Steven Bristol hates Ruby, not REST - REST is a series of observations about the effect the http protocol has on the communications carried out with it.
There are many ways of designing systems with the REST observations in mind, but unless you are using a different protocol (webSockets ftw!) or you've noticed something about http nobody else has, the concerns are always there, like it or not.
ipython+nltk+networkx+pytables+numpy+matplotlib=full of win
Seriously - text mining made fun and exploratory with open source tools.
One of the text sources I like to use is the Launchpad tickets for the Ubuntu project, since they get a good amount of traffic from international end users, a professional interest of mine.
It would be great to hear about some other interesting open data sets that people have found.