Computerworld has a nice article here about hiring people not tools. To me it’s important that I can trust the person and know that they are competent and willing to learn. If they have had experience with Java or C++ is secondary.
IBM DeveloperWorks has a good continuation on their series on JDK 5.0 concurrency here. Seems yo couldn’t do lock-free and wait-free algorithms in Java before the new atomic API.
Been using the Zaval Java Resource Editor the last couple of days. Properties files can become quite a nightmare to maintain when doing full i18N for your application, and refactoring them an even bigger nightmare. But it just had to be done. The editor has it’s shotcomings, but it’s the best alternative I was able to find. Having a tree view of my properties file really helped me structure it. It also has some manual translation support features that we will use when translating the app for release later on.