REST is the new SOAP (in a bad sense)

Two little anecdotes that happened within the last two weeks to me:

A buddy and I discuss how ...(something)... could be implemented, we find a solution, but we cannot do it that way, because he's afraid that the developers supposed to implement it will not find it RESTful enough.
Another buddy is told by his CTO to implement a REST interface in his Rails app because that would render the controller's code cleaner (or some similarly daft idea). By the way, there was no business need to do an external XML-based interface other than "REST is cool".

If the idea that something should be RESTful gets into the way of getting things done and if things thought to be RESTful are done for the sake of it, well, then REST has become the new dogma. In this sense it is the rightful heir of SOAP and SOA (and it is the the flavour of the year for 2008).
You might also want to look at Roy Fielding's presentation at Railsconf (p.28):

and REST(ful) became the next industry buzzword
Yikes!

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Interviewed by Internet Briefing Blog

Reto Hartinger of the Internet Briefing group has interviewed me about what I work on these days. The interview is in German.

Python script to set genre in iTunes with Last.fm tags

Now that I have started to seriously use iTunes I figured it might be nice to have the genre tag set in a meaningful way. Since I have a reasonably large collection of mp3s doing that manually was out of question - I wrote me a Python script to do that. There seems to be a large demand for such a functionality (at least I found a lot of questions on how to automatically set the genre tag) so maybe someone else finds the script useful. It is pasted below. General Strategy The basic idea is to use Last.fm's tags for genre tagging. In iTunes the genre tag is IMO best used when it only contains one single genre, i.e. something like "Electronica", not something like "Electronica / Dance". On the other hand dropping all but one tag would lose a lot of information, so I decided to use the groupings tag for additional information that is contained in the list of tags that an artist has on Last.fm. In the example above that would be something like "Electronica, Dan

Running the iTunes genre tagger script with OS X Automator

Due to public demand here's a little recipe how to run last post's mp3 tagger without using the command line on OS X: Open Automator Start a new "Application" project Drag the "Run Shell Script" action into the right workflow panel, set the "pass input" drop-down to "as arguments" and edit the script to (see screenshot below): for f in "$@" do /opt/local/bin/python /Users/michaelmarth/Development/Code/mp3tagger/tag_groupings.py -d "$f" done (you will have to adapt the paths to your local setup) Save the application and happily start dropping mp3 folders onto the application's icon.

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