take the time to read this W3C Working Draft.

Read about it in the NYTimes.

Rafe shares his experience helping a coworker get started and discovers (rediscovers) how difficult it can be. If it wasn’t for others in the office, I’d probably still be using one of my favorite text editors. The initial investment in time and effort had kept me away of a long time, but I’ve been very happy with Eclipse since.

A huge reference list of tools and APIs for Java development work.

If you use Firefox, you will want this extension to enhance searching on Google.

Almost everything we do rests on the shoulders of others. Economist.com: profies Dennis Rictchie, who invented C and helped produce the earliest version of Unix:

Because computers were rare at the time, people did not have them on their desks, but rather went to the room, one side of which was covered with whiteboards, and sat down at a random computer to work. The technical hub of the system became the social hub.

It is that interplay between the technical and the social that gives both C and Unix their legendary status. Programmers love them because they are powerful, and they are powerful because programmers love them. David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, perhaps put it best when he said, ?Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.? Dr Ritchie’s creations are indeed beautiful examples of that most modern of art forms.

Economist.com: Unix’s founding fathers

The first in a series of articles covering alternate JVM languages at developerWorks: Get to know Jython. Why I haven?t tried this before is a mystery. I’ve used Python on occasion and this is an easy bridge for a Java developer like me.

IBM deal boosts Liberty Alliance (CNet).

Interestesting concepts, useful tools, and lots of fun can be found among Flashforward’s finalists.