Sorry for the low posting frequency the last few weeks, I promise to make up for it within the next minutes by getting rid of the unread items that sit in my aggregator, waiting to be blogged about, within the next few minutes :-)

Mashups als EAI 2.0, Atom, REST, Hadoop, Jabber und Erlang/OTP — dieses Mal wagen wir mit der Blogosphäre einen Blick in die Kristallkugel.

Meine neue JavaSPEKTRUM-Kolumne ist online — für Leser dieses Blogs einen Tag früher. (Aber das meiste dürfte dem aufmerksamen Leser hier ohnehin schon bekannt sein …)

Amazing what a little more than two weeks of vacation can do to your inbox and unread items in your feed reader. Expect a flood of links I need to get rid of before I return to my regular schedule …

I had promised myself to stay out of this, but Elliotte Rusty Harold’s post “Blogger’s Code of Boring Irrelevance” is too great not to link to:

Tim O’Reilly is pushing a Bloggers’ Code of Conduct. Frankly this whole idea is bad, but what he proposes goes so far beyond anything I imagined I find it hard to believe. If adopted, it would eviscerate the blogosphere and censor millions of voices. Fortunately it won’t be adopted. Let’s see why.

Read more.

I’ve grown tired of the problems with junk comments, false positives, and all the hassle involved in with handling this. My apologies if any of your comments failed to show up — MT reports they’ve been held for approval even if they have been identified as junk.

Essentially, I believe there are only two options that actually work: disable comments altogether, or use some CAPTCHA™ method. I’ve decided to do the latter, so comments now require a preview first, and then a 4-digit code. I’ve used the SCode plugin for Movable Type — all of the other Spam protection mechanisms built into MT never worked out for me (which makes me wonder why I don’t do what all the cool kids do and write my own blog software).

If you want to do me a favor, leave a comment and let me know if you run into any problems — via email if necessary.

Dieses Mal führt uns die Tour durch die Blogosphäre von REST und SOAP über einen neuen JSR zur REST-Unterstützung in Java vorbei an Java-Properties zu einem fehlgeschlagenen Software-Patent und dem Business-Case für SOA.

Meine aktuelle Blog-Kolumne aus dem JavaSPEKTRUM ist online — wer hier regelmäßig mitliest, kennt viel, aber nicht alles …

There’s a new meme going around, originally started by Jeff Pulver, asking you to share 5 little known facts about yourself and then tag five people from your blogroll to do the same. Steve Jones tagged me, so I’ll comply:

1. I do not spend the whole day blogging.
2. I’m totally into progressive rock/art rock music and spend quite a bit of time organizing my (now digital) collection of Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull, Marillion, Dream Theater, Spock’s Beard, Flower Kings, and similar albums.
3. While my mother is German, my father is Bulgarian. (I don’t speak a single word, sadly.)
4. I earned my first “real” money when I was 19, by translating the manuals for Excel 2.0 from English to German (1 Deutsche Mark for every standard 55-character line).
5. I have a wife and two kids (a boy aged 9 and a girl aged 2) and two dogs (an Irish Terrier and an Airedale Terrier).

I’m tagging Mark Baker, Steve Loughran, David Orchard, Mark Nottingham, and Charles Miller.

Daniel Jalkut loves Podcasts. I positively hate them; I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would prefer an audio transmission over its transcript. The final statement on this topic, IMO, is rather old and was created by Maciej Ceglowski.

I’ve just upgraded our MovableType installation to version 3.3 and will now fool around with the layout until further notice. I only promise to keep the Atom feed working - no guarantees for anything else. In case you’re using the RSS 2.0 or RSS 1.0 (RDF) feed, I suggest you switch …

Update: I’ve restored all of the templates to their MT default, even the style sheet - which is why everything looks nice, but highly generic (like any other MT or TypePad blog). I’ll explore MT 3.3’s features, especially around tagging, and then re-introduce the original modifications bit by bit. Please do let me know if anything is broken.

Tim Bray has released Ape, a tool that will check an Atom Publishing Protocol implementation for conformance (somewhat, but not entirely similar to the Feed Validator).