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)