Tuesday, 13th January 2009
Visualising Radio, pushing, not pulling. The BBC’s new radio player uses Comet over a Flash XMLsocket connection transport, with an ActiveMQ message queue behind the scenes. I’d like to know what server they’re using to broadcast out to the XMLsocket connections.
What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 1970. What it has done, instead, is brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people.
Sloppy—the slow proxy. Java Web Start GUI application which runs a proxy to the site of your choice simulating lower connection speeds—great for testing how well your ajax holds up under poor network conditions.
New Gearman Server & Library in C, MySQL UDFs. Gearman, the job queue written for LiveJournal and now used by Digg and Yahoo!, has been rewritten in C. Looks like a good candidate for an easily configured lightweight message queue. Also includes hooks for writing MySQL functions that can interact with queues.
Gearman protocol. Notes compiled by Eric Day, principle author of the C server implementation.