Apparently a woman was forced to leave a Southwest Airlines plane for wearing an offensive T-Shirt. The shirt bore pictures of Bush, Cheney, and Rice, along with the caption “Meet the Fuckers”, a play on the recent movie title “Meet the Fockers”. I actually saw the exact same shirt at a store in San Francisco last weekend, and while I didn’t buy it, I thought it was pretty funny… (via BoingBoing)

Google has just released a beta version of their RSS Reader. I gave it a quick whirl, but so far it hasn’t blown me away. In typical Google style, the layout and UI is nice and clean (and very similar to Gmail). Contrary to other aggregators (such as Bloglines), Google Reader only displays a single post per page, rather than a whole list of posts. It provides keyboard shortcuts to easily navigate between posts....

Mozilla has unveiled the Lightning roadmap. Lightning is Mozilla’s next generation calendaring application and intended to integrate with the Thunderbird email client. It appears to replace Mozilla’s previous Sunbird calendaring tool. Lightning 0.1, which is scheduled to be released some time in November, will mainly focus on bug fixes and WebDAV calendar support. Improved Thunderbird integration is planned for the 0.2 release, which does not have a release date yet....

Recently I’ve been using YAML files along with some Ruby scripts as a simple and convenient mechanism for importing content into our database. The YAML files will be maintained by content authors, and one of the questions that came up is that of validation. Luckily, there’s a very nice solution in form of Kwalify, a small schema validator for YAML. Conceptionally, it is similar to the corresponding XML technologies such as XML Schema or RelaxNG....

The last time I mentioned the RDT (aka RubyEclipse) project about two months ago, I thought that development on this otherwise promising project had stalled. Since then I’ve started lurking on the RDT development mailing list, and I was happy to notice that the project appeared to be picking up speed again. The developers are realizing that Ruby is commanding significant interest these days, not least because of the Ruby on Rails framework that is gaining a lot of traction....