Best of the blogs: After ranting about spam last week, Martin Heller received some interesting responses, replete with suggestions about how to kill the practice of spam itself. The three he posted, though, are in-house fixes. Heller instead is calling for open source projects that filter the bulk of messages at the receiving server. “My final solution probably is far-fetched: find all the spammers and put them out of business,” he espouses in this Strategic Developer post. “I know that a few of the more notorious US-based spammers have been shut down, but spam has gone up since then. Many of the remaining spammers are out of reach of US authorities. What would it take to get to them, I wonder?” Columnist’s corner: Flash and Flex pretty much own the rich Web application fray, and Adobe owns Flash and Flex. But that dominance could change if Microsoft has its way and Silverlight gains purchase. The big question, thus, becomes whether the industry will suffer at the expense of two big wigs battling it out. “My conclusion? Maybe, sort of, and it depends,” explains Ephraim Schwartz in Microsoft guns for Adobe rich Internet apps crown. It’s not just about vendor lock-in, either. “The truth is that there can be no definitive answer as to the problems a competing development platform from Microsoft will bring; it depends entirely on the angle you are viewing it from.” Off the Record: When swapping in 3270 coax cards, motherboards, power supplies and, in fact, every other removable PC part fails to prevent an emulation screen from freezing, and even placing static mats on the floor, under the PC and keyboard doesn’t help, there is one last place our anonymous author learned to look: a floating ground. “When I traced the outlet to the electrical panel and then from the panel to the exterior ground I could see the (formerly) long ground spike. I kicked it to unearth it,” he writes in Zapped: Underground PC a shocker. “It was about 6 inches off the original ground just resting vertically on the surface. When the sun would be out for a week or so, the ground would dry out enough that the old section of the building no longer had an earth ground. The PC would lock up.” Podcasts: Add a new acronym to the SOA realm, that being VDA, as in vendor driven architecture. “The buying patterns around service-oriented architecture have a tendency to shift toward comfort technologies … technologies and vendors that are already in the organization. In many instances the vendors you’re already dealing with may not be the correct solution. If you don’t expand your analysis to include technologies out of your comfort zone, you may find that you’re building a service-oriented architecture that is much less efficient than it could be.” Tune into SOA Report. Security