I’m doing it again, before my aggregator’s tabbed windows list bursts. Besides, this gives all of you something to read over the otherwise rather slow holiday season :-)

• Python creator Guido van Rossum works at Google, .NET guru Clemens Vasters starts working for Microsoft.
• “Netshade, an anonymous proxy service for OS X, is an Internet security tool which makes your Web presence anonymous and secure.” It also helps to access Web sites whose publishers believe they should only be accessed from within the US.
• Eclipse Web Tools Platform 1.0 is available — and works very nicely in my Eclipse 3.2 for OS X installation.
• It’s ridiculous to link to it now, but Rails is now 1.0.
• “It seems that if a web service can, in any reasonable way, be treated as a repository of files, someone, somewhere will find a way to turn the web service into a file system.” — If you’re not already subscribed to Sean McGrath’s blog, you should be.
• All the WS-Star specs are in Standard Bodies? Yes, if you include only those your company collaborated in …
• Interesting discussion about the Web as a Distributed Objects System, with a link to Joel’s no longer new but still great Architecture Astronaut essay
• Imprecise Models and Killing Hippies — a very interesting blog, BTW
• Another Victoria Livschitz interview - similarly to the last one, I don’t really know what to think about it.
• The world’s coolest Help! menu
• Natural Docs is an open-source, extensible, multi-language documentation generator - very interesting, via L. M. Orchard
• Dynamic refactoring? Not really.
• Pandora is an amazingly cool service that helps you find music you like.
• Rickard Öberg likes Piggy Bank … might be a good chance for a pragmatic semantic web start project.
• Thinking about founding a Web 2.0 startup? This checklist might be helpful.