Interesting external blog posts related to Force.com development that caught my eye during this past week or two.

• Rails realities part 29 - Salesforce and rails integration, the easy way - a nice tutorial on ActiveSalesforce and Ruby (Java the Hutt)
  
• Calling A REST Web Service With Apex - a simple example of making a REST call (Jeff Douglas)
  
• OS X / Salesforce tools updates - Data Loader and TextMate plugin updated to v17 (Simon Fell)
  
• How to disable Visualforce inputFields - maybe a little ugly :-), but looks like an interesting approach to setting an input field to disabled (TehNrd)
  
• Using Javascript to validate an Apex form - client side validation (gokubi)
  
• flickr + jquery + force.com = awesome^5 [part 1] - interesting Flickr and JQuery mashups! (The Silver Lining)