I was talking yesterday afternoon with several other lab members about Martin Fowler's "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture." In his book, Fowler admits that most patterns aren't anything new. "Creating" a software pattern is just naming and describing a software practice already used by some developers. Of course, Fowler presents patterns with amazing clarity and skill, so his contributions are valuable to the development community.

Chipmark (www.chipmark.com) is a cool bookmarking site that lets you share your bookmarks between multiple browsers seamlessly.  (Bias alert: I've been advisor to the chipmark group for the past three years.)  Chipmark is written entirely by University of Minnesota undergrads, and distributed free of cost either as a server the students maintain, or as open source code that anyone is welcome to use to run his own server.  The most recent release of chipmark supports shared folders among buddies, and will be out Real Soon Now.  Check it out!