Blogging Roller

• 'Red Hat wraps Linux in sh*t,' says new exec
  "Neither Red Hat nor JBoss has returned our calls seeking comment"
• Red Hat buys JBoss: My Mixed Reaction
  O'Brien: "corporate / GPL / open-source strategies point toward consolidation and we’re not better for it"
• Monster rabbit devours English veggie plots
  My seven year old is quite concerned for this rabbit's health
• Roller (and the World Series of Birding)
  "biology and software - worlds collide! That's just how I roll people."

Back in 2004 I linked to a blog post authored by JBoss exec Mark Fleury that called Red Hat "open source wannabes" and "girly men." According to my referrers, people are looking for that old post using those keywords. Apparently, they're not finding it because it's been removed (but not from the Google Cache Wayback Machine). I wonder why.

First, Mark Pilgrim is blogging again. He said he'd return when hell froze over or Rogers switched to Atom. Fortunately for us, hell froze over (i.e. Bootcamp) and Rogers made the switch.

Second, Microsoft has kindly answered my questions about the Feeds API. I was wrong; they were just too busy to answer sooner.

Third, Raleigh's own Red Hat is aquiring JBoss. I always knew they'd start doing some Java stuff someday.

And finally, of course, there was that stuff last week about our president being the source of the leaks he supposedly hates so much, but we already knew that so big woop.

Over the weekend I finished the second of two new chapters I promised for RSS and Atom in Action. The first one covered Windows RSS. The one I finished late last night is the new Chapter 7 on "The ROME newsfeed utilities." Here's the outline:

• Introducing ROME
• How ROME works
• The SyndFeed model
• Parsers, generators and converters
• The parsing process
• The generation process
• ROME limitations
• The ROME subprojects
• Parsing newsfeeds  with ROME
• Parsing to the SyndFeed model
• Parsing funky RSS
• How to handle Dublin Core
• How to handle <content:encoded>
• Parsing to the RSS model
• Parsing to the Atom model
• Fetching newsfeed with ROME
• How the ROME Fetcher works
• Using the ROME fetcher
• Generating newsfeeds with ROME
• Extending ROME
• The ROME plug-in architecture
• Adding new modules to ROME
• Overriding ROME
• Summary

I also updated the book's example code, which you can find on Java.Net here: http://blogapps.dev.java.net.