European mobile operators say big sites need to pay for users' data demands (Guardian) -- it's like the postal service demanding that envelope makers pay them because they're not making enough money just selling stamps. What idiocy.
Grace Programming Language -- language designers working on a new teaching language.
Gawker Media's Entire Database Hacked -- 1.5M usernames and passwords, plus content from their databases, in a torrent. What's your plan to minimize the harm of an event like this, and to recover? (via Andy Baio)
Macmillan Do Interesting Stuff (Cameron Neylon) -- have acquired some companies that provide software tools to support scientists, and are starting a new line of business around it. I like it because it's a much closer alignment of scientists' interests with profit motive than, say, journals. Timo Hannay, who heads it, runs Science Foo Camp with Google and O'Reilly.

mytop -- a MySQL top implementation to show you why your server is so damn slow right now.
What Could Kill Elegant High-Value Participatory Project? -- The problem was not that the system was buggy or hard to use, but that it disrupted staff expectations and behavior. It introduced new challenges for staff [...]. Rather than adapt to these challenges, they removed the system. [...] No librarian would get rid of all the Harry Potter books because they are "too popular." No museum would stop offering an educational program that was "too successful." These are familiar challenges that come with the job and are seen to have benefit. But if tagging creates a line or people spend too much time giving you feedback? Staff at Haarlem Oost likely felt comfortable removing the tagging shelves because they didn't see the tagging as a patron requirement, nor the maintenance of the shelves as part of their job.
Gremlin -- a Turing-complete, graph-based programming language developed in Java 1.6+ for key/value-pair multi-relational graphs known as property graphs. Graph structures underly a lot of interesting data (citations, social networks, maps) and this is a sign that we're inching towards better systems for working with those graphs. (via Hacker News)
Anic -- programming language based on stream and latches. I still can't figure out whether it's an elaborate April Fool's Day joke that was released too soon, because the claim of "easier than *sh" is a bold one given the double-backslash and double-square-bracket-heavy syntax of the language. Important because it's built to be parallelised, and we're in transition pain right now between well-understood predictable languages for single CPUs (with hacks like pthreads for scaling) and experimental languages for multiple CPUs.

Language Detection: A Witch’s Brew?. The Flickr team make the case for using the Accept-Language header over IP detection to pick a site’s language, with a simple UI for switching languages in case you get it wrong. They’ve been using this for two and a half years without any significant problems.