Links Roundup: June 2

People: As part of her "Solutionary Women" series, Britt Bravo posted an interview today with my very good friend Rebecca Kalin of Asthma Free School Zones. You can also find it on Britt's Blogher site. Rebecca points out that idling vehicles is the Number One cause of air pollution in urban areas! Cut that engine! Policy: Susan Crawford has posted an illuminating discussion of why the net neutrality debate really matters and the very real dangers of caving in to the telcos on this issue. Susan, a law professor at NYU, has an insiders' view of Internet policy - she sits on the board of ICANN. Programming: Google has released the Google Web Toolkit, a programming framework for AJAX development that takes a very new approach to Javascript development. It allows the programmer to work in Java, which it then translates to browser-independent javascript. The GWT console allows the developer to trace through the Java code while executing the javascript in the browser, finally bringing professional debugging capability to javascript code. You can find a more detailed review of the GWT on OnJava.com Non-profit Blogging: Nancy Schwartz in her Getting Attention blog points out this enthusiastic article on blogging by non-profit organizations, in The Journal News, a NYC regional paper. The article quotes Marc Sirkin of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society as saying, "It's extra work, but we're reaching people where they want to be reached." Marc's job title demonstrates his organization's uncharacteristic awareness of the importance of new media: he's the vice president of e-marketing! The Net-admin's Corner. This blog's name is very appealing: Help Desk when Help Desk wasn't Cool. "Bitter help desk survivor writes cheesy blog" reads the subtitle. But sometimes there is some great info there. This article on how he has set up an administrative workstation for remote management might be of great help to the accidental techie whose installation is getting more and more complicated and needs to maintain a growing number of servers. And now for something completely different. This article from CNN on an odd aspect of the Silicon Valley geek culture. Tags: nptech