Welcome to those of you who wandered over from the Daily Grind in the last few days...as always, the links here are to things I'm currently interested in. I'm not necessarily proselytizing.

  • Mercurial - Yet another open source distributed source code management system. They're sprouting.

  • Java is becoming the new Cobol - If this InfoWorld headline were actually accurate, this would be a great time to learn Java. The folks left who can actually maintain large Cobol systems are pretty much guaranteed employment-for-life at the moment. What they really mean is "Java Isn't Sexy Any More."

  • Rails is a Ghetto - Essay from Zed Shaw, probably best known to many as the author of Mongrel. He no doubt has some valid points here, but the presentation is so full of trash talk that it's hard to take seriously. And yeah, Zed, you probably could wipe the floor with me in a fair fight. So what?

  • Changes - Commercial visual diff-and-merge tool for OS X, now in beta. (via TUAW)

  • Say hello to acts_as_family_tree - Like acts_as_tree, but with multiple parents per item.

  • faker - This fake data generation ruby class now does Lorem Ipsum text.